The Press Box - Trump’s Fox News Campaign, Beat Writing in the Bubble, and Ben Widdicombe on Gossip

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

Trump gave two speeches during July 4 weekend, and Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss how Trump's reelection campaign and how Fox News is involved (2:10). Next, Curtis and Shoemaker take a look at what sports beat writing looks like in the age of COVID-19 (20:00). Ben Widdicombe, author and former writer for the New York Post’s Page Six and TMZ, joins to discuss his career as a gossip columnist (32:50). Plus: the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the Ringer, I'm Tyler R. Taur Times. When I spoke to NFL star Cam Newton in January, his mindset was clear. I want my whole career to be in Charlotte. Cam won't be getting that wish. He was released by the Carolina Panthers in March. Cam is a complex figure, and my interest in him goes far beyond his exuberant smile and transcendent style of play. Cam broke the glass ceiling in American athletics, ascended to a place in the sport that few black quarterbacks have ever reached, making his fall that much more dramatic.

Over the past year, I've traveled the country speaking to coaches and teammates, friends and family, reporters, and even briefly to the man himself, trying to unravel the enigma that is Cam Newton. I uncovered contradictions at every turn. How can the hardest work on the team be depicted as a bad leader? And how can a franchise icon with the NFL MVP and Super Bowl appearance on his resume? may be so abruptly cast aside. The Ringer NFL show presents

The Cam Chronicles. The series premieres Monday, July 13th. Hello, media consumers. You've got the press box. Brian Curtis and David Shoeemaker of the Ringer here. We got a lot of fun stuff for you today. We'll take an early glimpse at what sports beat writing looks like in the age of COVID-19. How does standing six to eight feet away from athletes change the texture of sports writing. We're going to talk to Ben Whittacom, a veteran of the New York Post page six and TMZ, and the author of a new book about his career as a gossip columnist. What does a gossip columnist do when he's interviewing a celebrity? He doesn't recognize. All that plus, David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's start by talking about the way Donald Trump is running his reelection campaign. I need your help with a metaphor here. I'm trying to say you can't. You can't. You can't. You can't. I'm trying to start by talking about the way Donald Trump is running. I'm trying to say, you can't. I'm

understand a Donald Trump speech these days without a Fox News decoder ring. But that metaphor feels like it's out of the movie, a Christmas story. And I don't want to be the journalist who's quoting 40-year-old movies. You know, when you, you have orders as soon as I quote Animal House, you just send the cops. It's over, right? This pod, my whole, my whole career is done. You can't listen to the press box these days without a 40-year-old man pop culture decoder ring. We're not doing that.

So help me. you can't understand a Trump speech these days without Oh man Without without without having spent the past month mired in Old people Facebook I mean I like my my verse instinct is to go to Reddit But I think that most of these things are being felt like the the lunacy of Reddit is being filtered through fake Facebook news sources and you know

oddball Twitter accounts I have no idea anymore. So David's hip fresh metaphor here is old people Facebook that you cannot. We're just going to go with that. Two speeches Donald Trump made marking Independence Day.

At Mount Rushmore, you saw this very Alfred Hitchcock on July 3rd and then July 4th in D.C. David, Donald Trump, did not talk about the coronavirus so much, did not talk about the Black Lives Matter protests so much, but he did talk a lot about

statues. Listen to this. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, to fame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Without seeing that clip, how easy it is it to tell that he is definitely doing prompter Donald Trump rather than off-the-cuff Donald Trump right there? You can tell just from the audio, but I will say the video on this was just sort of the chef's kiss of Donald Trump reading from the prompter

where he's like in a full on oscillating slouch where it's like one one elbow on the on the on the on the on the platform I mean one elbow in front of them so we can look to the right and then just a full swivel to the other side where he's just leaning

on the podium with all of his weight and looking and looking at like like a six o'clock angle right I mean he's just like looking way off from one side to another and I mean, I guess this isn't like the deepest thought in the world. It's not that hard to wrap one's mind around, but it is weird that like this was by most accounts or by piecing many accounts together, the sort of coming out party of the old Trump, right? There was a, this is, this was a, the tone and tenor and content of the speech was a very specific or very, uh, was it was a decision Donald Trump himself made.

And yet he didn't seem to have made the effort to read the speech ahead of time at all. I guess the companion thought there is that given a dozen menu options of how to beat Joe Biden, the Trump campaign has settled on. This campaign is about statues and Antifa and how Joe Biden will join with the protesters or be a puppet of the protesters and will tear apart your quote unquote American heritage. Am I right there? it's almost as if the success of the dog whistles like just the nonstop dog whistle of four years ago has led them to a point where they think that all they have to do is whistle

and like there doesn't actually have to be any you don't have to decide ahead of time what the racist undertones are you just got to say some like say some stuff that seems to be alluding to something more evil and vile and that some like invisible electorate will emerge cheering

I don't I mean it's very confusing when Trump did get around to the coronavirus during his July 4th speech, he insisted, once again, David, that it really wasn't that bad. Now we have tested almost 40 million people. By so doing, we showcases, 99% of which are totally harmless. Of everything that was said in this speech, the 99% line is what's, I think, gotten the most traction, particularly because this is a speech. I mean, Trump would have gotten flag for it if he'd set it off the cuff, but this is 99%, you know, that's just not true. And it's not even true if you, you know, give Trump, I mean, if you, if you

assume he's speaking sort of in some loose metaphor, right? It's just willfully oblivious, which has been, I guess, the operating position of his president. of the White House of this whole thing. And to track back to that metaphor at the beginning of the pod that we're still workshopping, all of this points to Trump running essentially a Fox News campaign, where he's not aiming to capture a broad piece of the electorate. He's not trying to, you know, win over voters who have deserted him for Joe Biden, but he's particularly focusing on the issues and obsession.

of a particular corner of conservative media. Here's Brian Stelter making that point a lot more coherently on reliable sources over the weekend. When Trump says stuff like this, he said children are being taught in school to hate their own country. You might think that makes no sense, but it does make sense if you go to Laura Ingraham's school,

where it's all about grievance politics, victimhood, threats to old-fashioned conservative, and, I might add, white America. Trump learned to speak this language by watching by being interviewed on Fox and becoming friends by the guys like Sean Hannity. Here's another example recently. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement is widely known for a hateful chant about police.

