Roll Over, Henry Luce — The Koch Brothers Are Going Create The Print Equivalent of Faux News

In 2013, David and Charles Koch poked their philanthropic nose into the virtual tent of the Rawls College of Business at Texas Technique University (commonly known as "Texas Tech" with no period). Their donations of several million dollars funded the establishment of the Free Market Institute. The Koch brothers also have gained influence at both George Mason University (VA) and Florida State University as well. Of course, the purchase of Time, Inc. is another matter altogether. If this is a (fair & balanced) alarm at the conversion of a major print publication into a propaganda-machine, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
Can Time Inc. Survive The Kochs?
By Jane Mayer


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according attack bell brothers buy called charles company conservative control corporate cover david deal director dollars executive featured fortune hundred inc including independent influence interest investigative investment journalism kochs magazine media meeting meredith million money point political press private pruitt publications publisher purchase reporters role story told trump wrote years

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Time magazine’s cover story from its November 6^th issue was a point of pride in its twelve-person Washington bureau. It featured three swinging wrecking balls emblazoned with Donald Trump’s face and a tough-minded, fact-laden investigative report on three Trump Cabinet secretaries who were systematically dismantling protective regulations in their respective government agencies. The section on Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was particularly critical, opening with a story from a mother from Minnesota whose eight-month-old baby appeared to have suffered brain damage from a pesticide that Pruitt’s EPA had recently removed from the list of banned chemicals after meeting with executives from the company that manufactures it. (An EPA spokesperson told Time that the conversation was brief and that the pesticide, chlorpyrifos, was not discussed.)

The sale of Time Inc. earlier this week, to the Meredith Corporation—a deal made possible by an infusion of six hundred and fifty million dollars from Koch Industries’ private-equity arm—has called into question whether such independent, accountability journalism from the media company will continue. For decades, Charles and David Koch have spent a staggering amount of money from their family’s private oil, gas, and chemical fortune to attack government regulations—particularly concerning the environment, where their company has a history of record-breaking violations. The brothers even helped sponsor Pruitt’s political career. As the New York Times reported, political operatives working for the Kochs also wrote the early blueprint for the Trump Administration’s rollback of Obama-era regulations, a corporate wish list called, “A Roadmap to Repeal.” And, as I reported, Pruitt placed Patrick Traylor, a lawyer for Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies, in charge of the EPA’s enforcement of key anti-pollution laws. In other words, the Kochs are directly invested in promoting policies and politicians that the publications they now partly own would ordinarily cover.

Despite their long and deep involvement in trying to align American politics with their conservative libertarian views, spokesmen for the Kochs insist that the multibillionaire brothers have no plans to play any role in running or shaping the editorial content of the Time Inc. publications. In addition to Time magazine, the company publishes Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated, Money, and several other previously iconic national weeklies. Instead, spokesmen for the Kochs and for Meredith say that the brothers intend to act merely as “passive” investors. They and their underlings will have no seat on the merged company’s board of directors, and play no managerial role other than meeting on a quarterly basis with senior management to discuss “financial and strategic matters.” According to an eighty-page agreement on the merger filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Kochs do, however, reserve the right to send an emissary to attend board meetings if Meredith fails to make good on its hefty 8.5-per-cent interest payments to the Kochs. But the brothers’ motive for financing such a large chunk of the $2.8 billion merger, according to those close to the deal, is purely financial, akin to the role that Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecom tycoon, has played at the Times, where he is the single largest investor.

Those familiar with the Kochs’ history, however, have reason to be skeptical about their professed passivity. Charles Koch, in particular, is known for the unusually tight control he exerts over Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the US, and also over his and his brother’s political and philanthropic ventures. As I wrote in my book Dark Money [link below], a former political partner of the Koch brothers, Murray Rothbard, once testified that Charles “cannot tolerate dissent” and will “go to any end to acquire/retain control.” His brother David, meanwhile, has been quoted saying that “if we’re going to give a lot of money, we will make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent.”

This year, among the Kochs’ aims is to spend a projected four hundred million dollars in contributions from themselves and a small group of allied conservative donors they have assembled, to insure Republican victories in the 2018 midterm elections. Ordinarily, political reporters for Time magazine would chronicle this blatant attempt by the Kochs and their allies to buy political influence in the coming election cycle. Will they feel as free to do so now?

“Everyone who has worked in journalism knows that even if you never see the rich and powerful owner of your publication, and you have the most powerful, independent editors, it inevitably has an effect on what you write, or on what you leave out. You just don’t do a terrible story on yourself,” Emily Bell, a professor of professional practice at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told me. Bell said that she doubts that the Kochs have put six hundred and fifty million dollars into the purchase of a media company saddled with ailing print publications only for financial reasons. “It can’t just be the return on investment, because, if so, you’re in the wrong asset class,” she said. But even if that is their intent, she argued, they will end up exerting cultural and political influence because “investments in media companies are different from any other kind of investment. Media companies affect the broader cultural life.”

The Kochs’ ownership stake in a mainstream media company may affect not just how the public thinks about politics but how it thinks about the Kochs. For decades, the brothers have been regarded as fonts of fringe ideas, so much so that William F. Buckley, Jr., who famously tried to purge the conservative movement of its more embarrassing followers, once dismissed their extreme libertarianism as “anarcho-totalitarianism.” For years, the Kochs eschewed press coverage, following their father’s admonition that “it’s when the whale spouts that he gets harpooned.” But in recent years they and their company have spent a fortune on advertising and public relations aimed at improving their reputations. Becoming press barons, even if passive ones, may burnish their images more effectively.

Bell suggested that media investments often “confer the perception of influence on their owners,” and also an aura of public-spiritedness. She pointed out that for Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, buying the Washington Post “was a tiny investment for him, but it’s transformed his profile because nothing pleases journalists like someone investing in journalism.”

Despite the reassurances from those close to the deal that the Kochs have no plans to use the media platform to proselytize, many of the liberal activists who closely track them remain suspicious. “There is zero chance that the Koch brothers are going to keep their hands off the content of these magazines,” Mary Bottari, the deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit that documents right-wing and corporate influence-buying, told me. “When they donated nearly three million dollars to Florida State University, they wrote a contract giving them control over hiring decisions in the economics department,” she said. (Donations were made between 2007 and 2015.) “The entire point of the purchase is to infuse the mainstream media with their extreme views.”

Scott Peterson, the executive director of Checks and Balances Project, an environmental watchdog group, agreed. “Acquiring a major media platform is all part of their repositioning campaign,” he argued. “The Kochs want to be thought of as free-market philosophers, not protectors of a fossil-fuel empire.”

