The Press Box - Trump's Taxes, 'Venom' vs. 'A Star Is Born,' and the Disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi | The Press Box (Ep. 536)

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker take a look at the New York Times story on Trump's taxes and how the Times rolled it out (03:00), the release of 'Venom' and 'A Star Is Born' in today's media landscape (27:30), and the mystery of Jamal Khashoggi going missing (48:45). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, it's time to experience New Mexico. I just made reservations to head to my favorite state in America. After Christmas, bringing the whole family, we're going to hit Sandia Peak Tramway, going to eat some of that red and green chili, breathing clean air like nowhere else in the United States. I love New Mexico, and I can't wait to get back. People thinking about going should go to soak up the unique beauty and rich cultural diversity with the influences from native tribes, the Wild West, and even George O'Keefe. They should check out one of the funky small.

towns in New Mexico like Pie Town or stop in Albuquerque, which is my favorite place in the universe, as you road trip down Route 66. Learn more and plan your next trip at New Mexico.org slash pressbox. That's New Mexico.org slash pressbox, New Mexico, true. David, former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, has joined Fox as head of PR. What I want to know is, if every former former. Trumpite had to work at Fox what job would

they do? For all the things that we've said about Steve Bannon over the months this is actually he's actually like job appropriate for something at a television network having worked in Hollywood for some period of time. Although he'd end up doing something

boring just like being head of programming or you know demographic research or production or something Um, but let's see. Who else is, who else is the old, like the great. Stephen Miller? What do you see him doing? Well, I mean, he's a fine wordsmith, right?

Uh, he should, he should be, they, they should give him a head writer. What's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, it's right in his wheelhouse. Last Man Standing takes a weirdly political bent, but that's fine. It was, it was, it was pretty close there anyway. would you put Steve Nuchin on a Fox business or do you think does he strike you more as like a like should they just pull

should they do a Max headroom revival and just put his head in the box? That I'd love to see but it's like 50-50 between that and wearing Don Imas's old cowboy hat on Fox business in the morning. I was going to nominate Mike Pence for Fox NFL Sunday

but I'm afraid he'd probably walk out. Oh, that's good. He would be good on that. I mean he would you know sometimes that show gets a little bit too manic, you know, a little bit too upbeat. I think you'd bring some nice gravity to that. It's the really important sport of football. We are the new cast of Lethal Weapon.

This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. The Pressbox is the media podcast where you're not allowed to declare the system is broken and then not say why it's broken. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. A big show today, David. First off, with Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, we will talk about the massive New York Times story about Trump's tax. In taxes, in particular the way the Times rolled it out, a case study in how you do journalism in 2018.

Second, we're going to talk about the coverage of last weekend's two big romantic comedies, Venom and a star is born. Just kidding, I think. And finally, the strange and haunting disappearance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Plus is always the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's start with Trump's taxes. On Wednesday, the New York Times published a 14,000-word financial biography of Donald Trump. by David Barstow, Suzanne Craig, and Russ Butner, charging Trump with engaging in, and these are their quotes,

dubious tax schemes and outright fraud. Should we cover a few highlights of the piece? Please. You read it? Did you read the whole thing? Be honest. No. And this is why I'm excited to talk about it.

Precisely why I'm excited to talk about it. This will be newsworthy for you, too. The main focus, I think, is how Fred Trump, father of the current president funneled money to both Donald and his other children. So some of the revelations here were that Trump was earning $200,000

a year by age three. He was a millionaire by age eight. When Fred Trump was near death, Trump and his siblings got control of his buildings and claimed in an effort to avoid gift taxes that they were worth $41 million.

They would later sell the buildings for 16 times that much over a 10-year period. There was a company they created, the Siblings and Fred and the siblings created called the All-County Building Supply and Maintenance, which is an incredibly fake name. If that doesn't sound like a front, I don't know what does.

I'm pretty sure the imprudey Wiley Coyote gets crates delivered to him with that spray painted on the side. Right, but it was sort of a creative, non-taxed way to essentially devote, excuse me, to divert money from Fred Trump's buildings. to the younger Trump's. A couple of interesting things about the piece to me. One was the language the Times used, which I think was very vivid for those, for that

kind of investigation. They called Fred Trump Donald Trump's wingman, quote unquote, in one of the various things. They also went back and revisited some of their reporting, including a 1976 profile of Donald Trump, called it a spectacular con. It just read very differently. If I told you 14,000. word newspaper investigation into Trump's finances, right?

You get a particular sense of how that's going to read. This read very vividly, almost gripping in a way. I was looking at it in the newsprint pages. I wouldn't say rapidly turning the pages because it does take a while to get through, but as rapidly as humanly possible. What struck you about the unveiling of this big piece of granite of investigative journalism? I mean, I was with you on the language. I mean, I read, I read most of it.

