The Press Box - Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon Out, the ESPN Layoffs, and RIP BuzzFeed News

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Bryan and David dive into recent news that Tucker Carlson and Fox News, as well as Don Lemon and CNN, have parted ways (0:42), and discuss what this means for all parties involved. Then, they providing more details behind ESPN’s layoffs (23:21), and the announcement that BuzzFeed News will be shutting down (35:52), before weighing in on the media’s current stance on Ron DeSantis’s chances in a Republican primary against Trump (43:00). They then wrap things up with an NBA conversation focused on the need for a new word for “midsection” (52:55). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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David? Yes. Let's begin the biggest press box we've ever done with this emotional message from Fox News. We have some news from within our Fox family. Fox News media and Tucker Carlson have mutually agreed to part ways. Tucker's last show was this past Friday. Wow. You can press.

practically hear the teardrops falling onto the table in front of her. It was a very, let me stick to the contours of this statement delivery. Scripted almost, huh? Might say that. What do you make of this? I mean, Tucker Carlson, out. Well, I just checked online. Brian Stettler took great pains to make it clear that Don Lemon,

was also fired or it will no longer, I guess, no, he was fired by CNN today. And those, these two things, Stettler assures us have nothing in common. It is just a crazy coincidence. But to take the Carlson one on its own, you know, it's impossible to separate this out from the Dominion verdict or the Dominion settlement, at least at this point. We might find out there's something totally separate going on. But Carlson certainly didn't seem to be thinking he was ending in his. his show on Friday. He did have pizza boxes strewn about his desk in the last segment,

but I don't think that was any sort of schools out for summer, you know, pizza party. I think at this point, it's reasonable to assume that it's tied to the Dominion settlement, whether that be, it's harder for me to imagine that it's sort of like literally tied to it. Like this was some sort of like handshake deal that went along with the cash payment. if it wasn't written, you know, it wasn't written into a deal and probably more likely to assume that Rupert Murdoch or whoever was, you know, having to deal with this, you know, taking the point in dealing with this gigantic problem had probably come to the conclusion that there are a bunch of liabilities under on his payroll and, you know, was just waiting until the settlement, waiting

until the case was done before he actually made any movement on it for fear that it would look like an admission of guilt if he fired him ahead of time, right? I mean, is that a reasonable reading of this? It might be, though NPR's David Fulkenflick, who knows about this stuff, says, Reed Tucker, it is likely that this has more to do with pending litigation, Abby Grossberg's lawsuit alleging sexism and harassment at Carlson's show. So there's also that possibility. Wow.

I didn't even see that. Can we just spend a moment in talking about not just that it's remarkable that Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News, but that it was remarkable Tucker Carlson was ever in at Fox News. Sure. That he of all people became the go-to star of that network. I mean, if we took the time machine today and went back 10 years and went up to Bill O'Reilly and say, Bill, someday you will be booted out of this network and you will be replaced by a former magazine writer who has.

We all got to start somewhere. We're all going to start somewhere, who has no constituency other than editors of the late 90s and early 2000s, who's been a flop at two different cable networks. He's going to come in and he's not just going to become a star at Fox. He is going to take your blue collar red meat, red America, tell it like it is corner. That's unbelievable. He would not believe us that that had happened. no i mean i think this has been discussed to some degree throughout the entire reign of tucker but the current one i don't think any other any of the other iterations would be

considered a rain not quite a rain um but there there was always a sort of sense that this was somebody who just sort of game the system who sort of figured out you know someone who sat back and watched you know watched a couple episodes of whatever was on primetime tv right in all the ratings on Fox or whatever else and said, I could do that. I can see the big picture. I can make myself into that. You know?

I mean, it's, and in that, I mean, Tucker Carlson is a deplorable person for any number of reasons, but it, you know, it's clear that he's an intelligent guy. I once heard a story about, and I believe this is widely disseminated at this point,

about Todd Phillips who made the Joker movie, at the screening for, what was the one he did with Jonah Hill where he was like, they were selling arms or whatever. Anyway, he was at the premiere, I believe,

of one of his movies, refuses to sit through his own films. So he left the theater and wandered into suicide squad. And just was just, it was a packed house and he was just like, this is nuts.

This is this thing that people are, the movies that are making billions of dollars. This is what people are lining up for. He's like, I'm going to go make one. And he went and he made Joker. You know, I mean,

that was, It's a different iterative. I mean, totally different sort of superhero movie, but you kind of get that vibe about Taco Cross and, you know, I mean, and that's not to say that he's totally, that it's a total con job. He certainly believes a lot of the stuff he says, at least to the extent that a lot of the stuff that he says

would be impossible to wrench from the mouth of someone who didn't believe it to some extent, right? I don't think if someone, if Erica handed you an ad read, and it was the average, of an episode of Tucker Carlson, I'm guessing you wouldn't finish it, you know. I don't think I would start. Yeah, I mean, so he certainly believes a lot of this stuff. Doesn't particularly make it better or worse.

I mean, your mileage may vary on that. But, yeah, I mean, he's a smart guy who figured out this kind. But what I was going to say is it doesn't really matter the audience either, because the sort of reclamation project has always been a calling card of Fox News. I mean, they have forgettable anchors who got drummed out of the places they worked before for various reasons. You know, I mean, that's sort of what they do. And it's the same thing in conservative Hollywood, quote, unquote, you know, anyone that they can claim as one of their own is a big way. Now, Tucker never framed himself as a reclamation project.