Although the Kochs have flirted with other media purchases in the past—including taking a close look before deciding not to buy what was then called the Tribune Company, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, a few years ago—their relationship with reporters who have covered them has hardly been a love story. Their corporate Web site used to feature a section called “KochFacts” that attacked reporters whose stories they disliked, including my own. The Kochs also hired private investigators to discredit critics, including investigative reporters such as myself, as was discussed here. In 2012, the Kochs paid for Facebook ads attacking what they called the “deceptions” of David Sassoon, the founder and publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Web site InsideClimate News, because the Kochs took umbrage at his site’s coverage of their controversial Canadian oil interests. The attack ads featured a mugshot of Sassoon, personalizing the public-relations battle in a manner usually reserved for gutter political campaigns. After showing such contempt for the press, it’s not surprising that the Kochs’ vows to respect independent journalism have struck some as unconvincing.

Ironically, though, reporters at Time Inc. may end up having more to fear from the Meredith Corp. than from the Kochs. According to the Daily Beast, the real role of the Kochs’ investment may be to enable Meredith to sell off the publications it previously expressed little interest in, including Time magazine, to others. One person who has in the past expressed interest in the Time Inc. publications is David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media, Inc., which owns the unabashedly pro-Trump tabloid the National Enquirer. Last July, Pecker told my colleague Jeffrey Toobin that he wished he could buy Time Inc., and was in search of a deep-pocketed partner to help. As pockets go in America today, very few are deeper than those of Charles and David Koch, who, together, according to Forbes, are worth an estimated $96.6 billion. # # #

[Jane Mayer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1995. Mayer is a graduate of Yale University (BA, history), where she was a stringer for Time magazine. Mayer has also contributed to the New York Review of Books and American Prospect and co-authored or written four books—Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (written with Jill Abramson), a study of the controversy-laden nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988 (1989) (written with Doyle McManus), an account of Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House. Mayer's third book is The Dark Side (2008) — addressing the origins, legal justifications, and possible war crimes liability of the use of interrogation techniques to break down detainees' resistance and the subsequent deaths of detainees under such interrogation as applied by the CIA — was a finalist for the National Book Awards. Her most recent book is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016). Mayer is the granddaughter of the late historian and biographer Allan Nevins.]

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60 Years Later, The "Freedom Train" Of 1947 Still Wouldn't Stop At The Station Named "Liberty And Justice For All"

The history of civil rights in the United States is complex and twisted between the best and worst impulses in its people. Today's post illustrates the twisted history in 1947 that resonates 6 decades later in 2017. If this is a (fair & balanced) illustration of the permanent "American Dilemma," so be it.

[x New Yorker]
Remembering The Freedom Train
By Edward (Ted) L. Widmer


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african-americans american became birmingham black boss cent citizens city coblenz corridors display documents emancipation exhibit family found foundation freedom harry heritage history idea including line memphis moving national officials organized per president proclamation public recently recorded report segregated song soon south together train truman visitors walk war washington white years

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Seventy years ago, in the fall of 1947, Americans had much to be thankful for. Two years after the overwhelming victory of the Allies in the Second World War, US citizens owned seventy-two per cent of the world’s automobiles, sixty-one per cent of its telephones, and ninety-two per cent of its bathtubs. No nation in history had ever seen this level of economic and cultural dominance. In his Thanksgiving proclamation, President Harry Truman called on his fellow-citizens to share their bounty with “needy people of other nations,” and they did, through the Marshall Plan and other acts of generosity.

But even at the apogee of the American century there were doubts about the future. Twelve million GIs came home from the war, only to encounter housing shortages and labor strikes. Few were more disillusioned than African-American veterans. In 1946, there were at least six lynchings in the South; poll taxes blocked voting in many localities, and there were plenty of other reminders that human rights were a work in progress in the country that had done so much to define them. During the war, Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of four towering freedoms had inspired billions around the world. His successor, Truman, seemed beset by a multitude of foreign and domestic crises.

It was at this precarious moment, in 1946, that William Coblenz, a junior official at the Department of Justice, had an idea for an uplifting display of American values. During his lunch break, Coblenz liked to walk across the street to the National Archives, to inspect the exhibit of recently captured Nazi artifacts. Coblenz felt that Americans lacked a coherent understanding of their own, history; soon, he was pressing forward with the idea of a mobile display of America’s greatest documents. Officials from the National Archives were intrigued, and the heads of Paramount Pictures, US Steel, Du Pont, General Electric, and Standard Oil lined up in support. A bipartisan American Heritage Foundation convened to direct these energies, raise funding, and sell the concept of a moving museum to the public. The documents would be carried across America by a special railroad, guarded by Marines: the Freedom Train.

At first blush, these exhibit planners were not natural revolutionaries. They chose the word “Freedom” because “Democracy” struck several as too volatile. The foundation’s most prominent Democrat, John W. Davis, had run for President, in 1924, on a segregationist platform. Without a very clear plan, the organizers hoped that the publicity stunt—seven train cars pulled by a two-thousand-horsepower locomotive with the number 1776 on the side—would result in a national “rededication,” purging “cynicism” and “confusion.”

Tensions became apparent as soon as the documents for display were selected. Archivists sifted through papers from a broad cross-section of historical categories, but certain topic areas—women’s suffrage, collective bargaining, and desegregation—were rejected by the foundation as sensitive. Privately, archivists began to refer to the Freedom Train as “Hell on Wheels.” The final selection of a hundred and twenty-one documents ranged from the Magna Carta to the flag that flew over the USS Missouri on the day the Japanese surrendered, only two years earlier. In between, there was a heavy emphasis on the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, and Washington’s handwritten notes on the Constitution. Robert E. Lee was included, in a letter accepting his university presidency, which serenely occupied a panel with his adversary, Abraham Lincoln, who had three documents in all, including the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation.

By the fall of 1947, Americans were awash in Freedom Train-themed comic books, school kits, and other materials heralding the approach of the exhibit. The American Heritage Foundation unveiled a new slogan, “Freedom is Everybody’s Job,” and Irving Berlin wrote a catchy song, which débuted in a carefully coördinated media blitz, just before departure. All the radio networks covered the train when it left Philadelphia, on September 17, 1947—the hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution. Its first stop, Atlantic City, might have struck some as an odd place to encounter the sober language of Gettysburg, or George Washington’s account of starving troops, but American history offered a big tent, open to sinners and saints. At least that was the idea.

Although visitors of all races and ethnicities attended the exhibit together upon its launch, the Chicago Defender, a prominent African-American newspaper, was the first to note that none of the train’s personnel were black, adding that the Freedom Train was “somewhat of a contradiction” in a nation that segregated many of its transportation corridors. On the week of the train’s departure, Langston Hughes published a new poem, “Freedom Train,” in The New Republic, in which the poet hinted at future trouble:

The Birmingham station’s marked COLORED and WHITE.
The white folks go left, the colored go right—
They even got a segregated lane.
Is that the way to get aboard the Freedom Train?