Obviously, my, my first reaction to it was, seeing that it dropped, I was, I eagerly clicked through, read probably, I don't know, 3,000, 4,000 words before I just actually took note of how much more there was to go. And then it was, you know, a little bit, it felt a little bit burdened going forward by the amount that that was beyond me. thankfully the New York Times sort of rolled out the cheat sheet on their own we'll get to that in a little bit I think that I think that without you know without deliberately without demeaning anything that's

that we've talked about previously on the show or any other the really significant issues that are kind of that are going on in the world right now it felt like a rather a little bit more like hearty eat your vegetables in a good way sort of news cycle I can't say that this last lasted much longer than any other blip that's been in the news since Trump won the presidency or came into our came into the political sphere. But, um, but, you know, there was so much there

to break down that I actually felt like I was being informed by, by much of the television I watched on the subject and much of the supplemental stuff that I read. I mean, that was what a lot of people mentioned this week is that Kavanaugh was such a, just, you know, giant, magnet for everybody's attention that ate on an article in the New York Times that charged the president of the United States with quote unquote outright fraud basically got swallowed by Friday Saturday, you know, so much that when we were looking to do the show, I said, wow, this is still, we should we should still talk about this, right? This is still a big deal, right? I guess I was sort of amazed not only by the quality of reporting, which was exceptional, but

the rollout of the piece was interesting in this moment we're in. First of all, there was this documentary that came out on Showtime about the thing because now whenever we have a big time space, we also have a Showtime documentary. This was called the family business

Trump and taxes and sort of followed the reporters at various moments and various stages of the piece. Part of the documentary was everyone standing around getting ready to publish the piece. Have you noticed how this has become a new kind of moment in publishing.

You know, I always think of like, in the old days, it's the Humphrey Bogart, you know, going to roll the presses, you know, we're going to, we're going to fight corruption in city hall. And now it's everyone sitting around a computer, waiting to push the button by Jody Kanner tweeted about the moment a year ago. And they published the first Harvey Weinstein investigation. That was like, I've been sitting around a laptop essentially. Yeah.

I love how that's become a new thing. And then the second part of this was one of the writers, after they published it, going over and high-fiving Sam Dahlnick, who's one of the assistant managing editors of the Times, and then going over and looking at the analytics of a piece, because that's the second act, right? It's not how word on the street is. This is a great story. You're actually just looking at a screen and looking at the analytics and kind of marveling.

We've all been there. The ringer.com has been there too. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty funny. The other things that we found interesting were, and that the Times published, the Times self-aggregated this piece. Yeah. Mike Isaac, who's one of the reporters, said,

this is how you do it, cannibalize yourself before others can, and put out essentially a kind of like a shortened version of the, they called it 11 takeaways from the Times' investigation into Trump's wealth. What did you make of that sort of strange? Well, I was grateful for it to continue the most important thread in this conversation, which is the way that David read the, uh, consumed this article. Yeah, that it popped up when I was about, what, halfway through. and suddenly, you know,

you could just kind of go to the cheat sheet. It used to be that we'd have to wait for, you know, Slate or the Daily Beast to, or now a million other sites to aggregate these things or, you know, to bullet pointed for us. Or wait for the evening news shows to sort of take their spin on it. But yeah, I mean, it was nice and it was nice because there was,

I mean, it sounds so obvious, but, you know, it had the, the sheen of legitimacy, not just because it came from the source that broke the news, but because it came from the New York Times. You know, and it was, and, and to have everything sort of, you know, simplified, I thought was, was, was, was really interesting. I mean, it was almost like, it was almost like they, you know,

they, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, mathematical formula in reverse, right? It was like, the 14,000 word part was showing your work. and the bullet points was like just, you know, the part of the math problem that the teacher's going to read. And then after that, the writers started

when it went to the tweet threat, right? That's like part three of this rollout. Yeah. Where you sort of, you do, it's like a self-aggregation but in tweet form. So you can just hit all those high notes, right? Yeah. And then this and then this.

Yeah. And then just in case we needed the old school moment. Suzanne Craig actually went to the printing press, the Times printing press, as this rolled out on the front page, which is very cool and tweeted this video of the papers coming out, which really did feel like the old Humphrey Bogart movie. Like, oh man, here we are.

And then, by the way, the Times ran the piece in its entirety again in Sunday's edition of the paper. Yes. Which was very old school. Like, we're going to, you know, those bastards aren't getting away with this. We're just going to run it again. Doesn't that sound like a tabloid, like news

proprietor, circa 1950 or something? I thought that was really cool. It was really well done. I mean, it should be said about Suzanne Craig's Twitter thread that it was clearly,

I mean, clearly, it seemed very clearly to be set up in advance just like everything else, right? I mean, it rolled out later than the rest of the pieces in sort of the deliberate

sequential order, but everything, all these tweets were like ready to go. And just, which is all to say, this is part of the deliberate publishing strategy,

as I'm sure was publishing it on the Sunday. She also went on, I think she had a couple of stops on news shows and interviews too but I saw her on Rachel Maddow just sort of discussing

how the donuts were made you know I mean they did go over some of the more interesting parts you know some of the interesting parts of the story but a lot of it was just sort of like how did you guys get to this point

you know what's the detective if there's a detective story at all and speaking of detective stories there's also this interesting little sidebar that it's been rumored now that Trump's cousin John Walter must be the source of much of this information since he kept a lot of it in his basement.

He kept a lot of Fred Trump's records in his basement. But which I think is just, you know, I mean, every story, as we've discussed before, and this is Gwinda Blair from Politico, who's actually written on the subject a lot, but she knows the Trump family and kind of made this connection. She wrote a book about the Trumps, yes. Yes. And now as a political writer, right?

But I love that every story, and we've talked about this before, every piece eventually gets into the detective work of how the piece came to be. And what is the secret? Who are the secret sources and everything else? Remember when we were about to find out the source of who wrote the New York Times op ed about Trump and the White House? And then we forgot that that ever happened? And there was a piece the other day saying basically that even the Sherlock at the White House had kind of given up. So when I feel is whenever we absolutely know who it must be, it turns out to maybe not exactly be them. Well, also there is the relentlessness of the news cycle that Trump or, you know, whatever you think about it.