I'm sure you would have said it was a pretty straight line. You can pick which direction you think it goes. But yeah, I mean, it is, listen, regardless of all that, his rise to the top of the totem pole was pretty unbelievable. as you said. And I think what's going to be interesting is what happens next. Not so much for him, but to what degree Fox is,

you know, the next Tucker Carlson is going to fit right into the rubric of what's come before. Whether Fox knows, I mean, Fox clearly is a star-making machine in terms of its eight and nine o'clock slots. The question, I guess, is whether or not they've become as tuned into it

as Tucker Carlson was in the ways that sort of made him magical. You've brought me right to my instant think piece for today, which is this feels good for lots of people, for liberals, for people who think Fox News is poisoning America in many ways. It's a moment of karma, but at the end of the day, it won't matter because they will plug somebody else in there who will do a version of this act and will get great ratings because that's how it always works at Fox News. We all are sitting here waiting.

It's going to be a reckoning, right? It's going to be a wreck. Finally, Fox News. That was the whole Fox News lawsuit, Dominion voting systems. The lawsuit that was going to be the OJ trial for media reporters, then all of a sudden they got called off because there was a settlement. Everybody said, well, there was going to be, it was going to be this reckoning.

We're going to have Rupert Murdoch in there. We're going to have Tucker Carlson on the stand and all this stuff. And I don't think that was going to be a reckoning in either case, even if the whole suit had preceded Fox lost this big verdict, I think it would just be like, okay, pay the money. You know, we've, we've, we've, we've testified in court, okay. We've just spent, we've just spent months reading everybody's emails. Thanks to all the discovery in that case.

There's not going to be a reckoning per se. There may be a reckoning for Tucker Carlson. He winds up hosting a podcast or running for president or whatever he wants to do. but I just think there is this liberal desire for people to be held account in into account something to happen that sort of that's sort of a karmic ideal right I mean I don't I think that even like you said it might have to do with impending litigate with pending litigation um so maybe that blows my whole theory out of the water or my presumption out of the water but I do think that there's an element of this where it's just like you know fox is never going to

you see them sweat, right? I mean, they would, I find it hard to believe they would have fired Tucker Carlson when the, when, like, the text message logs came out just to prove a point, they're going to fire him when they're good and ready to, you know, and they're certainly not going to fire him in the face of the Dominion lawsuit when it might be perceived as some sort of admission of guilt, right? Sure. But at the end of the day, Fox News rolls on, no matter what the opportunity.

No, but that's the point. Fox News is going to roll on. And I think, you know, the question, isn't it so hard to talk about Rupert Murdoch without just thinking of and hearing the voice of Brian Cox at this point? Like I just... It is impossible. Not to think that that is what is happening. One can imagine, one can imagine Logan Roy in this situation saying, you know, fuck them all, especially in the heels of the Dominion settlement saying, you know, this is, I did this. we're not going to let people sit around and take my money anymore.

So there's certainly whether or not there's a public reckoning, there certainly has to be a private reckoning, at least amongst the people that matter over there, saying let's just do these five things to make sure we don't get sued again. And whether that means we have to be honest or whether that means we're just going to frame every sentence the right way, we're going to avoid these lawsuits. And if there is a personality that has gotten too big for,

us to control, then we're not going to mess that anymore, especially because going to your point, everybody's replaceable. So I find that fascinating about Tucker Carlson, because on one hand, he is the figure of Fox not leveling with its viewers in the Dominion lawsuit. What do you say in that one message we read? I hate Trump passionately.

Something that none of his viewers would have ever been able to discern from his show. Sure. But at the same time, dude, he did that January 6th documentary. And here I'm making giant air quotes around the word documentary. Nobody is going to wind up in court because of that.

That in a way is the Fox News sweet spot. Here's something that's not good that is actively bad, but that does not contain any defamation that we know of. Yeah. So it goes by. So in a way, I mean, you know, I think he had figured out that rubric with this one very notable example of how do you get things through.

By the way, do you see? Well, and I just want to say one more thing on, on the subject because you raised it. The January 6th documentary is a really interesting one, and it's hard to imagine anybody, you know, at Fox declining the opportunity to, you know, put Trump's reputation through the car wash or whatever, if that's, if, you know, if that's how you see it,

the specific ways in which he did it, I think, might not, would probably not have been, I don't know if anybody else would have pursued the tape and gotten it all and dedicated so much energy to it. And certainly the spin that he put, on it, I think is pretty singularly his. When you say there's going to be another one, yeah, there will be another primetime host of Fox

and there will be New York Times magazine articles about how so-and-so took over the conservative TV world and blah, blah, blah, but there's no guarantee that the person that replaces Tucker Carlson is going to be as nationalistic, as racist, as activist in so many ways as he is. Now, perhaps that'll be the case, right? It's just, you know, maybe it's just me. Can we get a line here? Can we make some bets? despite it being a machine,

the host do bring their personality to it, right? Sean Hannity would not, is not the same person as Tucker Carlson. Bill O'Reilly looks positively, you know, laid back compared to some of the people that followed him there. There will, you know, it remains to be seen whether or not this sort of

really problematic nationalism. I mean, that's about the nicest way I could put it. is the is the is what fox is going to focus on moving forward or whether it's just you know yelling about as you pointed out this was not the only cable news ejector seat that was activated today don lemon did his CNN show this morning and then he tweeted this out I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN I am stunned after 17 years of CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly.