In New England and New York, people stood in line for hours, whisked through the train at a rate of ten thousand a day. The documents were set back in futuristic glass cases, inside green panels that were angled at zigzags and lit with soft fluorescent bulbs, permitting visitors to glide through from one end to the other, as if moving through time. But, as the days grew shorter, it became clear that the Freedom Train was not moving as quickly as recent events. Having completed its run through the Northeast, the train circled back through Washington, DC, in time for Thanksgiving and the big crowds of Union Station. Then it prepared for a push into the old Confederacy. Its first stop was Charlottesville, Virginia, where the return of Jefferson’s documents was treated as something of a family reunion. Deeper into the South, the project’s contradictions became more difficult to manage. As Langston Hughes had suspected, many Southern officials had no intention of letting white and black Americans walk through the narrow corridors of the train together.

Harry Truman was a proud son of the Confederacy, keenly aware of his own family’s partisanship in the Civil War. But he had grown in the office, and the rising tide of violence against African-Americans had sickened him. On October 29, 1947, his Administration had issued “To Secure These Rights,” a report that cited the same historic documents that the train was carrying, to argue that the United States had defaulted on its promise to African-Americans. The fusillade received a mixed response in the South, where leaders awaited the Freedom Train with mounting dread. A different kind of Freedom Ride had recently taken place, in April, when the Congress of Racial Equality had organized a “Journey of Reconciliation,” by bus, bringing together black and white citizens opposed to Jim Crow. Now, as the Freedom Train approached, each Southern city had to deal with a core question: should visitors be allowed to enter the train together, or segregated into white and black categories?

Many cities alternated groups of black and white visitors without calling attention to the fact. But two cities went out of their way to insist publicly on two different lines forming. In Birmingham, the commissioner of public safety, Theophilus Eugene (Bull) Connor, was already known for his unreconstructed views. Memphis was also a problem, dominated by an old political machine led by E.(dward) H.(ull) "Boss" Crump and a mayor, James Pleasants, who argued that “jostling” in the line was a form of unhealthy contact between the races. A Memphis newspaper summed up the situation with a headline that no satirist could have improved upon: “Memphis Officials Fear Freedom Train Will Inspire Citizens.”

Faced with the prospect of segregated lines to see the Emancipation Proclamation, the American Heritage Foundation announced that the train would bypass Birmingham and Memphis. In Birmingham, the cancellation was received with resignation, but in Memphis the news hit hard. Many Memphians chartered buses of their own to Nashville, where the train was cheerfully welcomed. A reporter dispatched there by the New York Times found a long line of blacks and whites, waiting reverentially together, including one elderly African-American woman who fainted upon her first contact with the Emancipation Proclamation. Excitement had been building, especially as African-Americans read accounts of the train’s progress through other cities, including the reports filed from Montgomery by Rosa Parks.

"Boss" Crump was furious that the train had bypassed his city, and, in 1948, he supported the organization of a new states’-rights party, the Dixiecrats. Harry Truman, meanwhile, campaigned joyfully during his whistle-stop campaign, as if he had found a freedom train of his own. In 1948, his victory was in part due to the ballots of African-Americans, voting in the Democratic column for the first time. On January 20, 1949, the week that Truman was inaugurated, the Freedom Train pulled back into Washington, DC, the final stop on a thirty-seven-thousand-mile journey through all forty-eight states. A “Freedom Scroll,” containing the signatures of three million Americans who had boarded the train, was presented to the President, who had agreed to dispatch the train two years earlier, when there was no guarantee that he would be in Washington to welcome it back.

Perhaps no city had been more changed by the train than Memphis, where it failed to arrive. Boss Crump’s influence withered after the non-event, and, though segregation endured, a new generation of African-Americans found ways to make themselves heard. In 1953, a young Memphis musician, Herman "Junior" Parker, recorded a new song, “Mystery Train,” which described a railroad rumbling ominously through an imaginary landscape, changing everything. The song included lyrics borrowed from one set of white performers, the Carter Family, and it was soon covered by another set—Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black—in the tiny studio of Sun Records, where "Junior" Parker had recorded his version. In the wake of the Freedom Train, black and white Americans were free to walk down the same corridors, jostling each other. # # #

[Edward (Ted) L. Widmer is a historian, writer, librarian and musician who served as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House (1997-2001). In 2001, he was named the inaugural director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and associate professor of history at Washington College (Chestertown, MD). He left that position to become the Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University (Providence, RI). In 2012, he served as a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Widmer was appointed Director of the John Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Widmer received an AB (history) and a PhD (history) from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA).]

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Preview The XXIII Olympic Winter Games (Pyeongchang, South Korea) With The Skier Who Stays On Schedule (With Plenty Of Naps) & Wins Gold Medals

Watch out for the Colorado Girl in February 2018; Mikaela Shiffrin wants 5 gold medals in the upcoming Winter Olympics. Of course, this will depend on keeping to her schedule and plenty of naps. If this is a (fair & balanced) formula for Olympic greatness, so be it.

[x Outside]
Mikaela Shiffrin Does Not Have Time For A Beer
By Elizabeth Weil


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around athletes better body champion coach cup eileen game gate gets going hard hill jeff keep knows life loves maybe mikaela moving nap olympic parents people percent race really seconds shiffrin ski skier slalom sport start study takes taylor team think title training turn vonn watch win won work world

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Mikaela Shiffrin slept great.

She always sleeps great. Then she ate two fried eggs, plus toast, no coffee, as she does every morning. Now it’s 9 a.m. on this bright June Thursday, the fourth day of the third week of her six-week early-summer training block. Her schedule prescribes a morning strength session, so off we drive from her parents’ house in Avon, Colorado, to the Westin Beaver Creek, where she works out when she’s in town.

First: a warm-up on a spin bike. Ten minutes, moving her legs in circles in her Lulu­lemon shorts, much like half the women here are moving their legs in circles in their Lululemon shorts—no big deal. Then we go into a small glass-doored room labeled MIKAELA’S CORNER. The Westin didn’t know what to do with this space, so the hotel gave it to Mikaela so she could do Olympic lifts. It’s an asset for the hotel to have this tanned, blond, 22-year-old ski goddess training here—though she does, let’s just say, ruffle some patrons’ senses of inner peace. Her body fills out her skin in a way that just looks fuller and better than anybody else. It’s like she’s a freshly blown-up balloon and the rest of us have been hanging around losing air for a few days or weeks.

But in this private back room, there’s no one cowering in self-hatred at the sight of Mikaela’s epic, confidence-destroying legs except her father who, of course, feels not self-hatred but pride. Back in their youth, both Jeff Shiffrin and Mikaela’s mother, Eileen, raced alpine. When I ask Jeff, who is an anesthesiologist and has come to chat with me on his way to work, how they did it, how they managed to raise this specimen, perhaps the best skier in the world right now, on track to become maybe the best skier of all time, he says it’s all very simple. “If you have a kid who is going to a ski race, you go to the lodge beforehand so you can say, ‘Here’s the nearest bathroom, here’s where you put your backpack,’ so the kid can be better prepared and have less stress. At age six, you teach her how to juggle, for coordination and focus, and at seven you teach her how to unicycle, for balance.” There: now you know.