I mean, many people assume, many people would say that Trump uses the, this, the news cycles, the speed, the current speed of the news cycle to is advantage. Just like you were talking about Kavanaugh drowning this out or this drowning Kavanaugh out for a day. I mean, it all, it kind of, it's, it's all consuming. But, I mean, I guess if there's, if there's, if there's, you know, leakers or secret op-ed writers in the White House, they benefit from that too, right? I mean, the attention, the spotlight is off them, you know, the hunt is over, you know, 12 hours after it begins. It was really interesting, I thought, in the documentary that the writers talked about the, one of the moments they really decided to go in on all this and spend a lot of time on it was when Rachel Maddow, speaking of Rachel Maddow, unveiled the fact that she had part of Trump's, I think it was two, 2005 tax return. And that turned out to be such a spectacular bust that that weirdly was an event because there

were some pages made public of that. Those are some of the threads they started. And that convinced them that there was maybe a story here, which sort of turned from a change from a tax story into a larger story about Trump's finances. I want to play a couple of clips from the documentary to you for you because I think this is fascinating. We are now at this moment where there is so much transparency about journalism and how to, as you say, about how journalism comes together. It is, let me say, for the record, as somebody who sort of does this for a living one, it is fantastic.

I love it. I love understanding these things. Number two, there is way too much of it, right? I'm all, I feel, I look on Twitter all the time, tons of people are telling me their process. I didn't want to know their process. I didn't ask, right? It wasn't the giant Trump investigation. it was some profile they wrote and it's like, no, no, it's okay.

You don't have to tell me how you put it together. I really don't want to know. But one of the great revealing things about these documentaries is not the sleuthing and the kind of, oh my gosh, we found it. We broke the story. To me, it's the little things about how journalists, especially journalists at big newspapers actually operate. So here's a highlight.

This is Dean Beke, the guy who runs the New York Times last fall, trying to convince the writers that they should publish this a year ago, okay? Because Trump was talking about tax reform and like, guys, this is your peg. This is it. And listen to how David Barstow, one of the writers, subtly, this is just a great lesson in editor-writer relationships, how the editor-makes the editor makes the suggestion. And the writer, without exactly saying no, sort of turns it around. Listen to this. He's actually sort of flirting with an examination of his tax history and how they use the tax laws because of things he said in the last couple of weeks. So if there's a way to accelerate the completion, I think it would be, because my fear is

you're going to miss an amazing news window to write about Donald Trump and his taxes. It might even influence the debate over tax reform. If people got a sense of how one wealthy family over generations were able to use America's tax laws to avoid paying taxes and rich themselves, that's going to be such a lot of a powerful moment in the debate. I hear what you're saying, and I totally get it. I think we're all, like, been around. We've been in the rodeo long enough to know, like, how this works.

But I would say, actually, the tax story is this different beast. We've been piecing together from the public records and the other document that we already have in hand. The basic notion, and we're seeing things that are clear. clearly over the line in terms of legality, things that look like just fraudulent behavior. We need to talk to more people. David, that is a negotiation between a writer and an editor right there. You're never going to find it better, right?

You're not saying, no, we can't run this. We need to talk to more people. Let me tell you, the story's not exactly about X anymore. The story is really about why. There is no journalist listening to this podcast who has not had that. conversation within there. So I found that was, I thought that was fabulous. It was a, like I said, those are the moments I now come to see with these documentaries because that's, that's what journalism is really like. Yeah. You know, the, the, if it were all, you know, Woodward and Bernstein

moments, that'd be fantastic, but it's really not. It's little meetings like that with your boss. Well, the other meeting that you have, and that's why, and part of why this particular story is so compelling is, you know, the conversation that we've had a lot at the ringer is, you know, a story by story or a pitch by pitch basis, you know, does this, is this actually, is this a, is this a feature story? Is this a blog post? Is this a video? Is this a podcast? Like, what is the best format for, you know, a pitch that somebody has? And, you know, with the, with the, with this big, tag, Trump tax story, you know, the Times tried to, you know, hit for the cycle to, to mix metaphors or whatever. But the, but, but it's interesting, just in terms of,

how much, on how quickly the story sort of dissipated. It's, it's interesting to wonder if there is a, if there is a best format for a story like this in 2018, or if all of the formats is, you know, if everything at once is the, is indeed the way to go. That's a really good question. I probably think you take everything at once because if you're a beast like the times, you're trying to feed print, you're trying to feed your daily podcast. You are now trying to feed various television arms. whether they're ones you're going to be producing as this is about to happen or television arms like Showtime that are sort of following you around.

I think it's all of those things at once. And, you know, the thing about it dissipating is it's just, I mean, this is this would, it's just the Trump thing, right? You just have so much stuff and so much, so many things like this that are just would be unimaginable to learn about a president after he was elected. sure but um but in this case this is exactly what's happening can i play you one more one more clip from the doc and this is another thing i love about these latter day journalism documentaries is just how journalists actually feel about things before everyone starts taking bows and we decide everything's important this is uh russell butner and then one of the uh writers of this story time did you guys wake up this morning i didn't really sleep

largely due to the quality of the documentation we have we're going to proceed with confidence. But whether people are going to care, you never know kind of how that's going to go until you hit the button. Okay. And again, that's another point I think that gets lost in this heroic journalist era that we're in is it's all right. It's all public service. It's all, you know, getting to the truth and, and, you know, holding the powerful to account. But every journalist really secretly worries, is anybody going to read this? Is anybody going to care about this blockbuster exhaustive investigation. And again, I just love seeing those moments. That to be is, that to me is actual journalism versus, you know, overly romanticized movie

journalism. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I mean, because you, you know, these are conversations, again, that we have, that you and I would have, you know, about something else, about someone else's piece. It's just, it's so, you know, months ago, I feel like we talked about the Times documentaries and, you know, whether or not it was possible to humanize the staff of the New York Times. In some ways, I mean, even for me, that, that does a lot because it's, this, it feels like, you know, this feels so vital to the public discourse. And even on a story like that, there's that question, you know. If you really wanted to have an all-encompassing document, You should have live look at the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal in the Washington Post when it came out and record all the shit talk about this absolutely successful piece of journalism that nonetheless comes out of competing newsrooms.