The quote there is, pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon. Now that's repulsive. But it's not a BLM rallying cry. Of course it's not. It's not a common chant at rallies. That hateful speech was uttered five years ago by a local group in St. Paul, Minnesota. It lasted for about 30 seconds at a March. It did not spread nationally. But if you watch Fox Prime Time, you might think it's said, it is said all the time at BLM rallies.

Hannity Show loves to play that ugliness. So does Carlson Show. He recently played the clip as well. I've heard it on Fox more times than I can count. It is part of the Fox News language. One of the kind of the organizing theories of the last election was that Trump sort of channeled all of this conspiratorial thought, not just from Fox News, but certainly from, from darker corners of pop culture and the internet and everything else. His campaign speeches were in some sense, I mean, I think it's given, it almost gives him too much credit to say this is just, it was just Fox News four years ago. It wasn't just Fox Talk. It wasn't this right wing radio. A lot of it was on right wing radio, but, but he went a lot further than that and

witnessed some corners that no respectful politician would have gone to. And that's not just talking about blatant racism, but that certainly was part of it. But it's almost as if he normalized, not almost as if he normalized all of this nonsense for a place like Fox News to regurgitate and or at least have its primetime non-news trademark hosts regurgitate. And now it can be spouted so comfortably by the president as if he, and he honestly thinks that he's reciting the news in some form or fashion. I think that's right, to quote David Schumacher, and I think because what happened,

what we saw in 2016, right, Fox News hosts were at the outset against Donald Trump. And essentially Donald Trump bent Fox News to his will, right? He made them line up around his issue positions. Now, four years later, you see that Fox News created this like Trump-friendly Trump-centric universe. and that he is only playing to the Fox News universe, right? In a sense. And doing this, as we record this Monday morning, media matters. Matthew Gertz tweets mentions on Fox and Friends this morning per closed captioning.

The word statue was uttered 17 times. The word coronavirus was uttered 10 times. So if you're Donald Trump and you're playing to Fox and Friends, something in your brain tells you, aha, statues are a bigger issue than the pandemic that's killed over 100,000 Americans. Another Trump tweet this morning, David, that just blew both of our minds. Trump is now tweeting about Bubble Wallace again. And let me just read this to you because this was just wild. Has bubble Wallace apologized to all those great NASCAR drivers and officials

who came to his aide, stood by his side, and were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another hoax, all caps, that and flag decision has caused the lowest ratings ever exclamation point. Now, Bubba Wallace is not in the news right now, or hasn't been for several days now, but Trump this morning goes there. I mean, that to me is only Fox News brain gets you to tweet that this morning. I mean, obviously, let's not under-rate Trump brain, but only is this idea that you are playing to this very strange,

cohort that thinks bubble Wallace must apologize would lead you to that place on a Monday morning. Oh, my God. If you take this sort of, the version of these events, the Bubba Wallace events that happened in Trump's mind, that Bubba Wallace identified that news and it ran out with it in his hand, insisted that someone had been, had planted that there to scare him. and in fact he had said he had done the whole thing. Literally none of that is true. Even so, I'm not sure what the apology.

I mean, it's, I guess if he planted it himself, then there's an apology necessary, but no one is insinuating that. And again, like you said, I think more significantly, I'm sure someone's already pointed out by the time we're recording this, certainly by the time it's up, what Trump was watching the moment when he tweeted that.

But there does, I mean, so it probably was a reaction to something that he saw on TV, but there does seem to be a little bit, of it's like the racist version of the Costanza where you remember the joke too late and you run back you have to like reset up like re-teat it up for the world The jerk store Yeah the jerk store where it's like

Everybody has moved on from Bubba Wallace I mean from this from that issue And certainly in the terms of like national media But Donald Trump's just like I've had this in my back pocket For three days and finally I have my my Twitter page open And no advisors around to stop me or something I mean thought it up. It's just so bad. It's so offensive. Do we think the Tucker Carlson could run for

president in 2024 boomlet, which has come up over the last week, comes directly out of this? Not only Carlson having big ratings in that universe, but if those two universes are the same thing, right, the Donald Trump campaign in Fox News, is that just, is that what's leading people to that place? I know Carlson's ratings are good. I'm sorry, I'm sidebarring here. I know his ratings are good. I know he's a little bit more physically symbolic of what, you know, Fox News than, you know, maybe some of the other people there. He just looks, I mean, like the conservative that we all want to shake our fists at. But, like, all this shit that he gets, it's like, it's almost as if nobody realizes that

Laura Ingram exists. I know that Tucker Carlson deserves all the shit that he gets. Don't hear me not saying that. But he at least manages to usually couch things in such a way that you can look at the transcript and he can be like, I didn't say. what you're saying, I said, and Laura Ingram, meanwhile, is in, like, the next block, just saying, like, black people are bad, like, full stop. You know, it's absolutely bonkers what's happening on that network right now.

