Media Monday: Ballmer’s Billion-Dollar Beef & Wintour’s Galliano Gaffe

Jon Kelly (0:02)

Bomber is fighting back, right? I don't think this is done yet at all.

And I don't think this is lawfare, right? I don't think, and I'm not on anyone's side here. I care less about the Clippers.

Peter Hamby (0:16)

Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Pucks podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Monday, September 7th, which means it's Media Monday. Today, Jon Kelly and I talked through the aftermath of the NBA's astonishing punishment of the Los Angeles Clippers and their owner Steve Ballmer for circumventing salary cap rules, a story broken a year ago by the journalist Pablo Torre, who is taking a much deserved victory lap in recent days.

We also look at how Anna Wintour bungled a planned John Galliano exhibition at The Met and why certain scandalized figures can't suddenly be rehabilitated in this day and age. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

Happy Monday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. Happy Labor Day. Hope you've been having a great weekend. It's Media Monday with John Kelly, but before getting into that quick programming note, my new podcast for Puck, The Making of a President, about how political campaigns work in our modern era interviews with insiders who actually decide what happens inside a campaign. How do you decide on a message? Who makes the memes? How does the money work? We're gonna be talking to all the players starting now, all the way through 2028 Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Apple, Audacy. It's everywhere and it's coming tomorrow. It's gonna be coming every Tuesday. So John, after our Media Monday segment, people can wait a day and pop on over. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm excited to do this. Good to see you. We're all back on the grind after Labor Day. Today we're gonna talk about the Los Angeles Clippers situation. A lot of people out there on the internet were dogging me and John for a commentary about Pablo Torre. I did a whole monologue slash conversation with John Orrind on Friday. Go back and listen to that before you come at me. We're going to reflect on that situation. It was still ongoing. Steve Ballmer, the owner of the Clippers, denies the claims that he used outside advertisers and partners to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard outside of the salary cap. He's being hit with something akin to the death penalty. The Clippers are losing five draft picks. Huge stories in the world of sports and business. We're also going to talk about The Met and Anna Wintour canceling a John Galliano exhibition plan for next year after a huge backlash given Galliano's history of making inflammatory offensive and racist comments. I don't know how she didn't see this one coming. Anyway, John, I was telling John Oren on Friday's episode. Again, everyone go listen. Some of our critiques recently about Pablo Torre, which we made, by the way, in this context, there was that ESPN story basically saying that the NBA had found no evidence of wrongdoing on Steve Ballmer's part. That popped about a week ago, so we were responding to that.

Two, Torre's story, his exclusive, his investigation had been lingering out there in the universe for a year.

Again, I said this before, in my world of politics, typically if there's a bombshell story, a bunch of other news organizations will try to chase it and confirm it. Not every exclusive can be confirmed by another media outlet. To Pablo's credit, he's right about this. There's not a lot of investigative reporting muscle left in the sports media world. Anyway, we were talking about Pablo's Clippers investigation in that context, also the context of Dylan Byers reporting, our colleague from Inside the New York Times. There's long been some tension, some discomfort inside the gray lady with all of these new media entities that they're licensing and partnering with, and obviously their partnership with The Athletic. They licensed Pablo's podcast. We're talking about it in that context. Anyway, people were criticizing you, John. They thought you were being dismissive of Pablo's groundbreaking investigation.

Jon Kelly (4:33)

Yeah. Look, it's healthy. Everyone gets their time in the barrel, and there were plenty of people on X that were criticizing me and some of the commentary that we've discussed on this show. I continue to take the position that this story is complex, which I think is one of the reasons that Puck exists, to be able to really appreciate these multifaceted, sophisticated stories in multifaceted ways.

So let me unfurl for you how I look at this latest update and the texture it has to the larger picture here.