Mikaela wraps up her set. Papa Shiffrin, who handles the logistics of his daughter’s ski racing and refers to himself as “Sure Pa,” goes to the hospital to work. So far, so good. Then Mikaela moves out of her corner into the gym proper, and for a while all is still well in the Westin. The other gym­goers, both locals and hotel guests, continue pleasantly about their golden Vail days. Some recognize Mikaela, but whether they do or don’t doesn’t really matter—this isn’t a story about fame, or even winning, exactly. It’s a story about being the kind of person who not only knows how to win (that’s not really the hard part), but can execute on the never-ending tedium required. Still, to get it out there: Mikaela has won 31 World Cup races, the 2017 World Cup overall title, four World Cup slalom titles, three World Championship slalom races, and an Olympic gold medal in slalom. And she’s on track to win more races and more championships than any skier ever. Lindsey Vonn may be only nine races away from catching up to Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark’s record 86 World Cup victories, but Mikaela already has 24 more World Cup wins than Vonn did at her age and three more than Stenmark did when he was 22.

Mikaela tries to keep her success low-key and her mind not on beating others but on being better tomorrow than she is today. After she won gold in Sochi in slalom, she did lose her focus for a few seconds and told a reporter that she wanted to win five medals in the upcoming 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. (Who doesn’t?) But then she backpedaled and started talking again about putting in the work and staying strong.

Mikaela’s quads look capable of leg-pressing entire alpine villages. Her glutes, halfway up her five-foot-seven frame, are abrupt, definitive forces of nature, the Rockies rising out of the Midwest. But it’s her concentration and discipline, and her ability to turn physical instruction into action, that are the real killers. Today, as almost every day, she isn’t working out with a partner or coach. There’s no minder, no entourage, no fuss. She does have an esoteric piece of gear called a GymAware PowerTool, which costs $2,200, looks like a small bomb, and measures lifting metrics like bar angle and velocity. But other than that, she’s just an extraordinarily fit young woman with an iPhone, a silver watch, a few turquoise anklets, some very cute braids, and a list of reps and sets to get through.

Still, slowly, quietly, all around her, people start flipping out, needing—and failing—to adjust to the fact that here in this gym is this person with these legs and this ass who is flawlessly, unassumingly executing maneuvers that none of them could do with her precision and grace if they made it the focus of their lives. A man goes to pick up a kettlebell from a rack behind Mikaela, who is doing seismic squat jumps, and just melts down, worrying loudly about disrupting her to the point where she has to pause and comfort him. “No, you’re fine. You’re fine,” she says. When she loads a bar with 100 pounds, holds her squat for 45 seconds, and then explodes up into space, another guy bursts out, “That’s amazing! I can’t believe you can do that! Holy Moses!”

Mikaela does her triple jumps, her agility drills. None of the exercises are that complex. We can all do this stuff, sort of—just like we can all keep ourselves from eating the entire bag of chips.

Eventually, Eileen comes in, after her own workout, wearing Hokas and basketball shorts. Mikaela is on the US Ski Team, but she’s also on Team Shiffrin, and her mother serves as her 24/7 unpaid coach. Eileen, it bears noting, does not think Mikaela does everything perfectly. It’s her job—not as mother but as coach—to find flaws. She scrutinizes Mikaela’s every movement (often repeatedly, forward and backward, in slow motion, on video), searching for imperfections and ways to crush those imperfections out.

Eileen is also here to make sure that I don’t intrude too much on Mikaela’s two-hour workout and thus keep Mikaela from getting home to her parents’ house in time for her nap. In the elevator to the parking garage, I ask Mikaela how she wants our day to go.

I could take her out to lunch or dinner. “I need to go on my ride later,” she says. Then she adds, with just the slightest hint of an edge, “I don’t know what’s on your schedule.”

The tone is understandable. Given that Mikaela is the US’s designated darling in the run-up to the 2018 Olympics, there have been a lot of nonathletic obligations: photo and video shoots (and attendant hair and makeup) for sponsors Barilla, Bose, Red Bull, and Visa, interviews for other media. But Eileen suggests that, even amid these obligations, there may be room for improvement. “I think you should be nicer,” she says.

---

A word about naps: Mikaela loves to nap. She also loves Bode Miller, and she’s seen his movie, "Flying Downhill," at least 20 times. And she remains so crushed out that even now, when Bode congratulates her on races—for instance, he called her name and hooted at her when she was walking through the crowd on the way to collect her World Cup overall title last March—she says, “I still can’t believe he knows who I am.”

But the naps: Mikaela not only loves them, she’s fiercely committed to them. Recovery is the most important part of training! And sleep is the most important part of recovery! And to be a champion, you need a steadfast loyalty to even the tiniest and most mundane points. Mikaela will nap on the side of the hill. She will nap at the start of the race. She will wake up in the morning, she tells me after the gym, at her house, while eating some pre-nap pasta, “and the first thought I’ll have is: I cannot wait for my nap today. I don’t care what else happens. I can’t wait to get back in bed.”

Mikaela also will not stay up late, and sometimes she won’t do things in the after­noon, and occasionally this leads to more people flipping out. Most of the time, she trains apart from the rest of the US Ski Team and lives at home with her parents in Vail (during the nine weeks a year she’s not traveling). In the summers, she spends a few weeks in Park City, Utah, training with her teammates at the US Ski and Snowboard Center of Excellence. The dynamic there is, uh, complicated. “Some sports,” Mikaela says, “you see some athletes just walking around the gym, not really doing anything, eating food. They’re first to the lunchroom, never lifting weights.”

Last summer, while Mikaela was in Park City, she overheard some of her teammates in the lunchroom talking about what they did for fun the weekend before and what they might do this upcoming one. “You want to go float the river?” Mikaela recalls one saying to another. “Let’s get a group of people together.”

This mystifies Mikaela. “That takes freaking five hours to float the river,” she tells me. “And I’m like, honestly… Do you forget how wonderful it feels to lie in bed and not be doing something in like the two seconds of spare time you have?”

Her dedication causes some tension, even passive aggression. If you’re focused at the expense of being social, and you win all the time, by huge margins, and are blatantly ambitious, you’re considered, well, standoffish. And you’re going to catch shade.