But, yeah, Tucker Carlson for president, the Tucker Carlson wave, mini wave, whatever, that happened over the past 10 days has been pretty wild. And it's only, I mean, it's literally only in Trump's America that it can happen. It's literally only in Trump's America, I mean, that Donald Trump can react to, a president would react to the 9 o'clock block on or whatever they was it the 8 o'clock block on on a news channel the host of which and call them directly and be like what am i doing wrong when that same person has advertisers literally fleeing like jumping ship as quickly as possible at that very moment it's so it's just it's that's it's it's amazing i remain incredibly skeptical

that statues are going to be the winning issue in 2020. Like, I understand what the Trump campaign is trying to do. You know, they're trying to take away America. They're trying to take away Christopher Columbus. They're trying to take away the Confederate institutions. I understand the play there and I understand how it lines up with a lot of Trump themes. But do we, do people think that in Joe Biden's America, all the statues will come down? But if Trump gets reelected, many of the statues will stay up.

and his statue garden that he proposed over the weekend, well then, which included, by the way, some truly amazing names going over that some other time. But, wait, I honestly, somehow I miss this. There was a statue, he proposed putting all the statues in a statue garden. Yes, he proposed a statue garden. David, would you be surprised that Billy Graham is going to be in the statue garden? Would you be surprised?

The Reverend, not the superstar, I presume. Yeah, not the wrestler. Would you be surprised that both Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone are going to be in the statute garden. Both Douglas MacArthur and George Patton are going to be in the statue guard. Oh my God. This is this is like a deleted scene from return to Oz. Just like incredibly creepy statue garden with all these these things come to life. Well, speaking of old movies. I'm so haunted. I do want to leave you with this note. And speaking of statues, the Daily Beast Lachlan Markey tweeted this Monday morning. The Trump campaign ads over the weekend,

vowed to protect a new statue, David. We're not going to let this one go down. And it is a statue of Jesus. Here's the only problem. It's the statue Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. Oh, Jesus. Brazil in the picture. So reelect Trump and he will stop Antifa from tearing down Christ the Redeemer in Rio.

Do we think Trump was playing where in the world is Carmen San Diego? over the weekend and stumbled upon that reference. I know that that was your like out of this of this conversation. I can't. I like it's so great. Is there, do you think there is a, you think there is, it is possible that there will be enough fake Antifa rallies

that armed Trump supporting militias show up for and just have to stand there hopelessly while nothing actually comes to, but do you think there is a number of these in which will actually turn the tie? People will stop believing this bullshit that comes up on their Facebook. Uh, I don't think so. I'm going to go with a save, probably not.

Yeah. In terms of not believing the bullshit. All right, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David, while everyone in Texas was taking cover over the weekend, as our producer Erica Servantes knows, one man demanded that the show must go on. Vanilla Ice, who had a brief career in the 90s, followed by 20 years of Where Are They Now Stories, was set to perform at an outdoor venue near Austin. Plenty of room for distancing, Vanilla Ice remarked.

He later wound up canceling the show. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Vanilla Ice stops preventing the public health risk from fans collaborating and listening. Thanks to Kai and Devin Peterson for that. by the way, this is not a joke. A color me bad performance at the same venue was also postponed this weekend. No good jokes there? No, I just, just a note for you.

David, in the continuing, let's talk about how terrible 2020 joke genre, July 1st marked the halfway point of the year. It was an upward Twitter joke to write. Hopefully 2020 is a second half team. Thanks to Blitz is an. emotion. And finally, this Daily Beast headline was like a 40 mile per hour pitch in the batting cage, quote, deadly brain eating amoeba confirmed in Florida. Deadly brain eating amoeba confirmed in Florida. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, update it starved to death.

Thanks to Adam McMonagall and Fartagnan. If you know the rules of comedy have changed, but you also know you can still make fun of Florida. Congratulations. you made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. Let us spend a moment talking about beatwriting inside the bubble because we're a couple weeks away from the alleged start of big time American sports. The NBA comes back July 30th, Major League Baseball a week before that. I know the latter is happening because I saw reporters over the weekend

tweeting pictures of empty baseball fields from the press box, which is always like the first Robin of Spring, now the first Robin of summer. I saw one guy tweet a video, a faraway video of someone taking batting practice. Now, I would just love to know what sports fan got some true knowledge out of a faraway video of somebody taking BP. Was there like information being conveyed in that video? Is it information or is that just like the first, the first flower popping up from underneath the dirt, right? It's just like spring is here or the sun is out. the bad weather is gone

and now there is a there is like living proof that sports will continue. Yeah, I think that's part of it, but it's also reminds me of like when you watch local news and they would do a little minute and a half sports report from the baseball team and there'd be a piece of video that just literally needs to be man hitting ball

with bat. You know, like there's just a need for that image. And that's kind of what all sports writerdom has become. Yes. Yeah. And just the endless loop of it too. But more than just a bit, I sort of think this is what sports journalism in the pandemic times is going to be, right? It is metaphorically going to be a photo taken from the press box, the far away batting practice video.