At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network. It is clear that there are some larger issues at play. Larger issues is doing some interesting work there. One issue was Don Lemon going on his morning show. Of course, he used to be a primetime host at CNN. And doing the whole Nikki Haley is not in her prime thing.

Yeah. in which he started out like he was going to actually talk about the way we think of people and how we shouldn't judge people and then wound up just blowing himself up and judging people, yeah. Still one of the strangest moments I have ever seen. There's been a lot of strange moments with Don Lemon.

We don't talk about him much on this show, although it does seem like for a long time it felt like he was sort of being overly targeted I'm almost going into the sports like underestimated, overestimated lingo, but it seemed like he was targeted by the right to just an unfathomable degree for someone who was, I mean, he's a CNN anchor, you know,

when he was hosting his night show, his evening news show, he was much less a much more an anchor and much less a talking head. It wasn't, I don't, it all seemed to be a little bit imaginary, but then it seemed that the attention that was placed on him led him to sort of react a little bit, you know, to sort of up the stakes to sort of fulfill

what people were objecting to about him. Not that he was particularly objectionable, but he definitely had a lot of moments. Even today, there was a clip floating around, which I guess was amongst his last segments, which seemed where he was talking to the producers out of his earpiece and his co-host, Poppy Harlow, was sort of reacting with discomfort.

It was, there are a lot of odd moments. The fact that it happened on the same day as Sacher Carlson is just sort of impossible to process. And it's so weird to try to, to try, I mean, they are not connected. I believe that, but to disentangle them mentally is really difficult. Could I do another instant think piece?

Yeah, go for it. Donald Trump was not just a great unifier for Democrats. He was a great unifier for cable news talent. Mm-hmm. And as long as Don Lemon was seen as this anti-Trump anchor, or he would probably put her, CNN would put it, somebody holding Donald Trump to account, right, insisting on honesty, all that kind of stuff.

People overlooked a whole bunch of stuff about it. Right. because you would just turn on CNN and it would be like, oh, now it's Anderson Cooper's turn to go after him. Now it's Chris Cuomo's turn,

remember him? Now it's Don Lemon's turn because Trump was the uniter there. By the way, we could probably say it was a uniter for cable news talent on Fox News too because everybody knew what the song was.

And then you lurch into this post-Trump era CNN tries to change what it's doing. it puts Don Lemon in the morning, which looks like a very, very strange decision now, and here we are. Yeah, here we are. What do you think about, you were fantasy booking a return of Crossfire not that long ago.

Was I doing that? I don't know if Don Lemon is the best choice to sit across from Tucker Carlson, but why not? I mean, I guess they're not on CNN if Don Lemon's gone. What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? What do you think?

I guess it has to be, Wait, where is this a podcast? Where is Chris Cuomo working now? News Nation. Okay, sure. I had to think about what that network is. I saw somebody in the comments of one of the tweets that I was looking at, fantasy booking Elon Musk, who was interviewed by Tucker Gross and last,

God, was that just Friday? And someone was fantasy booking, Elon Musk buying CNN and putting Tucker there in the prime time slot. Oh, my God. Well, what is it? I mean, so you know, you said what you think about the Fox machine. There will be another Tucker Carlson. But the thing we don't see that much is the former Fox primetime hosts really succeeding outside of the Fox ecosystem. Megan Kelly.

Yes. Obviously, Bill O'Reilly is a pretty specific example. Greta Van Sustern, Glenn Beck. Yeah. Much bigger within that ecosystem than they were outside of it. I clicked on something with Glenn Beck, and I am getting Glenn Beck stuff in my news feed that is just, every day I'm just like,

it's like some glint you won't believe what Glenn Beck did. I'm just like, oh my gosh, did Glenn Beck die, you know, whatever? And it's every day I get sucked into it. It's like,

it's nothing. It's a meaningless. It's so terrifying. Remember his liberal turn? His brief, like, level-headed moderate moment or whatever. Yeah.

Man. I've made a mistake. Remember what he told, genes? Remember? Sorry. I'm going to stop after this. Remember, he started a jeans company that was made, the denim was made, and the jeans were crafted in America.

It was called like 1776 jeans or something like that. And if you went to the, I think they only sold on Facebook. And if you were on Facebook, it was people saying, why don't you sell them in triple XL? This is not very American. And also they were like $90 because they were made in America and people were complaining about that. Anyway. I totally blanked this out. This is amazing.

This is a real thing that happened. But Tucker Carlson. is a big enough name, especially in the social media era, that he could show up on Rumble and probably still make a ton of money, but would CNN not want to give him a show or not want to have a conversation

about what a show would look like, minus the racism? Boy, that's an interesting question. I don't think, I don't think they go there. I don't think they want anything to do with that. What if it's a crossfire situation? I like minus the racism that would be in the contract. can we just put some things down here in this contract

just to make sure we know what we all are happy with here I mean they had Pat Buchanan on Crossfire for a long time they did they did and that's now seen as like the glory times of Crossfire politics not that different I guess the politics in the general sense are significantly different it's socially acceptable on television

but it does seem strange that I don't know. I mean, maybe there's another reinvention in line for him, in store for him. But I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't go to that. But not as a crossfire thing, not as a talking head across somebody else who could bounce it out. You don't think they'd be interested in those numbers? You don't think there's some Craven studio head out there who's just like, yeah, why not?

Yeah, I'd see an end at this point. I don't put anything past them in their very, very desperate and sweaty bid to reinvent themselves. but Tucker coming back to CNN is very, very hard to imagine. What about like a Rush Limbaugh-style spot on Monday Night Football? Could we give? Oh, my God. There's a lot of opportunities out there. Wow, you're really fantasy booking the rest of Tucker Carlson's career.