According to Mikaela, the form this takes in Park City is: teammates will invite her to join them for a movie or a party or whatever and then add, with the faintest whiff of sarcasm, “if that fits in your schedule.” Mikaela gets it. That dynamic has dogged her since high school. The day she moved into her dorm room at Burke Mountain Academy, a boarding school in Vermont for elite skiers, her roommate, Brayton “Bug” Pech, remembers saying to her, “You seem like a really nice girl and all, but I just have to hate you when you get in the start gate.” Bug, now one of Mikaela’s best friends, told me about a morning when the school canceled classes because there was such amazing powder, and while Bug and all the normal (that is, truly excellent) skier-students were out on the hill, freeskiing in the magnificent blower pow, stoked out of their minds, there was Mikaela, on the training hill by herself, working on traverse drills and ankle flexion.

Bug quickly learned that the path to personal happiness around Mikaela is to give yourself a break for being mortal and stand back in awe. “You have to put her in her own category,” she says. “She’s an anomaly. Most people with Mikaela’s talent just rely on their talent. That’s why, when the competition gets really serious, they fall apart.” Mikaela was different. “I knew she was going to be special, because she was going to make herself into something special.”

Skiing is an incredibly complex sport. Unlike, say, swimming or gymnastics, athletes don’t just have to learn to control their bodies. The terrain is always changing, the surface is always changing. “The training is very deliberate, and then when the training peaks, the skiing becomes more about feeling,” says Kirk Dwyer, who was Mikaela’s main coach at Burke and a major influence in her life. “You can think about it like going up a chairlift.” What he means is that you’re moving along, training, making progress in one mode, and then, to perform, you have to make a 180-degree switch. Mikaela arrived at Burke well suited to the process. “Her mentality is similar to virtuoso musicians like Isaac Stern, always trying to play better,” Dwyer says. “She’s very intrinsically motivated. She sets the bar high. She focuses.”

Mikaela won the national slalom title at 16. Then she started winning in giant slalom. Now she’s adding speed events, winning her first alpine combined race—one super-G run, one slalom—earlier this year. She has won events by two or three seconds, in a sport where one-tenth of that is considered a decent margin. This is eminently—and maybe even unavoidably—hateable if you’re a female American alpine ski racer not named Julia Mancuso or Lindsey Vonn. Mikaela, like Vonn, has a custom training program in part because she brings money and glory to US skiing and is considered the future of the sport. (None of the American men have a custom program.)

---

“It’s hard to find someone who is really genuinely happy for you if you are having success and they’re not,” Mikaela says. She knows that’s only human. “I just try to be as nice as possible and make fun of myself and laugh at the jokes.” But the slacking off, by which Mikaela means floating the river or having a few beers and playing spoons on a Friday night—she has little patience for that. Champions put in the work. Champions prioritize the effort to get better, every day. She makes each decision in her life only after she’s weighed whether or not it will help her achieve. She has a new boyfriend, a French ski racer. She’s going to meet him in Paris. But she won’t visit again if she can’t finish her training block strong. “Don’t worry about it and you’ll be great, said nobody ever,” she tells me just before her nap.

Mikaela has a recurring dream. She shows up at the mountain for a race, puts on her boots and helmet, then realizes her clothes are disappearing. So she takes off her boots and helmet, dresses in her thermals and speed suit, then buckles on her boots and helmet again. But by the time she’s done this, her speed suit has flown off. This goes on: one piece of gear donned, another vanished. Eventually, she just starts running to the chairlift so she won’t miss her start. Every step she takes, the hill gets steeper and steeper until she’s falling off a cliff.

---

To say that Jeff and Eileen Shiffrin are dedicated and passionate skier parents does not even begin to cover it. The Shiffrins did not just click Mikaela’s tiny boots into bindings at age three and drift down the hill with her, snowplowing; they began methodically coaching her and her elder brother, Taylor. “Mom and Dad said, ‘Let’s do this: ski to that tree, in this position, as fast as you can,’ ” said Taylor, who just got an MBA at the University of Denver, where he ski-raced during undergrad, and now works on the business side of tech startups. “There were actually very specific drills about body position: head in front, knees to skis, pretend you’re holding a tray of hot chocolate and try not to spill it. Let’s do it again, and again, and again.”

Eileen started training her daughter on gates when she was six. The next year, Mikaela began racing. Soon after, she lost control near the end of a run, spun around in a complete circle, and still won the race by ten or twenty seconds. A parent of another skier turned to Eileen and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Eileen is casual and friendly, offering me leftovers at a dining table that has family snapshots hanging above one end and ­Mikaela’s five huge World Cup globes lined up on a credenza nearby. She’s smart and game for anything (including studying German and chemistry alongside Mikaela while her daughter was finishing her high school diploma; now the two watch "Madam Secretary" and "Blue Bloods" together). She’s also a serious athlete. As a girl, Eileen spent three hours a day hitting a tennis ball against a wall. When not practicing her ground strokes, she watched as many matches as she could to study technique. She brings her intense commitment to practice—along with a belief that if you study, you can master anything—to all parts of her life.

For instance, when Taylor was in sixth grade, he tried out for the soccer team but didn’t make the cut. Eileen bought four soccer nets for the family basement, ordered a complete set of World Cup soccer DVDs, and spent every evening that winter in the basement with Taylor, running him through drills. At tryouts the following fall, the coach thought Taylor played like Neymar’s little brother. “What on earth have you been doing?” he asked Eileen.

Eileen is not paid by US Ski and Snowboard, but she’s recognized by the organization as one of Mikaela’s coaches, along with team coaches Mike Day and Jeff Lackie. She approaches her job with the sense of purpose and attention to detail of a forensic scientist at a murder scene. “You have to study the sport like you would study precalc or physics,” she explains. “You have to be willing to think about it that in-depth.” Eileen will, say, spend an hour or so in the evening with Mikaela watching tapes of Marlies Schild, the 2011 slalom world champion, asking questions: Is she keeping her shoulders facing out at this point in the turn? Or is she not really facing her shoulders out but driving her outside shoulder around? How much separation does she have between her upper and lower body? How is she using her ankles and knees?

Few athletes’ parents have the time, inclination, or athletic experience to do this, and that has given Mikaela “a pretty big advantage, almost an unfair advantage,” Eileen admits. She insists that her parental contribution ends there, that she has not also bequeathed to her daughter a significant competitive streak.

I ask Eileen what I think is a simple question: When did Mikaela become faster than her?

“With skiing?” she says. “I don’t know. Mikaela says when she was 11 or 12—which is… no. But I don’t race against her. I never really compared or had that situation. I still ski pretty fast, faster than a lot of people are comfortable with me skiing. They are always like, ‘Why aren’t you wearing a helmet?’ So, I’m not sure.”

“But when did you cross the threshold to saying, ‘My kid is a better athlete than me’?” I rephrase.

“Better skier. Well, probably when she was…” Her voice trails off.

To be clear, we are talking about 2017 World Cup overall champion Mikaela Shiffrin. “I don’t know. I’m not really sure,” Eileen says. “That’s such a hard question. I never really think about it.”