In talking to writers over the last couple of weeks, nobody who's thinking about going to Orlando to be inside the NBA bubble has any hope that they're going to be near the players when they're interviewing them. I sent you the tweet of Washington Nationals players Sean Doolittle, amazing interview by the way, giving this interview over the weekend. He's doing it in a mask. And you've got the boxes of Zoom calls at the top of the video for far away reporters, including a box where the cameras turned off that just says Buster

only, which I loved. Yeah. Here's my first question. In terms of you and I are going to pay attention to the mechanics of the media here, because that's sort of what we do. But in terms of your normal sports fan, who's, reading stories, maybe reading tweets, let's say watching TV 2,

how much will they be able to tell that those close-up interactions with athletes aren't happening in the quote-unquote normal way? I think that if they make a kind of they being the news media, make a concerted effort to make things feel as normal as possible, there probably will be a pretty minimal distinction. But I'm not sure that the audience, I don't think we have the same audiences,

we have even during previous sports lockouts, I think that everybody's kind of too clued in and too, I mean, I think your average fan is too, is more obsessed than they kind of were in the past, even of baseball and certainly of basketball. I don't know. I,

I kind of feel like, and I kind of feel like that outlets will probably focus on the ways that it's different. Maybe I'm wrong. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of procedural pieces, right, about how does sports come back?

So what you're saying essentially is that your average sports fan who might not have paid attention at that kind of granular level about how the sausage is made is just paying more attention right now. Yeah. So they're just sort of hip to it. Yeah. I think maybe. I just think like the actual product, and I say this as a comp, I'm a person who wants, I'm an absolutist when it comes to access to athletes, right? Yeah. There's currently not enough.

I want more. That applies to almost every single sport known to mankind in the United States. But I also think, and I say this as a compliment to sports writers, that the person who just sits down and reads a story is probably not going to be able to tell the difference all that much. And that writers have gotten so good at just sort of watching a game on TV or in this case, let's say the NBA kind of watching it from the stands and then processing what they what they see in a news conference or something like that, that they're going to be able to get pretty reliably 85 to 90% of the way, maybe even higher, way there that they would have gotten

if they'd had all the tools at hand. On an individual piece. Now, there's certainly going to be a ton of like just institutional knowledge and stuff that you lose over the course of, you know, the several weeks that's going to be the NBA season. But I just don't think people are really going to be able to tell that

much the difference between full-on access sports writing and very low access, at least in the short term. No, I mean, and I think it will be in the sports NBA and MLB's best interest to, if not accommodate the journalists to the degree they're used to being accommodated to find ways to minimize the distinction, right? To find ways to make everything seem normal. And I'm sure they've, you know, they're batting around ideas about how to do that right. I think it's going to be really interesting to see because people are obviously very eager for sports to return.

It'll be interesting to see from the sports point, from MLB and the NBA's point of view, how eager they are to have sports journalism return, you know, to have to sort of streamline that process. Because, well, I mean, I guess there's an argument to be made. I mean, the NBA certainly wouldn't make the argument that this season is any less meaningful than any other season,

but I think a lot of people are going to view it that way. It's not like watching a big three tournament on late at night, but it's a, you know, it's not not a full, you know,

proper playoffs. But I do wonder, I mean, it, I guess it wouldn't see, it wouldn't have shocked me if they were like, and we're going all in

with ESPN to provide embedded coverage and no one else is there. You know, I mean, it seemed like it, this seemed like an opportunity for like literally to throw everything out. So it'll be,

it'll be interesting to see to what extent they're committed to, to keeping a sort of of normalcy in the journalistic world. You know, I don't, I don't think much because I think there's this, look, every time we see a report that another player has COVID-19, the whole thing becomes, what can we eliminate so that this will not

completely screw up and or end the season before it starts? And close up media coverage, if not any media coverage, is number one on the list. You know? and I just I don't I do not see look I think they'll try to be creative when it comes to Zoom calls and like post game press conferences allowing like let's say there's a Milwaukee Bucks reporter right who's still in Milwaukee they're not down there for the playoffs will they be able to get questions in via Zoom to Janus after a game that they would not be able to get in remotely in the in the before time right I think that will happen I think the NBA will try to make that happen so that like you can be a writer from afar. But just in terms of like anything beyond that, the kind of informal interactions between people, absolutely not because they're not going to want to risk it. Yeah. I think the right question here is like wither sidling in the age of coronavirus. That's part of it, right? I mean, you literally can't sidle. I mean, I'm sure everybody is listening to this knows, but Brian

wrote a great piece in the art of the siddle, specific to the NBA locker rooms, the sort of sidebarring with players to get your exclusive content. But yeah, I mean, that's, that literally is not possible now, right? And of all of the kind of pieces of the art of journalism, that's one where very specifically, like without the literal version of it, it doesn't exist, right? Like, Jay Adande is probably not going to get as much from Kobe if he calls him after the game as he would back in the day if he like got the full on walk to the car, right? and unless you're unless you figure out the way to join the guys at the ping pong table or whatever

I'm not exactly sure where a lot of that's going to come from okay you've just sidled up to my next question which is in this new bubble six to eight feet away from the athletes atmosphere who are the winners and who are the losers reporter was right so I think the Adrian Woznarowski, Sham Sharania class, that is being conducted at such a high level. I actually don't think that that is going to be affected by this at all, right? Yeah.

What they're doing right now. I don't see that. There is also like a Chris Haynes sort of level of NBA reporter. You know, and maybe that just kind of, if there's not sidling, which Chris is somebody who's very, very good at and has lots of relationships with NBA players,

maybe that just goes to text messaging. And there's a way to do. a phone call or something and the players a little more receptive to that because they're sitting by themselves in Orlando for a week after week, right? But I think there's another, I sort of think there's another class, which is like you're really, really plugged in beat writer who gets private moments with players and is basically explaining to a fan base, the psychology and the kind of minutia of a season as it happens. and that to me, and maybe is not

texting a player a ton, that to me is the kind of endangered thing that is going to be put to the test, shall we say, by Orlando. Yeah, I mean, I think the text message thing is key. I mean, it's a really small thing, but your felicity with your various text apps, I think is going to determine a lot of your ability

to continue doing your job. I think I agree with you on all those points. I, you know, we're going to run up pretty quickly into questions about the, I mean, when you're talking about Woj and, you know, that sort of reportage, we're going to be talking about the offseason and free agency and all this kind of stuff in very short order, right? And I think that that will, uh, the timeline of that is going to be kind of interesting to watch. But it, but it will also be interesting during the season, such as it is to see how people are really, how, how interested people are in the kind of backstage goings on. when those goings on probably have more to do with COVID testing than the actual like, you know, contract status of your favorite stars. I don't think that, I mean, I do agree with you. I don't think that Woge doing his job. I don't think he's going to be slowed down a single bit.