That would be the real experience of a journalist, right? Here's the stuff we're going to say in private about the investigation that we, while we go to Twitter and say, what a fabulous piece of reportage by my colleagues of the New York Times. That would truly capture the way journalists actually think. All right, David, should we do overwork Twitter joke of the week? Let's do it, man. All right, David, the overworked Twitter joke where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. David, before we leave the Brett Kavanaugh story behind for a few days, did you see the New York Times piece about the 1985 bar fight that Kavanaugh was involved in when he was a student at Yale? And the detail of this, among many details, was that Kavanaugh was accused by a page.

patron of throwing ice, which a couple of people tried to downplay it. A couple other people said, you go into a bar and start throwing ice and see how that works out for you. The time story reads Chad Ludington, who is a Kavanaugh classmate. If you had to think of a name of one of Kavanaugh's classmates at Yale, would Chad Ludington have been in your top three? I think, yes. I think Bart O Kavanaugh would have been more believable than Chad Lendington. Anyway, Chad Luddington is one of the guys who said that Kavanaugh was not being truthful about the extent of his college drinking,

said that the altercation at the bar happened after a UB40 concert in 1985. So it was an overwork Twitter joke to wonder, does red red wine make Kavanaugh feel so fine all of the time? Thanks to Anthony Ronziou for that one. I'm sure, David, as you read in the news last week, you noticed that when Pennsylvania went searching for a moderator

for its gubernatorial debate, it found Alex Trebek. Yes? Alex Trebek of Jeopardy, who proceeded to deliver a widely mocked performance where he hogged the mic and made jokes about the Catholic Church at one point even making clear to the debate audience that he was not molested during his time at a Catholic high school. Can we hear a little bit of Alex Trebek's opening bit? Yeah, let's listen. I'm back. Now, when I was asked by the chamber if I would come here

and be the moderator for this event, I was not drunk. I love the nervous laughter. I accepted immediately. Didn't give it a second thought. What on earth was I thinking? My gosh. Obviously, I'm not as bright

as some of you people in the audience think I am. This is not a game show tonight. This is serious stuff. And I can't begin to tell you how much agony and stress I have experienced over these many months because I accepted that invitation. The evening is not about me, but I have spent four decades hosting television competitions with impartiality. And what I was very afraid of was that some of you would leave here tonight and say,

well, our guy didn't do too well, but it was only because Trebek was so biased against him. I didn't want that to happen. So, yes, I am very nervous, but I accepted. Wow. This is not about me, says Alex Trebek in the midst of a multi-minute intro to a debate that is all about Alex Trebek. That is incredible. wasn't it? Oh my gosh. If there was any doubt he was doing it

his way without the assistance of professional writers or any part of the production staff, that was clear about 15 seconds into that thing. I've never heard somebody flop during a debate. That was really weird. What doesn't surprise you, David, that after that performance, that Twitter phrased most

of its jokes about Alex Trebek in the form of a question. Does not surprise me? What is awkward? What is a shit show? What is an Alex Trebek filibuster? what is Alex Trebek could not shut up? What is politics for $300? And this is what happens when you genuinely need to ask a question such as what is a moderator without having the answer first.

A lot of great stuff on that one. And finally, David. That's fantastic. All right. This might be the overworked goat. I really, and I think you know what I'm referring to, which is the warning text we all got from President Trump last Wednesday. Do you want to hear some highlights in the immediate reaction to that? But I'm here you go.

Hello, I'd like to report a sexual predator sending unwanted text messages to 150 million women. New phone, who dis? Amber alert is already taken, so maybe an orange alert. And my favorite of them all, Tiffany Trump receives first ever text from her father. That's, uh, thanks to Isaac Chips for that. If you compared a FEMA text alert to Trump's distant relationship with his youngest daughter, congrats, you paid the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David.

let's talk about the movies, shall we? Yes. Two giant grossing movies arrived at the box office this weekend. And after reading a ton about which movie a star is born or Venom would be the big winner, are we all just loser for caring? What do you think about this? This was probably the biggest weekend and the biggest weekend at the movies in Ringer history. I mean, certainly there have been bigger movies that have come out as far as

ringer coverage goes there's been the big Oscar weekends you know we've we've dedicated a whole weeks to the Star Wars relaunch and various other you know big budget summer movie type things or tent pole movies sure um but a stars born is occupied you know the the the interest and and much of the consciousness of the sort of you know ringer group think for the past month two months and then here came along Venom to sort of, you know, swoop in and start, you know, trying to trying to battle for space. Now, it's really interesting, going into this weekend, no one knew exactly what to expect out of either of these movies. I wrote a piece on The Ringer, just trying, basically attacking the character of Venom, not the movie character, not the film,

but the comic book version of him. Yes. But, and we'll get to, some of that later, I'm sure, but, but, you know, I think there was, the expectations for Venom were really low, and the expectations for, for a star is born, uh, were maybe higher than they had been six months ago. I think, you know, without getting too, too deep, I think there was this really interesting tension with the star is born as to whether or not it was possible for something to be both good and both like fully subsumed by like internet meminess at the same time. And so there was this big question as to how far that could propel a movie like a star was born. And Venom sort of had this parallel track where it started off feeling like, you know,

another superhero tent pole and then started feeling like an almost certain failure of a superhero tent pole, more akin to sort of, you know, not a not a full-on failure, but not not on par with Spider-Man or the Avengers movies or anything like that. And then it sort of made it's made a comeback based on its good badness, maybe based on its own sort of secret meminess along the way. The whole point of this is to say that we take, we have these two movies in a world where, in a world,