---

On the slopes, Mikaela steers her body like a Nascar driver classically trained at the Bolshoi Ballet—with such precision, grace, and control that it’s hard to comprehend the power required to hold your lower body at a 30-degree angle to the ground while keeping your torso upright, all while moving down iced ruts at 80 miles per hour.

US Ski Team coach Jeff Lackie says, “Mikaela separates herself from the field by using every inch of the turn to extract speed, building momentum whenever possible. You never tire of watching athletic genius.”

Right now, Mikaela’s focusing on turning before the gate. Pretty much nobody can turn before the gate. If you think about turning before the gate, you’ve missed turning before the gate and you’ve probably missed turning before the next gate, too. The window of time and the acreage of snow in which to perform the maneuver are just too small. Mikaela recognizes this. She knows the effort to turn before the gate is basically a Zen exercise. You keep working toward it. You keep not getting it. You stay committed to the practice.

---

Mikaela is a really nice, smart person—I feel compelled to say that. She’s thoughtful and grounded, under her beautiful skin and all that muscle, and when I tell her I want to find a way to share the normal 22-year-old side of her life, she gamely takes me through her Instagram feed. We look at a story posted by an actress from "Glee." Another posted by a cliff-jumping champion also sponsored by Red Bull. A third from a tawny-skinned fashion blogger. “She’s #tangoals,” Mikaela says. “I would get skin cancer if I was that tan all the time. But still.” Later we watch a video of Julia Mancuso training on a beach with her hunky husband. “This is not OK. I would love to be on the beach,” Mikaela says. “If I could just dip my toes in an ocean for a second, I would be over the moon.” I point out that she could fly to Maui, train on the sand, and dip her entire body in the sea. But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Telling Mikaela now, in the months leading up to the Olympics, that she could fly to Hawaii and train there is really not all that different than her teammates saying, if that fits in with your schedule. It’s disrespectful—subtly so, perhaps. But still. The remark fails to honor who Mikaela is.

Mikaela is gracious and lets it slide.

Lindsey Vonn has always worked harder than anybody else on the hill. On Instagram, Mikaela finds a post of Vonn doing one of the same core exercises she did this morning—plank position, feet suspended from a rubber band, body stiff in a linear plane. Only Vonn’s hands are not anchored to a box, as Mikaela’s were; they’re clutching rings. Mikaela laughs nervously. “Oh, that’s like what I did today, only twice as hard.” But she still wants to try it.

Wanting to work the hardest is not just stealth-killer goody-two-shoes behavior. Skiing fast is the result of preparation and flow. This may be the key to success in all sports, maybe all of life. To win you need to work the hardest, because knowing you’ve worked the hardest is what will allow you to believe in yourself and stay out of your own way in a race. This idea is the core lesson of The Inner Game of Tennis, published in 1974 and written by W. Timothy Gallwey, one of the most influential sports training books ever written. “The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills,” Gallwey writes. “He discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”

Eileen loves this book. Kirk Dwyer made all the skiers he coached at Burke read it. Only if you’ve done enough training, only if you’ve tried hard beforehand, can you fully relax during a race.

The trouble, for most of us, starts with the fact that we don’t always do all the work. We don’t do as much as Mikaela, or Lindsey Vonn, and this is not just a technical or physical problem. It undermines our self-confidence. Mikaela makes us see our weaknesses, our lack of full commitment. We want to win, but we don’t want to win at all costs. Maybe we’re scared to try that hard. Maybe we don’t know how. Almost none of us truly give 100 percent. We give 98 percent, or 95 percent, maybe less. Then, even though we may have dedicated our lives to a sport, even though we may be among the best in the world, we go out there and lose. Or we go out there and get hurt. “You don’t want to be second-guessing yourself on the way down,” Mikaela says. “And you don’t want to be skiing at 110 percent.” If you stretch yourself too thin, you snap. Mikaela likes to race well within her ability. “One of my theories is that if I just train more than everybody and I’m strong and I watch more video and understand the sport better, my 90 percent will be enough.”

Enough so that, come February, she can fly to South Korea, fall asleep on the mountain, and win. # # #

[Outside contributing editor Elizabeth Weil joined the magazine in 2012. She also writes/has written for The New York Times Magazine, Real Simple, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Glamour, Rolling Stone, Parade, Mother Jones, Pacific Standard, Redbook, More, Chicago, Boston, Chicago Tribune Magazine, and Boston Globe Magazine. Most recently, Weil has written No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried To Make It Better (2012). See other books by Elizabeth Weil here. She received a BA (English) from Yale University (CT).]

Copyright © 2017 Mariah Media Network




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Copyright © 2017 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Roll Over, Joseph Conrad — Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) Encounters The Mind Of Darkness, 2017

Sigh.... Today's 'toon arrived without comment from Tom/Dan. Time-delayed jet lag? Cartoonist-PTSD induced by the comments of the idiots who elected the Moron-in-Chief? For whatever reason, prefatory comments were absent again. If this is (fair & balanced) sympathy for the toll of creativity, so be it.

[x TMW]
Checking In (With Trump Voters)
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]


Copyright © 2017 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)




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Copyright © 2017 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

From Today's Department Of Hopeful Thinking: May "Pod Save America"

This essay by Jason Zengerle about the "voice of The Resistance" — "Pod Save America" inspired this blogger to bookmark a site offering a "Pod Save America" T-shirt that will join the blogger's collection of Resist T-shirts. The creators of "Pod Save America" were among the Best & Brightest of the staffers in the West Wing of the White House (2009-2017). If this is a (fair & balanced) inspiring moment, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap 'Zine]
The Voices In Blue America’s Head
By Jason Zengerle


TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing

america appeared cable called campaign candidate chernin company conservative crooked crowd democratic election episode favreau hosts house job kristol liberal lovett media million network news northam obama office people pfeiffer pod podcast point politics race radio republican richmond save something suit talk told toward trump turn vietor white work year

created at TagCrowd.com

It was early November, the day before Virginia’s elections, and the Democratic cavalry — in the form of four podcast hosts crammed into a Lyft — was coming to the aid of Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam[D-VA]. “Do you want to kick things off with something light and funny?” Jon Favreau asked Jon Lovett as their ride — an SUV outfitted with neon lights and a disco ball that were a bit discombobulating before 9 o’clock in the morning — took them to a Richmond campaign office. They’d be rallying volunteers canvassing for Northam, the Democratic candidate for governor, who was at the time commanding a perilously narrow lead in the polls. “I want to go toward the end for some earnestness,” Favreau said.

“You should do something real message-y,” Tommy Vietor proposed.

“I’m expecting the ‘race speech’ for GOTV,” Dan Pfeiffer chimed in.