But I think the sort of, you know, the newsiness of all the, of his usual beat will, is going to be called in the question, at least at the start. Yeah, I just think in terms of the, just, go back to the texting thing, it's so much easier to not answer a text than it is to blow somebody off who walks up to you in the locker room or in the hallway after the locker room.

I just think that seems like a small thing, but I don't think it's a small thing. And I think a lot of reporters would agree it's a small thing. Even a player who may not particularly want to talk to you, it's a lot harder to be rude in person than it is, and players certainly can be rude, but it's a lot harder to be rude in person

than it is to just go, I am just not answering this text today. I'm never going to run into that guy in the locker room. Right? I'm not going to see this reporter there tomorrow because there is no locker room. So why would I do it? Yeah, to the Woj question, I'm already fascinated by the extent that COVID has become like day-to-day content. Yeah.

Like which players have tested positive across sports? Mm-hmm. And there's in some cases that the player has not authorized it yet to be said. So we get these kind of weird in the middle reports using the strange language, right? You know, like so-and-so is not at camp today and the manager can't say why they're not at camp. Yeah. Which is very different from so-and-so may have blown out as ACL and may be out for the season. Yep.

And it's so funny to watch writers do a dance around that. But that is going to be something they're going to have to puzzle out as well. I agree. All right, David, do you want to talk about gossip? Yes, please. Let's talk about gossip. Here's Ben Whitacombe. Ben Whitacom was lucky enough to work in a more glamorous age of tabloid journalism,

where when the New York Daily News gave you a gossip column, they were obligated to run a big picture of your face above it every day. I'm remembering that right, aren't I, Ben? That was part of the contract, yes. Different times the Whitacombe wrote gossip for the New York Post, page 6 and TMZ, which is like a mercenary fighting on opposite side. of a civil war. And all this is chronicled in his new book, Gatecratcher, How I Help the the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World. Ben, thank you so much for doing this.

My pleasure. So I worked for 10 years in the gossip minds every night going out, you know, meeting the rich and famous and, you know, try to get them to incriminate themselves, which was surprisingly easy. And then the 10 years after that, I wrote to the New York Times and I mainly covered sort of the wealthiest strata. And this book is about the extent of the extent to which the sort of the fancy people and the very wealthy in New York adopted the methods and the strategies of gaining attention and fame that the Hollywood set were doing in a way that really in the 20th century was looked down upon by that strata of society. And I do want to unpack that theory a little bit because you locate Paris Hilton,

the heiress whose rise, fall, rise, fall, et cetera, et cetera, you chronicled as a key figure in that transformation? I am acutely aware, Brian, that the moment you mentioned Paris Hilton, you get about a 60% drop off of your listeners because no one wants to take her seriously. And I think, you know, the big part of it is that I'm an Aussie and I moved to New York City from Sydney in 1998.

So to me, everything that I was discovering about the way New York City worked was kind of an insight into American culture more generally. And it was a great experience for a year. young immigrant because, you know, these people are nuts. You know, I was meeting Donald Trump out and about. I was meeting the Hilton's. My claim to fame is that I broke the Kim Kardashian sex tape in my column in 2007. So I was meeting all these personalities. And I was astounded at the level to which they were comfortable in gaining publicity. People would always say to me,

how do you get your gossip? And my response was, it's incredibly easy because people were, at that time falling over themselves to speak to gossip columnists in a way in the way that they are now falling over themselves to Instagram their lives. So your first big gossip column in New York, you move here in the late 90s, is an online column called Sheik Happens. That's right. Note the pun, press box listeners. How many nights a week are you expected to go out to gather material for this column as a young gossip writer? Well, Sheik Happens was my own deal. It was just something I started online. I was literally selling hot dogs on the street, Columbus Avenue at 72nd during the day, because that was the best job I could get. But, you know, I was in my 20s and just voraciously

curious about New York, so it was going out every night, often to fashion parties, gatecrashing them, which is why I called the book in my later gossip column, gatecratcher. And I was just reporting on the bizarre and very selfish behavior often, it was the era of the supermods. So, you know, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss would be there, Anna Winter would be there. And I would write this sort of kind of with a co-writer. This is a snarky column about what they were doing behind closed doors. And much to my surprise, it became a success. I never really planned to be a gossip columnist.

Page six picked me up as a stringer and then the Daily News gave me my own column. But to answer your question, the chic happens. I was out a few nights a week. When I had my own column, it was three to five parties every night. Wow. Three to five parties a night. Was that fun for you? It was fun.

You do have to be younger. think to enjoy it. That was 20 years ago. I would not find that fun now. I did write the party column for the New York Times until COVID killed parties. So I did that for a couple of years. But that was one event and evening. So you start stringing for page six, which if people don't know, was this dominant New York post gossip column run by Richard Johnson, who was in the 2000s as close to a J.J. Hunsucker character as New York has. You go into the New York Post offices one day, you write and just get to answer Richard Johnson's private phone line.