The best possible solution would be for MSNBC to come to the table, say, we'll pay you double what Fox was paying you. Come back home to MSNBC, but you have to play a Rachel Maddow style liberal. You have to just do the liberal routine. You see where the winds are going now and you go that way. No, no, no, just to prove how full of it you are. You have to come fully embrace that. And our audience will probably like it too. Coming up on today's jam-pack show,

you know how every sports radio host always says it's an amazing show, a huge show. This really is a huge show. This is the day press box became president. It's unbelievable. ESPN, David, began late. playoffs today. BuzzFeed News shut down last week. We try to make sense of both. In this week in 2024, we revisit the week. The press began to think that Ron DeSantis maybe doesn't got it. Plus, David, there's a crisis in NBA announcing. We need a new word to use when someone gets

punched in the midsection. All that more on the press box. A part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Consumers, Brian Curtis David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantis here. So meanwhile, dot, dot, dot. Well, apologies to the listeners. I thought that was the show. I didn't realize we had so much show left to go. You thought we were done. Yeah.

Call it a day. What a lot of us thought, David, would be the big media story today, were the layoffs that began at ESPN. We've gotten some details as the day has gone. gone along here. ESPN, of course, Bob Iger announced way back in February, early February, there'd be 7,000 layoffs at Disney. ESPN was definitely going to be affected by those.

That began today. Alex Sherman over at CNBC reports that this first round of layoffs will be fewer than 100 jobs. But here's the really horrible part. It's not just one round. There's going to be this round. There's going to be another round. Jimmy Bataro wrote in his memo today

before the start of summer, he says. And then after that second round, they will start cutting on-air people. So ESPN people waited two months to see if they still had a job. Then they waited through today. Then they will apparently wait another few months to see if they're part of round two.

And then on-air talent will continue to wait through some unspecified period after that. I saw one email It was BuzzFeed News shutting down, which is terrible story in its own right. But I think it was that email from the CEO where it said, if you're receiving this email,

you're not affected by the changes, which was a slightly different version of things that we've seen before. There's obviously different emails that go out to different people, different notices. But even that seems like a measure of kindness

compared to what you're describing, right? It's like, we're going to let a bunch of people go and send out emails and let everybody know. And, oh, by the way, if you're in section two or section three, your email is yet to come. Yeah, you're not safe. You just may not have been notified yet

and could be notified at some time over the next few months. It's like getting an email saying, you're not fired, but then also this email might have been sent in error. You know, like it's, that sounds, it's just ridiculous. The language of these things.

Petaro's memo today said, we will have another wave of notifications, notifications standing in for layoffs. Some stats for you, David. This is the sixth round of ESPN layoffs in the last decade. Six. Those layoffs have claimed 1,300 or so jobs. Plus, there's been a whole bunch of employees who've been,

and let go because their contracts weren't renewed or left voluntarily or left semi-voluntarily or maybe just kind of became part-time employees like Pablo and Bumani have recently. So that number isn't even reflected there. I was thinking this morning as I was trying to write about this is I found this old quote from Beano Cook. You remember Beano Cook,

the old college football analyst on ESPN? Absolutely, yeah. He had this line where he said, ESPN is like your family. this is back in the 90s. It's there all the time. The networks are like your mother-in-law. They are there on weekends,

meaning that ESPN is this all-encompassing, friendly force in your life. And I was just thinking, I am amazed at how much that has flipped in 30 years. ESPN now feels like the opposite of that. Remote.

Yeah. Kind of forbidding. Increasingly part-time, rather than all the time. And part of that is just the way the media has changed and the world's changed. We don't need clever sports center anchor giving us nightly highlights because we see those in different places now. But a lot of it too is the vision of the company.

The layoffs to try to meet these numbers and pump up the stock price. The Jimmy Bataro era vision of the company where instead of a ton of stars, you were just going to have a tiny handful of stars. So what just strikes me is how differently we think about ESPN after X many rounds of layoffs, after enormous change, it just feels like our interface with that company is increasingly different. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like what a lot of the news networks and what a lot of journalism in general is going through. It's the lack of necessity, the perceived necessity of your product, and the lack of sort of rhythm of intake in daily life. You know, there was a time where you and I would like go on vacation

and be 5,000 miles from home and try and be game planning how to get the Sunday times, you know, like just into our into our cabana or wherever the hell you were staying, right? Yeah. That kind of stuff was just, you know, built into our lives. I mean, that's, and we're still talking about our generation, not even our parents who, you know, consumed a lot less media than we do, but probably watched the same like two television programs every day. Well, three, Jeopardy and The Fortune in the news, right? That was the big three. The big three.