I'm doing, I'm doing a movie trailer right now. I can hear, I can hear the voice coming through. In a world where everything that we read about Hollywood is horse race commentary or, or the business of movie making commentary. Uh,

and after all of the meta, sort of meta box office. battles that we've had over the years, you know, Star Wars versus history, that sort of thing. Here we have a real showdown between two very different movies that weirdly have a lot in common. And, you know, you just sort of find yourself, like, it's hard to find the movie reviews on the New York Times website because all you can get is all this kind of meta-analysis. Or like, when you Google, I don't want to just denigrate the New York Times. When you Google anything about Venom or a Star is Born, you're just seeing the box office

records getting shattered and how they did against one another and not actually anything substantive about the movies themselves? Does that strike you as, does that strike you was right? Or am I just too deep in it to really be able to see what everyone else is seen? No, I think you're exactly right. And I think it's like it's, it is the way, is the way we talk about movies now, which is this weird meta-commentary. First of all, you say, we say like, there was like a showdown between the movies. Like, you know, and, you know, and, in this case there actually was. It was two very different interesting movies that were going at each other

on the same weekend, but this is what we see, but they write this piece every weekend. But going at each other to be number one at the box office? Right. Okay, what's interesting, and what's interesting particularly for this in this week is that there were really, real and sourced stories about

online fans of Lady Gaga or trolls or something like that that were deliberately going on Twitter and in various comment sections and things to trash venom to drive people towards a star is born. So that was the thing that happened. There actually seemed to be,

if I'm going to keep this like, you know, boxing match, horse race, metaphorism going. There seemed to be bad blood between these movies in a way that there isn't normally.

But I, but, but that's maybe an aside. So continue on. Well, yeah. I mean, so that was,

that was a funny story. It's I think that the Lady Gaga troll army, one of whom or one of the accounts told BuzzFeed, it's us Gaga fans creating fake IDs to trash the Venom premiere. They're both getting released on the same day, so we want more audience for a Star is Born. And the sort of fake, one of the fake kind of Venom tweets that got repeated over and over

was, I am the biggest Marvel fan, but I just watched hashtag Venom and I don't know what to say. That's so great. Actually, pretty good, right? Pretty fairly convincing is kind of a fanboy who's like, man, I really wanted to like this, but just wasn't there. I'm going to go see Stars Born instead on opening day. My favorite one, and I don't want to editorialize it too much.

was from at Anne Harrison Mom. It said, I saw hashtag Venom, which by the way, anyone with mom in their handle and functional use of hashtags is just so transparent, but I saw a hashtag Venom last night and had to leave halfway through. My children

wouldn't stop crying at how bad it was. Luckily, a second pre-screening of hashtag a Star is born was about to start, and now we are all crying, tears of amazement. And then this is just a throne at the end. Please pray for my eldest. in a coma.

I'm not sure if he's in a coma because of venom, but the actual character of venom, not the movie. But yeah. It was this, yeah, there was a lot of that going on him. Yeah. So I think one thing is we often talk about box office in,

in the terms of a showdown, which is funny to me because very few people, I think, thought other than people who were so into a stars born, thought that there was a chance of this kind of big, unashamed romantic, uh, music movie would beat a comic book movie, right? That just doesn't stand. As it turns out,

uh, from the actual box office results, it seemed like everybody's happy, right? Uh, they both made a lot of money. So the, the showdown is only in our imaginations. I would add, by the way, the, there are two ways we talk about movies like this now. We talk about box office and we talk about Oscars, especially with a movie like a Star is born. It all becomes, is this a movie that's going to get a lot of Oscar nominations, right? So we're already advanced. And I think part of this is I've found this so strange about movies because as somebody who is not really into that world so much, I'm always like really the thing I care about is is the movie good and should I see the movie? Yeah. And advancing past that space on the monopoly board is pretty hard for me at that point.

Of course, I want to read profiles and things like that. But just like we're just so meta that we're so far ahead of the actual connection between human and movie. this is like what I'm always yelling about on Twitter as like, you know, sporting event and ratings, right? It's the same thing. Like, was the Sunday night football game any good? Maybe we should do that before we get to what was the rating of the Sunday night football game?

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think there is an interesting form of meta-writing about movies. And, you know, our Boston Fantasy does it a whole lot really well. I'm not just saying that because he's almost certainly listening to this and could fire me. But I believe it to be true. But there is an interesting angle, which is like,

what does this mean? where a movie is going because of what just happened, but that's not an instant react idea, you know? There are bigger ideas that can be gleaned from this. I just, but it's clearly not the only way to look at how you come out of a weekend,

right? I mean, there's a certain... But it's almost like watching... It's become the Monday thing. Right. It is. It's the only way to do it. It's like watching, it's like watching stock market analysis when all you want to know is how the economy is doing and you're just not getting any knowledge out of it, you know? You're just, you find

yourself looking for the point a whole lot. I mean, another one of the ways it spends forward, not just Oscar Noms, I read in one of these pieces. I don't know if it was the Hollywood Reporter or a different one. I think it was THR that we're suddenly, we're already going to, is a star is born going to be, going to trend like the greatest showman did last year.