Will you give us a play by play of what that was like? Well, my first week there, I was stringing, I was sitting in his empty desk because he happened to be on vacation. And I certainly was not replacing him on the totem pole at the top. That was just literally the desk they had free. So I got to answer his phone.

And I discovered very quickly that all of New York rang Richard Johnson's phone. And page six was incredibly successful, still incredibly successful. Unfortunately, it's the last gossip column standing, so it has no competition anymore. But people were falling over themselves, and they would rat on themselves.

That was a huge revelation from answering that phone, because the allure to have your name in boldface, you would always bold the name of a living person in a column, on the same page as Brad Pitt, or Jennifer Aniston, as was the couple of the day, people would rat on themselves just to be in their company on the page. And that was a real eye-opening for me. So somebody calls in and says, I have an embarrassing story.

I'd love to tell you about myself. That's basically what it is? All the time, yeah. And what kinds of things are they telling you? Well, you know, they would talk about, you know, getting a little bit drunk at a restaurant, for example, especially if there was a celebrity nearby. A lot of the publicists would rat out people, sometimes even their own clients, in exchange for a favor for someone else who was paying them for placement. So that was a very common transaction

that a publicist would rat someone out and you'd give them a favor in a completely different item so there was no connection. But people were just desperate to be on that page. So at Gossip in New York in the 2000s, you got Richard Johnson at page six, George Rush and Joanna Malloy at the Daily News.

You get your own daily news column in 2006. You got the OGs of gossip, Liz Smith and Cindy Adams still doing their thing. None of these are shy people. Did New York gossip columnists just hate each other's guts or how'd you guys get along? You know, the funny thing is that the tabloids were set up to be at each other's throats. So the Daily News and the New York Post were certainly throwing rockets at each other every day.

But, you know, as a journalist, the journalists are part of the community. And we would help each other out, even though we worked at rival columns. And in fact, the Daily News and the post-Gossip columnists would often trade tips. Like if we got something that was so juicy, but the subject would, you know, blackball us or disown us or it would be too obvious the connection how we got the item, we'd call the competition and we'd trade. So there was actually a lot of secret back and forth between the competing

Collins. So I'm going to give you some Joan Collins and you trade me some Betty Buckley. Those are two really terrible. That's more of a Cindy Adams, Liz Smith, got a trade, but you know what I mean? I'm going to give you this and then in a couple of days, if you have something, you kick it over to me. You know, in those days, the trifecta

was Brittany, Lindsay, Paris. It was those three young women were probably 90% of the tabloid gossip. To come back around to your question of, how do you get your stories? You set up your shingle at the Daily News. You have your own column. Like I said, your pictures above it.

How much stuff just kind of comes into you via phone call and email on a given day? So I was definitely a second tier of columnist. I mean, you mentioned George and Joanna, Russian Maloy at the Daily News. They were the marquee Daily News column, page six, of course, at the post. And I was in the tier below that.

So I mainly got my gossip by going out at night. and you would meet people, people would have a couple of drinks, they would start talking. I remember one night out at Bungleau 8, which was a hot spot of the era. You know, a young actress who wanted a plug for something that she was doing, happened to be good friends with Ethan Hawke not long after he slipped from Uma Thurman. And she said to me just in passing, well, you know he's dating the nanny, right? And, you know, my jaw hits the ball. No, I did not know that he was dating his children's nanny.

And then so I managed to break that item in my phone. So really, by being out and standing close to the source of alcohol, that's how you've got probably 80% of the things you're going to get. So you were a shoe leather gossip reporter. I was. This is like from an even more cooler, you know, sort of 50s age, I think, right? You know, this isn't just info at daily news.com and something comes over the transom. This is you going out and sort of rustling the bushes.

I love this. I mean, I had to be. I was telling you one story. I was terrible at doing strategic deals. Just sucked it. I really had to be standing there to see the person slip on the banana skin. One time I got a call from the Prada store, a big fancy fashion story in Soho and Manhattan.

And they have this big staircase made of super slippery wood. And it was quite common that customers would trip on that thing. It was kind of a hazard. And the shop assistant said Tom Cruise came in and we closed the store so he could privately shop. And he's a really great tip. We was a great experience with Tom, but he fell down the steps. And so we'll have to pick him up.

And so I called his publicist, who at that time was his sister and said, you know, Leanne, I heard Tom Cruise yesterday fell down the stairs in the private store. And she said, please don't write that item. You know, I would be a big favor to us if you did. So I didn't ever write the item thinking in my mind that I now had the main line for Tom Cruise gossip, you know, for the rest of my life because I'd done his publicist this favor. and needless to say, I never heard from them again. So I was never very good at the strategic pace.

You write in the book about a lot of these premieres and parties you go to, and you'd often sort of see a big celebrity across the room. They're surrounded by friends or well-wishers, and you would go up and you'd get like one question a lot of the time. So what's the one question you would hit the celebrity with in that scenario? Well, I mean, bear in mind, I was always at an event where they were expecting to talk to the press. So it wasn't like I was approaching them at restaurants

when they were having a meal with their family. So to that extent, they were primed to talk to reporters and it was not inappropriate to go over. It would depend on the project. If you had one question, you never wanted to ask the pat question, like, what was it like working with that director? Because they're just going to tell you it was a great experience and whatnot.

So I would try to pick something that related to the subject matter of the film, that they were trying to promote, which might elicit an interesting response. If I really couldn't think of anything, my go-to was always, you know, what jobs did you do before you were famous? You know, something general like that. But I would try to tailor the question to the issue that the film address. Which celebrities liked this game and which ones hated it?