But, yeah, I mean, to take it really specific, I mean, more specifically to ESPN, the diffusion of sports has played a huge difference, right? I mean, the one thing that they had going for them, even in the earlier days, the earliest iterations of, or not the earliest, but the earlier iterations of ESPN, when the biggest games were on network television,

you know, the NFL football, most of NBA basketball, none of those channels were dedicating time to sports outside of those games, right? So if you wanted anything, if you wanted to prepare yourself for Sunday football, If you wanted to prepare yourself for the big game,

you would go to ESPN. Now, there are many channels that focus in even more minutely to whatever they want to talk about, and that's not even to take into account podcasts and other web video content. So, in a broader sense, anything like a place like ESPN

is bound to professionalize over the years. You know, there was never, even in the early days, they didn't just turn a camera on in the bullpen, even though it felt more, more like that than where we are now, you know? And as places professionalize, sometimes they lose, you know,

or they seed that bullpen ground to other places that are going to come along and do it in a younger, fresher, better way. So it's just, you just, you know, it just chips away from a million different directions. The best you can hope for is becoming the institution, which they've done a pretty good job of. The problem is,

There are a lot of people out there, a lot of other institutions out there willing to pay a lot more money to take away some of the things that make ESPN so special. Well, there's a couple levels there, right? Because ESPN at present has bigger games than it ever had. That new NFL contract, there's going to be two Super Bowls on ESPN, which would just be unthinkable to the founders of the network. We got the Super Bowl? What? That's unbelievable. as opposed to, as you say,

the network saying, hey, so Sunday football is happening somewhere else. We're going to barnacle ourselves to that and just be the best and longest coverage,

both before the game and then after the game with all those highlights when the network has signed off and sent you to local news. So that's part of it. The institution part is definitely right, and that was part of ESPN's success,

right? We went from the bargain basement thing to the institution. But we could argue, and you and I were part of this, that even in the 2010s, when they were very institutional, very, very big.

There were all these entry points that seem very friendly at ESPN. There was a very, very interesting website that barely exists in the same form anymore. There was a magazine. There was Grantland. There was Dan Labart's television show. There was Mike and Mike in the morning, if that was your particular flavor of ice cream. There were all these places to get in where it didn't feel like. the institution.

It felt like the creative, happy thing. And I would argue that just because of attrition, and again, because of the way the media has changed, so many of those have gone away. And now, whether you like ESPN or not kind of comes down to do you like the three or four or five stars that have been promoted as the faces of the network? Yeah.

Number one, Stephen A, and then you can go down the list. And if you just, those aren't your face, favorites, I always feel like, why are you going to watch this stuff? What is your entry point going to be to ESPN as a company, whether in pod form, streaming form, whatever it is? And I think that's an interesting question for them to answer, again, just in terms of how we perceive the company going forward. Yeah, I mean, what you're talking about is like sort of synergy, right? I mean, we're going to talk about this in a lot of different, we talk about this all the time in a lot of different ways. But part of the ESPN's charm,

was having, it being, like I said the bullpen, being a bunch of different things, all those different entry points he talked about, all existing under one roof was sort of a light guiding hand, a sort of communal ethos or whatever. And there's certainly a, you know, business side argument to be made for, you know,

what if Greenie writes the magazine, you know? Like, what if we just do? What if everything kind of comes from the same handful of voices? What if we really streamline the operation? It doesn't necessarily alienate people, alienate readers, viewers, whatever, although that's the reaction that it gets in the time. And I think that's sort of the fact that you can do that

and you don't have a million people walk away probably feels like it validates some of those moves in the moment. It doesn't alienate, it doesn't necessarily alienate someone who is already used to watching ESPN and values that. Even if you miss the old host, there's always going to be someone else. Next Man Up, just like on Fox News, but it does shrink the world.

I mean, it increases the sort of footprint, but it sort of like shrinks the world. And I think that in the long run can be a real problem because you don't have any room to pivot. You don't have any room to evolve in the direction of success, you know? you can't pivot to video, you know, if you've asked, you know, 90% of your video department and just given a camera to Stephen A. Smith, you know, like it's, there's a, there's just, it limits what you can do and it limits where you can grow

and it limits where you can find new talent that can take all those, that can, that can be the next face of the company, you know, or one of the next faces of the company. So I think it's a, yeah, obviously, it's a business side, it's a business side investment strategy that doesn't look like it's paid off in the long term.

Yeah. And like I said, I think... Although I will say, although I will say, just sorry, for the record, Disney deciding to slash 7,000 jobs, I think it doesn't necessarily relate to this conversation we're having. And I don't think that, I mean, certainly if ESPN were making 10 times as much money, then there might be a different decree coming down from on high. But talking about business decisions,

I mean, I just don't, you know, this could be a, I don't know that it reflects specifically on ESPN in any way at all, other than they have X number of employees and there's X percentage of employees that Disney wants to cut down. I mean, it's a, it's a really sort of tragic situation they find themselves in. Speaking of which, BuzzFeed News shut down last week. And you were texting me and I totally agree with you that this felt like it was hitting people, hard on Twitter in a way maybe you and I did not expect or expect in quite that form? Yeah. Obviously, whatever I'm seeing on my Twitter timeline now is a different algorithm than probably a lot of these layoffs took place.

But it does seem to me that the sort of existential dread was much more poignant this time around. And I think that has to do with one BuzzFeed being, obviously, entirely new media and not even, you know, piggybacking off of legacy media. It's sort of being an institution in new media, given its relatively short lifespan. And, you know, the success it has, the influence it's had, the number of people that have, that have, well, it's a big newsroom. So everybody has friends and colleagues and stuff that work there. There's a lot of reasons that go into it. But I think, you know, it's really hard to look at that and not immediately think towards the fact that

the parent company is investing so much in computers to write stories, you know, to have algorithms and AI becoming writing stuff and that being sort of the joke about BuzzFeed for so long. And now they shutter the newsroom. I mean, at least they're not trying to relay the news with AI, but that juxtaposition,