It was a joke from the podcasters’ past lives. As Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter for eight years, Favreau had a hand in some of his most memorable oratory — none more so than the 2008 campaign speech about race that followed questions about Obama’s relationship with the Reverend [Mr.] Jeremiah Wright. Whenever a knotty issue arose in Obama’s White House, Pfeiffer and Vietor, who worked in the communications department, and Lovett, a fellow speechwriter, would taunt Favreau: “We need a ‘race speech’ for Simpson-Bowles,” or: “Write a ‘race speech’ for the BP oil spill.”

The night before, at the National, an 800-seat theater in Richmond, Favreau and his co-hosts performed a sold-out live taping of “Pod Save America,” a liberal political podcast and the flagship offering from Crooked Media, the media company that Favreau, Lovett and Vietor started in January. “Pod Save America” scored its first million-listener episode within its first several weeks, and it now averages 1.5 million listeners per show — about as many people as Anderson Cooper draws on prime-time CNN. Their podcast has come to occupy a singular perch in blue America; where an NPR tote bag once signified a certain political persuasion and mind-set, in the age of Trump, it’s a “Friend of the Pod” T-shirt. “ ‘Pod Save America,’ ” says the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, “is the voice of the ‘resistance.’ ”

Its hosts have not shied away from making use of their newfound influence. In 2017, “Pod Save America” has pointed its audience toward an array of grass-roots groups on the left, partnering with MoveOn to send nearly 2,000 listeners to Republican town-hall meetings, with Swing Left to raise more than $1 million for challengers to House Republicans next year and with Indivisible to deluge Republican senators with tens of thousands of phone calls in favor of preserving Obamacare. And in Richmond, the hosts were lending their activist cachet and charisma to Northam, a candidate who, Democrats worried, could use a lot more of both.

“With Donald Trump winning the presidency, we have decided — we’ve realized — that democracy is not just a job for politicians,” Favreau told the crowd at Northam’s campaign office, amid half-empty doughnut boxes and carafes of coffee. “It’s a job for every single American, and that job doesn’t just end on Election Day — that job is an every-single-day job. It is a fight.”

As the podcasters spoke, Northam looked on with what appeared to be a mixture of bewilderment and admiration. He was the candidate, and the only person in the room wearing a suit and tie — the podcast hosts, like the canvassers, were dressed in jeans and hoodies — but it was clear he knew he wasn’t the star of this particular show. When it was his turn to speak, the man who in 36 hours would be elected Virginia’s 73^rd governor recalled a conversation he had the day before with his two 20-something children. “They said, ‘We heard you’re going to be on “Pod Save America”! Is that true?’ ” Northam recounted. The crowd laughed. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed. “I have finally arrived!”

During the 2016 campaign, Favreau, Lovett, Vietor and Pfeiffer — mostly as a lark — hosted a popular politics podcast for Bill Simmons’s sports-and-pop-culture website The Ringer called “Keepin’ It 1600.” But with Hillary Clinton expected to be sitting in the Oval Office in 2017, “we didn’t want to be the people who criticized the White House just to be interesting, nor did we want to be to the Clinton administration what Hannity now is to the Trump administration,” Pfeiffer says. “We all assumed the election was the end of the road for us.”

Favreau, Lovett and Vietor were in their 20s when they went to work for Obama in the White House, and they had been somewhat adrift since leaving it around the end of Obama’s first term. They relocated to California in search of a second act, but nothing quite stuck. Lovett helped create a sitcom called “1600 Penn” about a wacky First Family, but poor ratings and reviews led NBC to cancel it after one season. Favreau and Vietor founded a strategic communications firm to pay the bills while they nursed their own TV ambitions, but their projects — a campaign drama-comedy called “Early States” and a public-affairs show that they pitched, with Lovett, as “a millennial ‘Meet the Press’ ” — were rejected by the networks and streaming services. “Lots of people in suits told us that politics was a crowded space as they greenlit ‘CSI [expletive] West Hollywood’ or whatever,” Vietor recalls.

The day after Trump’s victory, Lovett was driving Favreau and Vietor to The Ringer’s Hollywood studios when his car ran out of gas. It was while the three of them were pushing the Jeep Grand Cherokee down Sunset Boulevard that they first started discussing what would become “Pod Save America” and Crooked Media. They wanted to get involved in politics again, but none of them had any desire to go back to Washington or to work for a candidate. A podcast and a liberal media company, they thought, could be their contribution to the anti-Trump resistance.

In the early days of “Pod Save America,” the hosts leaned heavily on their Obama connections; Obama himself was the guest on one of their first episodes. But as the podcast rapidly built an audience, Democratic politicians outside the Obama orbit began accepting their invitations, or sometimes even asking to appear on the show — even if they didn’t always know what exactly “Pod Save America” was. In a May episode, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota confessed that it had been her daughter’s idea for her to be interviewed: “I, for some reason, thought it was a video, so I spent a lot of time wearing a hip outfit today, and then I found out it was a podcast.”

More than 1,600 political podcasts — most of them anti-Trump — have appeared since the 2016 election, according to RawVoice, a podcast hosting and analytics company. “Pod Save America,” with nearly 120 million downloads to date, is the undisputed king of the field. But the show’s numbers alone do not quite capture the nature of its accomplishment. With a shoestring budget and no organizational backing, its hosts seem to have created something that liberals have spent almost two decades, and hundreds of millions of dollars, futilely searching for: the left’s answer to conservative talk radio.

Air America, the nationwide liberal talk-radio network, declared bankruptcy and stopped broadcasting in 2010 after six years of middling to abysmal ratings. The independent cable network Current TV, which Al Gore started with Joel Hyatt in 2005, tried to make itself a platform for unapologetically liberal commentary — at one point hiring Keith Olbermann as its chief news officer — but it was sold and shut down in 2013. Part of the problem with these earlier ventures was their arms-race mentality: They offered liberals a mirror image of what conservatives had, rather than something liberals might actually want. “Olbermann was lefty O’Reilly,” says Tim Miller, a Republican media consultant and Crooked Media’s token conservative contributor. “Air America was lefty Limbaugh.”

“Pod Save America,” by contrast, has no conservative antecedent. The craft-beer-bar-bull-session vibe of podcasts suits the left better than the shouty antagonism of talk radio. “Rather than trying to replicate what’s worked on the right, these podcasts aren’t taking the same tropes you see on Fox or hear on conservative talk radio and applying them to the left,” Miller says.

On “Pod Save America,” Favreau sits in what radio pros call “the power chair,” dictating the topics and pace of the show; Lovett provides comic relief; and Pfeiffer and Vietor contribute an earnest wonkiness. A typical hourlong episode might consist of a breakdown of the latest Republican tax-reform proposal, some war stories from the Obama White House, a dispute about which host was more disruptive at a recent “Game of Thrones” viewing party and an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. “It’s down to earth and relaxed,” Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts congressman who appeared on “Pod Save America” in March, told me. “I think it’s important for people to realize I’m a regular person, and sometimes you don’t get that when you see me in a suit on CNN.”