And so, you know, projecting out what future weeks might look like. I don't know, it looks like we're, like, there's, like, everybody has all of these small pieces of data right and, you know, waiting on their, in their Google Doc. for when these movies come out. And so you can immediately know what you can compare it to. You can compare it to other opening weekends

and months and years past. You can project to Oscar nominations and everything else. But there's not any real significance until the Oscar nominations come out until the year in movies is settled. And even then, it doesn't really speak. Yeah, and I'd say even then

that's of highly questionable significance. Because then you're just arguing about what did they convince people in Hollywood to name as the Oscar finalist. Exactly. If I like the movie, what does that have anything to do with me? I mean, you know, just again, a primal level. I'm not saying that other stuff isn't a story, but again, to advance past just the fundamental

question of should I go see movie or should I not go see movie? Right. That is all just projecting way down the road. I'd say for another piece of random data, this is always one of my favorites is from New York Times. For all movies and releases last weekend, ticket sales at North American theaters totaled roughly 174.5 million. The previous hallmark,

high water mark, excuse me, for an October weekend was 2015, with the Martian, blah, blah, blah, 163 million. What does that mean? What does that mean? This was the highest grossing October weekend of all time. Just think about what a tiny, that sounds so significant, but just

think about what a tiny data point that is. What if September was terrible at the movies? What if November will be terrible? What if the last week of October will be such a giant fall off of Mount Everest that it will make up for this. We'll never really know any of that stuff or very few people will put all those random numbers together.

And so it's just like my old bugaboo of TV ratings. It all sounds really significant. But when you step back and look at it, you don't really understand what that means. And you don't understand like even if we take $174 million of the box office this weekend to be significant. Tell me what that has to do with Sony's bottom line going for it. Tell me what that has to do with 20s.

Century Fox and Disney. Tell me then how will that affect movie franchises at those places that I actually care about? That's all nine or ten steps down the road and no one and very few, I won't say no one. Very few people will actually follow them or capable of following them because then the data gets pretty opaque. So I just, I always find this so funny. And it's like, okay, that's great. I was just saying, yeah, I mean, if they, if they don't, yeah, if, if, until Disney decides to release the next Star Wars movie, in October because of this. I mean, I don't really know

what the significance of anything is. Yeah. Can I ask you a few questions about Venom? Please. As the non-comic book person here. This is a line for your piece like. Brock, who was sort of the anti-Peter Parker. Who is, wait, tell me, remind me of Brock's first name again?

Eddie Brock, yeah. Eddie Brock. He was a serious journalist whose career was ruined when he ran an exclusive interview with a super villain called the Sin Eater, except it wasn't actually the sin eater. So he got, so essentially it's like a, was like a Stephen Glass thing? No, no, no, no.

He had, he was fooled. He had a, he had a source who claimed to be the sin eater. It turned out to be one of these guys who like serially admits to crimes that he didn't commit. And then his, this is, it's so bizarrely, it's just unnecessarily twisted or like, you know, complicated. Then when Spider-Man actually stopped and captured the sin-eater as superheroes are want to do, it was, it was revealed that this exclusive. was incorrect because the guy under the hood, you know, in Scooby-Doo terms, was not actually the person

who was interviewed for the piece and that ended Eddie Brock's career, which led him to a pathological lifelong hatred of Spider-Man and subsequently to become his greatest villain. But so it was, it was, I'm just fascinated by this. At bottom it was a journalism story. Like Spider-Ban, you stepped in and saved the world,

but as a consequence, it revealed that my big exclusive was a put on? Yeah, it's been portrayed after that, and I think it's legitimately portrayed as sort of like he felt, I think part of it was that he felt terrible for having to write these schlucky pieces just to keep up with the Spider-Man world.

Gotcha. But yeah, at the end, it was about ethics and superhero journalism. Did you remember how this, did like Eddie Brock pick up the phone and there was like a deep voice that said, this is sin eater? And it turned out to be somebody else?

Was it like the Trump John Barron thing? or what? No, yeah, that would be really great if it was someone deliberately trying to take him down. Unfortunately, it was just sort of a throwaway. It was not, you know, I mean, this is a very particular era of comic books that it's a little bit.

You know, the venom stuff that's out now is, in my opinion, I think, in most people's opinion, much better than back then. It was, there was a very sort of mechanical aspect of the comic book writing back in those days. Not to impugn any of the writers, it was just the way things were done. I got to say personally,

So I went and saw a Starsmore on Saturday night. Love the movie. I got to say personally, when you talk about our general coverage of it, I'm not sure if I would have known this movie was even going to be a thing until a couple of weeks before when we started seeing the profiles of Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, stuff like that and, you know, the kind of conventional press. It wasn't, if it wouldn't have been for the ringer's early tsunami warning system that this was just going to be like a thing, I don't know that I would have known about it.

but I'm but but as you say it was it's stars more is interesting because it's this particular cut of mediadom right and we are a tiny part of it but there is there is the sort of lady gaga part of mediadom there's a sort of kind of musical romantic kind of yearning for kinds of movies that don't often get made part of mediedom to right that this cuts across and what else what am i what am i leaving out of that calculus yeah i mean i don't know what you're leaving out but I do think there's a very interesting question of like, I remember when the first trailer came out. Actually, I don't.