I think, kind of creates a whole lot more, like I said, existential dread than some of these previous layoffs have had, because it's not just, oh, somebody made some bad decisions about money or this rich person has decided, you know, they want to do something different. And we hate them. Now it's sort of about the future of the whole enterprise. That maybe we're all pivoting to something awful and post-journalistic or at least post-human in terms of the way we come up with these articles. Well, not just... But I think it's actually more tangible than that and less sort of 2001. I think it's more

that my job is gone and there are jobs being filled simultaneously by AI. Like there will not be another job. I saw somebody write on Twitter, I think it was on Twitter, and I apologize for not having it, that one of the craziest things

about one of the oddities of journalism is like every time you start over at a new job, you're really starting over that except for a very select few people that kind of are noted feature writers or big names, it's like you go to work in a new newsroom and like no matter what your salary and your rank, you're kind of just sort of like starting from scratch a little bit. Yeah. And that is kind of inherently unsettling. There's a lot of people saying I don't know, I'm not even quite sure where to apply. It doesn't help when you're out looking for jobs

with a thousand other people all at once, you know, and that's to say nothing of the people that were looking before. But, yeah, I think there was a lot of like, I literally can't imagine where I'll be working next. And I can't imagine where job creation is going to come from in this sector. I can't imagine what the next,

I can't imagine there's going to be another BuzzFeed news. I can't imagine there's going to be another, I mean, whatever. I can't imagine there's going to be another wonkette. I can't imagine there's going to be another the ringer. I can't, you know what? I don't know what the next thing is going to be that would even like, that I should be holding out hope for, that I should accept a lesser job in wait for. You know, like I think it's just a lot of really rational, but heartbreaking hopelessness.

I think BuzzFeed News within that landscape you're talking about was a hopeful sign. Hey, sure. It's run by Ben Smith. It's turned out journalists like Ruby Kramer and Anne Helen Peterson and. Joel Anderson and Charlie Warzel and all these people like, oh, that's a place I'd like to work for. That's a place that does some good stuff. They want a Pulitzer two years ago. And then as you say, not only is that pathway closed, but so many of them have been closed.

That it begins to be this cumulative effect where you're just like, oh, my God, where am I going to work again? What's going to happen? Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. created 2011 to so we're also talking in timeframes here right the 2010s websites that were creating the 2010s that are still around that people would want to work for or see as destination jobs that list has gotten really small

BuzzFeed News was one of the last remaining there all right David coming up in 30 seconds this week in 2024 or is Ron DeSantis's would be campaign even less organized than Trump's but first 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 this week's runners up came last Thursday David we had one of those very odd

split screens on one Elon Musk removing blue check marks from Twitter and on the other Musk's SpaceX Starship rocket exploding in what SpaceX would call a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Some favorite lines. I confirmed SpaceX Starship did not pay the $8.

Oh no, my blue checkmark had a rapid unscheduled disassembly. And we would have also accepted Roman Roy watching the video of the rocket blowing up in succession. By the way, if we had more time today, we need to talk at some point about the blue checkmarks being given to people like LeBron, James, and Carrey Swisher and them saying, I don't want this. Yeah. You know, no, please take this away. This is a terrible mark of shame. Yeah.

For me to be seen with us. Just unbelievable. Like, one of the greatest product rollouts of our time. I've referenced this in articles that I've written and on many podcasts before, but life is, if life is paralleling any great book right now, it's the sneaches by Dr. Seuss. Thanks to Adam Walton Ball, not just. LeMond, Bobby Blue, and Tom Cooper for that one.

But this week's overwhelming winner, David, suggesting Tucker Carlson will be replaced on Fox News by Logan Roy's assistant Kerry from succession. And with the Fox News Star System, it just might happen. It might happen. If you think HBO's slogan should be, it's not TV, it's real life. Congrats. You made the overword Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, David, let's do this week in 2024. There was really just one big story last week, and I don't mean RFK Jr. getting into the presidential race. I mean, it was the week that the media decided Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, might be toast.

One of our friends in the political media texted me and said, is someone just going to write it? Are we there? Are we just going to do the newspaper thing where we accumulate all the evidence and suggest it? Or is somebody going to walk out on that limb? We know he's outmaneuvered by Disney in Florida. There were the comments about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There was the abortion ban in Florida. The polls NBC did their first national poll, and he is behind 4631 to Donald Trump.

But the real story was that Ron DeSantis does not seem to be good at relationships with other carbon-based life forms. And this particularly came to bear in the endorsements that Donald Trump was getting, which kind of functioned as anti-endorcements to DeSantis. Right. Do you see this one for, it was Greg Stuby, who was a representative from Florida? According to Playbook, Stuby remembers Trump calling him in the ICU to wish him well after he was injured in a January tree trimming accident. To this day, I have not heard from Governor DeSantis. There was that one.

And it kept going. Vern Buchanan said that according to the Washington Post is another representative. Trump personally called Buchanan about an endorsement and invited him to have dinner Thursday night at Mara Lago while Desantis' outreach came through a pollster who advises him. Lance Gooden was there when DeSantis met with congressional Republicans in Washington last Tuesday. He's a Republican from Texas. He said, this is such a good meeting that I am going to tweet out my Trump endorsement during the meeting. like I like this DeSantis guy but I'm endorsing the other guy

and then it just sort of got comical ex-representative David Trott tells Politico's playbook I sat right next to DeSantis for two years on the Foreign Affairs Committee and he never said a word to me so we're about to get to the level of political grievance where it's like

I had DeSanis on my podcast and he didn't retweet it Oh man I'm never I'm never gonna be president If that's the bar, I will never be running for a higher office. Listen, I think that that gets at not maybe the bigger problem with his candidacy, because that will that as well. But I think the bigger problem with the sort of perception of his candidacy,

which is something that I've sort of been saying all along, and not to pat myself on the back, but like he exists really, like he's a really formidable candidate in the imagination of like a handful of people, you know, until you have to see him in real life. And it's not that he's just an incredibly bad candidate, but he's just sort of incredibly like, he's just not together.