Like conservative talk radio or Fox News, “Pod Save America” is an authentic partisan response to the perceived failings of the mainstream media. While many conservatives hate the mainstream media for its supposed liberal bias, many liberals have come to despise what they see as its tendency toward false equivalence — a grievance particularly inflamed by the coverage of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Liberals don’t want a hermetically sealed media ecosystem of their own, so much as one that does away with the pretense of kneejerk balance: a media that’s willing to say one side is worse than the other. “I screamed at the TV a lot in the White House,” Favreau says. He and his co-hosts particularly loathe the bipartisan on-air panels of blabbering pundits that cable networks deployed during the election. “If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news,” Lovett says, “it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.”

“Pod Save America,” to its hosts and its listeners, is a twice-weekly reality check. “I think that when you have a president gaslighting an entire nation,” Vietor says, “there’s a cathartic effect when you have a couple of people who worked in the White House who are like: ‘Hey, this is crazy. You’re right, he’s wrong.’ ”

What is absent from the podcast, significantly, is any of the usual liberal squeamishness (or, depending on your point of view, principle) about using media as a tool of partisan advantage. Liberal activists point regretfully to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who in their Comedy Central heyday were happy to savage Republicans but refused to champion Democrats: In 2010, the pair drew some 215,000 people to the National Mall a few days before the midterm elections, only to keep the rally strictly nonpartisan. “Pod Save America,” by contrast, isn’t afraid to, as Ben Wikler of MoveOn puts it, “actually touch Excalibur.” At the theater in Richmond this month, shortly before bringing Northam and the rest of Virginia’s Democratic ticket onstage, Favreau asked the crowd: “Is everyone registered to vote? Is everyone going to be doing phone-banking and canvassing? Because if not, you have to leave.”

Crooked Media’s headquarters consists of a few bargain-priced rooms on La Cienega in a seedy section of West Hollywood, cater-corner to a lingerie shop and across the street from a strip club. On the summer afternoon I visited, I was greeted at the entrance by a goldendoodle. Favreau, materializing behind the animal, said: “This is Lovett’s dog, Pundit — the thing that we hate and the thing that we’ve become.”

The office, like the company itself, was still very much a work in progress. An entire wall was covered with “A Beautiful Mind”-style scribbles about “webseries,” “daily micropods” and “chat convos” — the handiwork of Tanya Somanader, who was the director of digital rapid response in the Obama White House and is now Crooked Media’s chief content officer. “This,” she said, pointing at the wall and summoning as portentous a tone as she could muster, “is how you build a media empire.”

The self-mockery about Crooked Media’s ambitions belies how outsize those ambitions are. In addition to “Pod Save America,” the company now has six other podcasts and plans to roll out at least two more soon. It has hired two producers, one from MTV and the other from the Oprah Winfrey Network. In October, it poached a New Republic writer to helm its website. A nationwide “Pod Save America” tour, Crooked Media’s first serious stab at live events, has so far played to sold-out theaters in seven cities. For the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race, Crooked Media is hoping to host candidate forums and debates.

Acutely aware of the perils of their new operation resembling the old political-media boys’ club, the decidedly bro-ish “Pod Save America” hosts have slanted Crooked Media’s growing podcast slate toward non-white-male hosts, and the company’s top two executives are women. “Ideally what we’re trying to build is a media company that’s not about one show, ‘Pod Save America,’ but a whole bunch of new shows that are not living and dying by the latest tweet,” Vietor told me.

Still, the one show is serving them awfully well. An executive at another podcasting company told me that assuming standard industry rates, Crooked Media is most likely bringing in at least $50,000 in advertising revenue for each episode of “Pod Save America” — which at two episodes a week is about $5 million a year. That has allowed the company to turn away the many investors who have approached it. Peter Chernin, whose Chernin Group acquired a reported 51 percent stake in the media company Barstool Sports last year, was one of them. “I think it’s more unusual than standard to turn down investors,” Chernin told me, “but it’s been very smart on their part.”

Chernin was the president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation when the company enlisted Roger Ailes to get Fox News off the ground in the late 1990s, and he sees some parallels between the conservative cable channel and Crooked Media. “This was true of Roger: It’s not just a business for these Crooked Media guys, it’s a calling,” he told me. “The real execution challenge is about authenticity. Does it feel authentic to the audience? They certainly have that going for them.”

Few things are as inauthenticity-prone, however, as the political-pundit business. On a Saturday morning in July, “Pod Save America” traveled to the Pasadena Convention Center for Politicon, a two-day event that has been hailed as the “Comic-Con of politics,” in which several thousand political junkies pay $80 apiece for the opportunity to see their favorite cable-news talking heads in the flesh. When the Politicon organizers first approached them about appearing, the “Pod Save America” hosts recoiled at the idea — “Some of these people are despicable,” Lovett complained to the organizers about the other invitees — but they eventually reconsidered. After all, they had a brand to promote.As they stood at the threshold of the Politicon greenroom, the “Pod Save America” hosts looked like patients about to go into surgery. “I’d rather stay out here as long as possible,” Vietor whispered. Inside, Ann Coulter — flanked by a couple of cops who were providing security — marked her territory, while the Coulter wannabe Tomi Lahren paraded around with a camera crew in tow. In one corner, the Republican rogue Roger Stone held court. In another, Chris Cillizza of CNN dispensed conventional wisdom. The Crooked Media guys mostly talked among themselves.

Then Vietor and Lovett spotted Bill Kristol, the founding editor of The Weekly Standard and a neoconservative boogeyman to liberals during the George W. Bush presidency, who emerged as one of the most forthright conservative critics of Trump in 2016. They introduced themselves and fell into conversation about the 2008 election. “You guys had a good team,” Kristol said. “It seems like another era: Hillary and Obama debating the intricacies of whether you could do health care reform without a mandate or with a mandate.”

“The primary was about whether the IRGC.” — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — “should be a terrorist group!” Vietor marveled.

Soon, their discussion turned to the Trump administration. “It’s so unbelievable that these guys are trying to run anything,” Kristol lamented. “This level of total insanity is terrible.”

“You know what?” Lovett told Kristol. “I like you better lately. It’s like we’re together to fight the aliens.”

“It’s like we’re all defending the Earth!” Kristol said.

“But at some point the aliens will leave,” Lovett reminded him. “And then we’ll just be sitting at the same table being like, ‘Oh, right, we hate each other.’ ” # # #

[Jason Zengerle is a contributing writer for the Times magazine and the political correspondent for GQ. In 2015, Zengerle has joined Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ) as a political correspondent. Previously a contributor to GQ, he has also served as senior editor for The New Republic and senior staff writer for POLITICO. In addition to joining GQ, Zengerle also joins New York magazine as a contributing editor. He received a BA (political science) from Swarthmore College.]

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