I'm going to confuse trailers here and what I say for sure. But the first trailer definitely had the window of the SUV rolling down with Bradley Cooper saying, I just wanted to get one more look at you and Lady Gaga giving the weird smile. It might have been the second trailer that had him touching his nose, him running his finger down her nose in that creepy way. There's a part, I mean, I think a real interesting question is how, how much of that stuff is in earnest and how much of it is is deliberately calculated to create

this that sort of, I can't believe this is happening, memeification. And I don't think those things are necessarily mutually exclusive. I think sometimes the thing will happen and, you know, the viral marketing or the marketing person will just kind of sit there and smile behind his or her hand without letting anybody know that they know what's about to happen. But it is, I mean, they did manage to strike exactly the right tone and the production of this movie, which was, this is going to be a great, great film that even the people who are not inclined to see great films are going to see because their friends won't stop talking about it, you know? And I, it did, I mean, regardless of the degree to which this was a masterpiece. And by the way, I didn't see it. I did see Venom this weekend.

I saw it. You fan boy, you? well I saw I saw Venom with a with a 10 year old the 14 year old and the 16 year old this week we all we all walked out incredibly excited by it I thought it was actually it wasn't even a good bad movie I thought it was a good movie like it was it was silly and and and you know

it's kind of screeching at times but it was pretty good and and and but I think I think that the star is born as no matter to what degree it succeeds has managed to pull off this weird sort of kind of two-track success in a way already, in a really impressive way. I mean, it's already a great success in marketing and publicity terms. Yeah. And I think, I think in some ways, Venom is even harder to put your finger on because it didn't

feel like, it felt like a big movie in the sense that it was definitionally a big movie leading up to this weekend. But it didn't feel necessary in the sense that a lot of comic book movies have up to this point. And it certainly wasn't necessary. I love that word with comic book movies. Yeah, no. Continue.

And it wasn't necessary in the sense that there is now this weird delineation between Spider-Man movies and the rest of the Spider-Man world that Sony pictures has ownership of for movies. Spider-Man wasn't in this Venom movie. I hope that's not a spoiler for anybody. And to kind of position it as separate from Spider-Man, despite the fact that he looks exactly like Spider-Man. is sort of interesting.

But all of that is to say, it did have that sort of viral, you know, immediate, immediate sort of second wave success that, you know, Deadpool and some of these other Logan, some of these other like offbeat Superho movie surprises have where, you know, people are really,

again, going back to the horse race, the business aspect, we're really surprised by the Saturday night totals. Yeah. You know, that Friday night, a pretty good Friday night begets an amazing Saturday night. And, you know, I guess I'm just, this is the snake eating its own tail or the whatever here,

but that is sort of intriguing the way that it, that it, they both won. Everybody's happy. You're absolutely right. I just, and it's just, it fascinates me that the news, the kind of moments in the news cycle. There's the trailer moment, which was big for both of these movies, as you say, and kind of establishing them in the public mind, Venom probably made people think it was a better movie than it actually turned out to be, at least to go by the 31% Rotten Tomato Score, David Schumacher's opinions aside.

The positioning of a star is born, as you say, hit that note. And I'd also add the note of even if you exist in a state of high irony in your daily life, you will give yourself over to this movie because it's just, you just have to, right? That was definitely established, the meme stuff, as you say. But then we hit these other notes in the movie news cycle, which is the opening of the movie, the kind of murmurs of whether the movie is going to be any good by people who saw it really early, especially in the trades, you know, the kind of,

review it a week out, then the first wave of reviews, then the Friday night box office, the Saturday night box office, the Sunday night and the kind of declarative Sunday night box office. The Oscar-y stuff is in there. And all of it to me comes from this idea that we want to write so much about this stuff. There's such a, there's this giant mouth open that you just want to feed content into, but there's nothing really to say. So you have to just have like a big trailer moment, right? We're going to, you know, everybody's going to write about the trailer. we're, you know, in this kind of vulture kind of way. Then we're going to have this big moment, then this big moment,

because there's really just not that much to say about movies you haven't seen, right? So you wind up going, and when I say you go all these steps down the road, you wind up projecting all these steps down the road because that's what there is to say at that moment in time. And I see this happen with sports. I see it would have with media. I see what have all these things where it's like there is more, there's sort of more content opportunities than there is actual content. So again, it's just like all of us are trying to project forward.

How do we hit all these, you know, fill all these boxes, right? Yeah, I mean, you have these giant Bradley Cooper profiles, which, you know, we can talk about or not. But there's, you know, big New York Times profiles, everything else that are all based around, I mean, it's really hard to conceptualize a piece like that without knowing how the movie is going to do, right? And at the same time, you're functioning as a part of the marketing arm of the movie. and I don't mean that any disrespect along with that. But, you know, the interesting thing, the interesting, I mean, it doesn't appear that Brad Cooper is particularly interested in putting himself out there. But, you know, the interesting time to ask him questions would be like, you know, after the

Oscar, you know, or after we see how people are responding to the movie. But yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a, and that's just, you know, and that's getting access to Brad Cooper. you're talking about access, but then you have all the, every other website in the world is like, well, we got to have five stars worn pieces up this week too, you know, and we don't have access. So what do we do? Yeah, exactly. Let's spend a few minutes before we go talking about Jamal Khashoggi, because I think this is a story that we may not have much to add to opinion-wise, but can do our part in amplifying because it's so haunting and strange.

Jamal Khashoggi was a former advisor to the Saudi royal family, was fairly unique within, a bunch of the Saudi intelligentsian commentariat and that he was not celebrating Donald Trump's 2016 election as good news for his home country. According to the Washington Post, he was ordered by Saudi authorities after he expressed his opinion on that to stop writing and speaking publicly.