He's not, he's in, he's inept. He's, he's missing so many of the things that are just such givens that they're actually easy to overlook in the offing, easy to overlook in the run up, you know, because it, they come so naturally to so many people.

Did you see, do you have the clip of him, of the reporter asking him about his poll numbers compared to Trump's? I saw it today on Twitter, yeah. We should play that because the tone of his voice is not, before we were asking, has anybody heard his voice? We asked that a couple months ago. And the answer was largely no.

But this isn't the normal tone of his voice. This was just a place that his voice went in a moment of irritation. And his eyes went even further. They bugged that of his head and looked up. And it was just not the reaction of anyone that has ever thought about the, the obligations that come with being a public. figure, right? I mean, it's someone who's literally, well, that's not true. It's obviously practiced a lot. But the practice does, like, he has moments where the, where the practice,

where, where, whatever, the moment overrides the practice. And, and it's just sort of bizarre to watch for someone who's been given so much credit, so much kind of preemptive potential awarded him. Um, none of that stuff about his personality surprises me. And by the way, that's why the stuff about him like, what, him eating the, the, Jello cup with his fingers or whatever. Like, pudding fingers. Oh, sorry, pudding with his fingers. One, you know, you don't want to go too hard on that kind of stuff.

But two, that was one of these things that just feels like a tip of an iceberg story. Got a lot of got a lot of things out here that I'm like one inch away from being able to report. But one thing I have on the record is the pudding. You don't necessarily report the pudding the same way about every candidate, right? It's only when there's more pudding, when there's more snack packs. waiting to be, you know, peeled open. I got this one solid, chief. I got the pudding scoop.

Yeah. Still working on some of those other big stories. But anyway, yeah, I think that I don't know that he's done. I still think that he's got obviously a lot of grassroots support. I think it's impossible and unwise to predict anything about the Republican Party's primary. And by the way, that goes through very, very. earliest question. I don't think any

journalist or anybody is ready to write anybody off because they're more aware that we are all more aware than ever that we don't know what's going to happen. But do you know what they're doing right now? They're forming impressions.

This is campaign reporter forming impressions time. And they're looking at DeSantis. They haven't heard him interact with the press very much. They don't know how he's going to fare as a national candidate and they are making impressions.

That's what people do. They're just like voters. And they're looking at this guy and is, is this guy for real? Can this guy be Donald Trump? It will affect the way that he's covered. subconsciously or consciously. Absolutely.

I think that all this is a particular problem for Ron DeSantis because the slot that he was filling was like the refined MBA Trump, right? M as in Masters B.A. basketball player. They're not really. He's a Kevin Durant Trump. No, he's a refined like businessman Trump.

And Trump is a businessman, but his public persona is more of a cartoon. MBA is a good word. That implies a level of slickness and. Well, and I'm sort of irritating, irritating modernity too. I mean, but it's, but, but I think that his public persona plays against the sort of persona he was trying or he had constructed or he had constructed for himself. if he wanted, I don't even know how to phrase that. But I think those two things are at odds,

and that makes you a problematic candidate. More so than some of the most problematic political and social positions that any candidate in America has ever had, I think that not, I think that not being sort of, not living up to your own hype is about as damnable as it gets. They always say the most effective attack in politics is when you attack your opponent's strength rather than their weaknesses. And if he is running as MBA Trump, I got everything locked down, buddy, I got everything going here.

I know what I'm doing. Unlike that guy who is falling prey to his own whims and his own, you know, rages and all this stuff. But I didn't call people to ask for their endorsement in my own home state when I was a representative from Florida for six years. And I just don't have any of that, you know, I didn't, in somebody who was in the hospital, I didn't make that phone call or I farmed a phone call out to a pollster, then do it myself and say, I need your endorsement. It's a tough one. And like I said, to be the biggest surprise is that Donald Trump's campaign, which is oddly being advised by Pat Summerall's daughter,

boy, learned a new one on that last week, is somehow organized enough to do all this. Because if there's one thing I would never attribute to Donald Trump, it's organization. And yet they're just rolling out these endorsements, one after another to embarrass DeSantis. and problem's all. But like I said,

none of this will be, those polls, that guy from Florida's endorsement, that'll matter. Journalists are making, they are forming impressions right now. They are forming. And that will,

as you said, exactly right, color the coverage of his candidacy. Mm-hmm. From henceforth. But do you want to, you don't have any like Pat Summerall impressions like queued up here

for the, to describe the Republican primary campaigns? I mostly do, I mostly do video game, Pat. I think. But I'm trying to, I'm trying to think,

there was one time where Madden Gilbert Brown, remember that big old defensive tackle, Gilbert Brown. Yeah, of course. Landed, you know,

landed on somebody and, you know, John Maggot, you can imagine Gilbert Brown landed on you? Imagine being that guy. And Summerall just goes, imagine being the ground.

Love that Summerall. By the way, in other news, and this is a parenthetical to this segment very much on purpose, Joe Biden is supposed to announce he's running for re-election tomorrow. Oh my God.