Some of them really can't be bothered under any circumstances. I mean, I would say Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio hate the press. Like, even at their own film premieres, it's just, I mean, DiCaprio will go over to a photographer and demand to see their digital photos and have them delete them. I mean, he just hates being pounded by the press at all. You know, most celebrities at their own premieres are incredibly gracious. Meryl Streep will talk to you as if you're the only person in the world. Hugh Grant is incredibly smart and funny and thoughtful, as is Kate Winslet, about questions that they must. have been asked a million times before.

So most people are managed to get it together. Liam Neeson is always a grump. Like you take your life in your hands when you ask him a question at a premiere. And also, you know, sometimes people are just having a bad day. So I think you have to respect that, you know, talking to a gossip poem that may not be their favorite thing to do that day. You also talk about these moments that despite your encyclopedic brain for celebrities,

you would occasionally be at one of these events and you'd see somebody and you'd be like, oh my God, I don't know who this celebrity is. How would you navigate that situation? So in those circumstances, I had this generic question. You've had so many wonderful roles. What is your favorite? And that is my way of asking, I have no idea who you are. But I'm hoping you'll give me a memory prompt.

And of course, these days, we all have IMDB on our phones. So we can see the person coming out and we can try to work it out or try to triangulate them. But in those days, when you just had a notebook, you had to ask these questions, which were essentially, who the heck are you without really your ignorance? So you mentioned the Kim Kardashian sex tape. How did that story come together? Can you give us a, can you give us a blow by blow, as it were? As it were. Well, I'm an Aussie, as I mentioned.

And I was working the graveyard shift at the last week of the year in 2006, where very little happens. So you really have to be a junior gossip columnist to throw that straw. And I was reading the Sydney Morning Herald, as is my habit. And Paris Hilton was in Sydney that week, where, of course, it was high summer. And she had this friend with her called Kim, who no one really knew. And I just thought that the friend was really stunning. And I made a mental note that this was an interesting person in Paris Hilton's orbit. And then 10 days later, you know, I got a call.

In those days, there were companies like Vivid Entertainment, Red Light, and a number of companies that trafficked in erotic home videos of the stuff. And when they had a tape like that, they would contact the gossip columns to let us know of their existence because they had to get the participants to sign off for it to be legal to release. There's no question that it's illegal to release a sex tape if the people in it have not agreed for it to be released. So that was a way of getting some pressure on the parties to sign and, of course, driving up the value. This particular tape was of a young rapper called Ray J, who was the Celebrity Party. and the girl on the tape was Kim Kardashian, who I recognized from just looking at those pictures

in the Sydney Morning Herald. And so that was really interesting to me because I realized who the girl was and that she was maybe even more of a draw than Ray J. And Kim initially denied the existence of the tape that eventually came to the table. And they were both paid for the release of that tape. That is so wild.

When I started reading your book, I thought it might be an apologia for a career spent partly in gossip. especially given the subhead. But you're not sorry about this, right? Like you don't look back at this and say, I wish I hadn't done those kind of stories. Am I reading that correctly?

No, exactly. I think that gossip is like anything else. You can do it with integrity and you can do it without integrity. You can be a waiter or a taxi driver or the president of the United States, and you can have integrity or not. And so I do think there is a way to do gossip ethically. The subhead, how I hope the rich

and become famous and ruin the world, is a way of a good way of it. acknowledging that I'm not pointing the finger at the celebrity class because the media was really benefiting from beating all those stories up. I mean, when Britney Spears was having her mental health breakdown, that sold a lot of papers. So we and I as a gossip columnist were completely complicit in that setup because we wanted them to behave badly. And these days, you call it concern trolling, right? And you'd have Brittany on the front page of the newspaper and, oh, she's having a mental breakdown isn't that sad. But really, we were rubbing out.

our hands because we were profiting from that. So I want to acknowledge that, you know, it wasn't these just, we're not tutting this behavior because the media really was promoting it. You're creating an incentive structure saying, if you behave this way, we will give you more press.

And we will make hay out of it. I mean, what Brittany and Lindsay Lohen needed, you know, at the Naderas was they needed a break. They needed to, you know, they needed a hug, and they needed to people stop reporting their every movement. And we didn't do that. we did the opposite of that. You recount one item in here that turned out to be like factually wrong,

but is there an item you published during your gossip career that was right but made you just feel shitty for publishing it? You know, there's a saying book that when you have a daily newspaper gossip column, the bus leaves every day at 6 p.m. and somebody has to be under it. So there were a couple times, you know, you need to have a lead, and that needs to be pretty much in place by 4 p.m. every day. And sometimes the lead drops out. And so, you know, unfortunately, sometimes you do have to pick a pal or someone who's

confided in you and throw them under the bus because you need a lead. So there were certainly some stories which didn't have a high news value, but I was obliged to feed the beast and beat up into something, you know, which perhaps didn't deserve for the next day. Yeah, and I think careful readers could tell, right? You know, it's like, why is this the lead item today? You know, we wouldn't know the mechanics, right? And you're like, boy, this is a lot of attention being paid to this random sort of semi-random. Oh, you hear from the radio.

Slow News Day is what they say when that happens. You move out here to L.A. To work for TMZ, which is then rising in the gossip world. This is described in your book as a fairly mournful period of your career. What happened to TMZ? Well, you know, TMZ is a marvelous operation. I'm astounded that it gets everything right. It really does.