Khashoggi winds up leaving the Middle East and sort of becoming a full-fledged journalist and pundit. He wrote Washington Post columns with headlines like Saudi Arabia wasn't always this repressive. Now it's unbearable. Another one was called Saudi Arabia is creating a total mess in Lebanon. He criticized Crown Prince

Mohammed bin Salman for dispensing what he called quote unquote selective justice. Last Tuesday, Kishogi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and disappeared. According to Reuters,

two Turkish sources believed Kishogi was deliberately killed inside the consulate of you echoed by Turkish President Erdogan's advisors. Another Turkish security source told Reuters that a group of 15 Saudi nationals,

including some officials, had arrived in Istanbul and two planes and entered the consul at the same day, Keshoggi was there and later left the country. Let's listen a bit. This is Karen Adia, who was Koshoggi's editor at the Washington Post, where he wrote columns. This is her, this is Adia talking to CNN. Jamal, he didn't want to be known as a dissident. He didn't want to be this opposition figure.

When he wrote his first piece for us in 2017 in September, he said, this changed my life. I just want to be a journalist. I just want to write. So, David, I think moving from the journalistic games we play with movies and sports and media and all this stuff to something much, much bigger and much more serious, I was just struck by this story. What did you make of the whole thing? It's heartbreaking. I mean, confounding. I don't know exactly where we go from here.

But and also just the, it's sort of. I mean, from just a whatever media podcast perspective, reading about it, learning about it, it's all, I mean, you have to kind of engage with the facts in a different way because you see all these outlets, like actually trying to balance like potential disinformation against, you know, other information. But regardless of the outcome, and I think we kind of know where this is, where this is going. Unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, it feels like that, I mean, this is a, you know, know, at its base, a, not at its base. This is, this is a, you know, tragic journalism story as well as, you know, a tragic story of, you know, humanity. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. He was something this is going from Liz Slice profile in the Washington Post, which ran Monday. But, you know, he was actually a guy who traveled with Osama bin Laden and wrote one of the early profiles about him in 19, back in 1988. when he sort of left, decided to leave Saudi Arabia and become a journalist.

It was really an enormous moment in his life because his wife wound up divorcing him. In fact, part of the reason he was at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was the fact that he wanted to get papers so that he could remarry. He was an enormously influential guy, I think probably not terribly well-known, you know, among broad swaths of American readers. It's fair to say, but among the international community really well. all known he had 101.7 million Twitter followers. He had the column in the Washington Post. Robin Wright, who wrote a really nice piece in The New Yorker about him, talked about how he was enormously regular presence on international television. I think the one sort of point with me is that what we're going to do here is now go over a lot of the glowing coverage of Crown Prince

Mohammed bin Salman, right? Who is who was and is, I think in a lot of ways, somebody who who's changed that society for the better, but then I think we'll look at a lot of it as cheerleading, right? Here's right, right again, the New Yorker, Khashoggi's disappearance as part of a broader trend. Since June of last year,

for MBS, as he's called, has pledged sweeping reforms, which his rule has been increasingly ruthless with mass arrests of businessmen, even other princes, death sentences met it out this year, to a women's rights activist,

and also to moderate clerics who've preached against extremism. So, I think the great sort of thing, and again, this is something that Khashoggi wrote about, you know, he was not, as that clip said, a dissident. He did not oppose the monarchy, but he did speak out against a lot of these reforms. And that certainly seems to somehow be tied up in what happened to him, whatever that is. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the weird, I mean, one of the actually bizarre places where my two podcasts,

sort of, where the streams sort of crossed because WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment is about to have their second show in Saudi Arabia, which is part of this sort of, you know, rollout of, you know, exciting crossover into the cultural mainstream that the Crown Prince is spearheading while at the same time just having this incredible, this was just mind-boggling

crackdown of both, you know, political competition and, uh, and internal, you know, outspoken voices. I mean, dissidents is almost, um, legitimizing is that. I feel like I'm partially legitimizing any action he would take or whatever. Um, but, you know, I mean, there's, this is, this is not an isolated incident of, uh, of what's going on right now. I mean, there's, uh, they're seeking the death penalty against a female human rights activist, which would be like a, just, a huge, I mean, there's a lot of norms have been broken. That's one example. Even in a not entirely, you know, modernized country. It seems like there's a lot of regression and not, and repression that's bubbling up. And it's, it takes voices to, I mean, it takes these sorts of like,

you know, outspoken or just honest voices in journalism to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, bring that to the public consciousness. Yeah, he told Benny Associates that he feared for his life at various times. I think Wright thought she's wrote today that she thought, you know, he was maybe being a little too serious about that, but that is obviously something that perhaps now was not an idle fear. All right. No, I mean, his fiance, I mean, just last thing, his fiance waited outside for 11 or 12 hours or something after he went in. I think that's all you, I mean, in some way, that's emblematic of how sad and tragic the story is, but it's also, that's all you need to know about the legitimacy of this fear, right?

I mean, that you would do that. I feel like, I think most other people in that situation, after an hour, after 45 minutes, would assume that there would just been some, like, crazy miscommunication and the cell phone battery had gone dead or something, you know? I mean, the fact that you would be kind of almost standing vigil there shows the degree to which this was a real fear. that he had and and clearly a very tragic and legitimate one. All right.

That's the press box for this week. We'll follow up next week on that. Our producer is Jim Cunningham. Research by Chris Almeida. David Shoemaker, see you back here next week for more talk about the media. All right, man. Incredibly fake name. Yeah.

Yeah. And now we are all crying, tears of amazement. Please pray for my eldest. He is still in a coma. which led him to a pathological lifelong hatred of Spider-Man and subsequently to become his greatest villain. I'm not just saying that because he's almost certainly listening to this and could fire me, but I believe it to be true.

That would be the real experience of a journalist, right? Wow. This is not about me. We've all been there. Hello, I'd like to report a Lady Gaga troll army. Yes, please, please. Says Alex Trebek.