Former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor are launching a new company after their podcasting in 2016 failed to elect Hillary Clinton president.
Their new company, called Crooked Media, seeks to counter President-elect Donald Trump and will offer another podcast called Pod Save America.
During Obama's first term, Favreau and Lovett were speechwriters, while Vietor served as the president's national security spokesman and assistant press secretary. The three Obama bros launched a podcast in March called Keepin' it 1600 and amassed 400,000 listeners by Election Day. As the New York Times pointed out, the show mainly consisted of expletives and descriptions of Trump as "insane."
As they admitted to the Daily Beast, the group, like the rest of the crooked media, predicted Clinton would easily defeat Trump.
In Crooked Media's mission statement, they say they will focus more on advocacy and less on punditry. However, the podcast will still be "a no-bullshit conversation about politics where you can laugh, cry, scream, ridicule us daily, share your ideas, and hopefully decide that you want to help fix this mess too."
They told the Daily Beast that the title Crooked Media was an attempt to "take back" a phrase from Trump, who often assails the media for being biased against him:
Deciding to call their venture Crooked Media was the result of "10,000 text messages back and forth between the three of us," Vietor says of the "tongue-in-cheek" moniker. "We take this work very seriously, we take the issues very seriously. We don’t take ourselves seriously." It is their attempt to "take back" a phrase that Trump used to smear the press during his campaign — and will no doubt continue to wield as a weapon against his critics once in office.
"One lesson from Donald Trump is, name things after something Donald Trump says and you’ll get attention," Favreau adds, laughing. "We didn’t want to send a message that we’re starting this company only in opposition to Donald Trump. It’s much bigger than that. But I think that Trump obviously looms large for us and everyone else right now."
"We’re doing this because we care about these issues and we care about talking about these issues in a way that would perhaps bother somebody like Donald Trump," Lovett says. "And maybe earn the name ‘Crooked Media’ from him."
They added they will be "open and honest" about being "Obama guys," but that their partisan podcast will help "pierce the bubble" separating the right and the left.
Favreau and Lovett, since leaving the White House, have made frequent television appearances together to discuss the wonders of writing Obama's speeches and laugh about people losing their health insurance.
Lovett also co-created and co-wrote the NBC sitcom 1600 Penn, which was canceled after half of a season in 2013, with the critical consensus that it "doles out its jokes unevenly and lacks the cutting wit necessary to meet its satirical aims."
Favreau, struck by Lovett's show getting on the air, left the White House in 2013 to pursue his own dream of screenwriting. That did not pan out, but he did ultimately get the Keepin' it 1600 podcast deal with Bill Simmons' website, The Ringer.
Vietor memorably told Fox News host Bret Baier in 2014, "Dude, this was like two years ago," when discussing the changed talking points about the Benghazi terrorist attack.