I would say they have an accuracy level on power with the New York Times. And the interesting thing about TMZ is that, just as within the five boroughs of New York City, page six is the gossip brand, and Richard Johnson's phone rings, now Emily Smith's phone rings with everything that any New York sees. TMZ is that for the entire rest of the country. For everyone who's not in New York City, anyone who sees something interesting, they call TMZ. And as managing editor in one of my roles was betting those incoming calls, I describe a sort of

a lost weekend in the book when someone gave me an inaccurate tip that Morrissey, the singer, had died and he'd been having heart trouble so it was really was plausible that he might have died and you know I just spun my wills for two days being unable to prove or disprove that anecdote and being in a fear of my job but TMZ is a really tight ship I think for me personally I was ready to get out of gossip so I didn't have the best personal experience working there it's very long days at that office and it's none of what I found to be the fun stuff which was going out every night and meeting people and being in interesting situations they really do everything from the mothership.

And that really works for them. But I was exhausted by it. And it was a good moment for me to leave gossip. I was also interested to learn that your actual desk at TMZ was the desk that Harvey Levin in the TMZ TV show is leaning against. So they've since moved offices. But yeah, the first thing, so the day starts at TMZ at 6am. By the way, I don't know how to drive.

So I was taking the bus to TMZ. In LA. Yes. The first bus out of the depot, every more. morning, I got on the 526 up Fairfax. I got on at the farmer's market stop, went up Fairfax to sunset and was to be at my desk by 6 a.m. If the show started filming at 7, that was a late day. So we would, you know, 615, 6.30, the show would start. And I would have to get up because Harvey would stand in my cubicle to write on that board that he has. Did you, we, you mentioned Donald

Trump a little while ago. Donald Trump, we now know as president as somebody who used and manipulated the media, right, to get to his current position. Sure. How do you see that in gossip columns and how do you see him bridging this idea you talked about between wealth and celebrity? So a lot of people look down on the gossip columns and believe me, I understand why. But from a broader perspective, if you ignore the trashy stuff at good peril. Because I really do believe that gossip and celebrity is a form of democracy.

It's a popularity contest. And I think that people like Donald Trump understood that and managed to exploit that not only for conventional fame and money, but in his case, for the absolute supreme political power. And if you were covering these people as I were, and seeing how Trump manipulated the media at the lowest levels, by which I mean the gossip columns,

he managed to, I think he, the traditional model is that you monetize celebrity, like you get an endorsement deal if you're an actor or a famous person. And what people like Paris Hilton and Donald Trump managed to do is celebratized money. And by becoming famous, they got more of everything. They got more status. They got more money.

And they got more political power. So this book really is an eyewitness account of speaking to Donald Trump every couple of months because he was out and about speaking to these people. And it's a TikTok of how they did it. What was he like as an interview? Could you see him sizing up the situation when you're talking to him? like, what is this going to do for me and how am I going to appear in this column? Absolutely. He was always one of the most approachable people. He loved talking to any kind of reporter, especially gossip columnists. He would call the columns quite often. He didn't,

he didn't call me, but he would call Russian Malloy or page six. And he would often be the anonymous source for the items about himself. Let me tell you a story about something Donald Trump did, which is me. An embarrassed, slightly embarrassing story that just might find its way in your column. And he also, he sort of dropped this around the 90s, but he also used to pretend to be his own press agent, a guy called John Barron. So when John Barron called you about the Trump organization, you knew you were speaking to Donald. So that's what it is now. That's where we find this kind of thing. It's kind of some partly in a celebrity's own Instagram feed, partly on TMZ, and then some kind of reporterly transaction somewhere. That's what gossip is in 2020, do you think?

Well, you know, there's an old saying that, you know, gossip is what people don't want you to know, everything else is publicity. So clearly on the Instagram level, you're getting mainly publicity. So for a big story to break, you're going to need a third-party reporter. But I think most people would just like to snack on that content. You know, they do like to see pictures of pretty people. Pictures of pretty people is probably 70% of the draw, frankly, of celebrity coverage. And, you know, my attitude about celebrities is it like birdwatching. Some birdwatches just want to see pretty birds, and that's perfectly fine.

Others can look at birds in the park and understand that it's a real indicator about what's happening in the ecosystem. And it tells you all sorts of things about migratory patterns, it tells you where the food sources are, tells you all sorts of stuff about the biosphere. And I think that if you are smart about gossip and celebrity culture, you can get that from reading the columns and reading the celebrity nonsense. But you know what, if you just want to look at the pretty birds, that's fine too. Ben Whitacombe's new book is Gatecrasser, How I Help the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World. Orderable right now or viable, I guess, at any bookstore you dare to enter physically. Ben, thank you so much for doing this.

Right. Thank you. All right. Thanks to Ben for that. And now it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Woo-woo. Last Monday's headline about a new policy for Confederate statues was Statue of Limitations. Today's headline comes from Alex. It's from the national interest.

Oh, those clever yucksters at the national interest. It's about the Russian bounty story we talked about last week. Donald Trump, David, as we noted, seem more interested in arguing about whether or not he was briefed that the Russians had put out bounties on American soldiers. Ooh, ooh, ooh, all right, keep going. I think you're already there. rather than taking discernible action, this has led some fellow Republicans

to rebel against Trump. Yeah. And I think I've given David plenty of string here. What was the national interest, strain pun pun headline? Mutiny on the bounty? Mutiny of the bounty? Mutiny,

is it just straight at mutiny on the bounty? It's contained in a longer sentence. Trump faces a GOP mutiny on the Russian bounty. Perfect. It is the national interest. It's not Esquire in the 60s, just so. but very good, very good stuff there.

He is David Schuemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Albata. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We're back Thursday and your listener mail is due now. Hit us up on Twitter or via DM. We'll be back with that and more lukewarm texts about the media. See you then, David.

See you, Brian.