With a video. Okay. Joe Biden running for president, what you think? Last one for you, David. Wait, if it's a pre-taped video like we know this because it already exists. It has already been, it was taped in Delaware, yes, over the last week. You know what they should really do is they should re-tape it since if everybody knows that and have him predict Tucker Carlson's firing and Don Lemon's firing like a- talking off the top of my head.

Yeah. it's like a podcast how it's edited so we all look smarter when it's over yeah that would be really great let me take that one more time Joe Biden says let me just let me just take that one more time last topic for you David I don't if you're watching Saturday's Lakers Grizzlies game

but Dylan Brooks who had been talking a significant amount of trash about LeBron James went ahead and hit LeBron and the well you know here's how announcer Mark Jones handled that moment on ESPN The ball to the Lakers, there's a look at it.

Brooks on the reach connecting with LeBron's midsection. So it struck me after watching a weekend of basketball that we need some agreed upon term to talk about this very delicate matter. Oh my gosh, as the father of a teenage boy for whom this. This is a, you know, regular topic of conversation. And let me just say, this is a very difficult, this is a very difficult thing to, well, to parse. No matter how, no matter how vague or clean you try to be on the subject, it always comes out sounding dirtier than the thing you avoided saying.

If you abbreviate a term, it gets gross. if you say the most antiseptic thing you can think of. I mean, literally this happened to him at a soccer game yesterday, and you're trying to confer to other adults what's going on, and you hear things like he got hit with the ball in his region, and region sounds so much grosser than anything a 14-year-old could come up with in the locker room, right? When it said that it is impossible. But I agree with you because none of the terms that we have are functional.

I was listening to one basketball podcast about this yesterday. I think it might have been the hoop collective. And somebody talked about whether or not someone got kicked in the groin, and it became a debate because one of the person was using groin euphemistically, and the other person was not. Right? It's like, no, he did get kicked in the groin, but he did not get kicked in the balls.

But the other person was like, yes, that's what I mean. You know, like it was, it becomes a huge problem. that referee caned Fitzgerald. His name is Kane, which always just makes me smile, that they've been bringing on to explain it. He had a couple of groin drops when he was trying. Well,

it's clearly a shot in the groin, he kept saying, which made me laugh. Game three, David, of the Sixers Net Series this weekend. Joelle and B. gave a little upward kick to the net's Nick Claxton.

Listen to Turner's Kevin Harlan and Reggie Miller do their best to describe this foul. Hard to tell there. There's the finish. And there's the stairdown and the step. Look like one of the Rockettes with that kick. Like one of the Rockettes with that kick. Of course, same game.

James Hardin wound up getting below the belt on the net's Royce O'Neill. Here is Miller and Harlan one more time. Ten seconds, steam clock and shot clock winding down the third. And O'Neill is on Hardin. James Fowled And a shot by Harding

and they're going to take a look at this a shot to the midsection of Royce O'Neill So now we're back to midsection Which I feel like I've been listening To sportscasters Use that term my whole life Is that what midsection means?

No, I just think of getting hit in the stomach Or whatever. Yeah. So again, we just need some We need some clarity here. We need a style book. When I was a kid and I believe that I've sourced this

I've done at one point I was researching this I think in the early Grantland days uh I think it was this specific to skater lingo like skateboard lingo um I was never a skateboarder but but whenever someone got got hit in that region we would

you would say you got racked and I think it makes more sense when you're when the when the aggressor isn't an animate object right i got wrecked when i was sliding down the banister or whatever but there was a great sort of simplicity and lack and lack of grossness to rack that i will that i always go back to it and and use the phrase without thinking about it a couple of times a year and always get just confused stares from everyone around me there's no there's no mystery to me what that means

yeah and by the way kevin harland and reggie miller watched the james hardon replay and they took one final shot at it. We may be getting closer here to some words we can all agree on. This is either going to be a technical foul unhardened or a flagrant one. It's clear where he got them and they're going to look at it again and

point right there. Good call. The official was right on it as well. So Boink or Doink, I'm not sure which of those he said, he's sort of wandering into Madden World there.

The doink was when he hit it off the uprights on a field goal. So what if we had just some sound? And we know, you know, if it's like, oh, he doinked it, that means he missed the kick because it hit the upright. So could we just come up with some kind of sound like that? Can we all know what happened? Just wondering aloud. Announcers, get in touch. We need some clarity here.

Now it's time for a feature where we always come out and say what we mean. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about Clarence Thomas's entanglement with a Texas billionaire was quid pro crow. Very funny, though I still struggle to say that. Today's headline, David, comes from Tyler Lasowski and Erhank. It's from an AP story that ran in Huffpost. I'll read you at the top here.

Russia has been excluded from qualification for the men's Olympic basketball team in Paris next year. basketball's international governing body, Fiba, said Tuesday. The decision was widely expected since FIBA has suspended Russia's teams from international play since shortly after the invasion of Ukraine last year. Okay, Russia cannot play basketball. They are saying no to the Russians. What was the AP and Huff Post strained pun headline? nothing but yet we're done

we're just done here nothing but yet that's a good one a rare one for one a rare swish from David Jumaker he was indeed

nothing but yet he is David Chumaker I'm Brian Curtis production magic by Erica Cervantes everybody just slow down out there in media world now we we got through it

don't do anything to Lawrence O'Donnell this afternoon. David and I just need a moment. You do not owe us a firing. It's not cool to be part of this crew. It doesn't have to be one for one. We will stew on that.

I'm back later this week for Pressbox's final edition. Shoemaker and I return for more lukewarm takes about the meeting. You see you then, David. See you later, Brian.