The Trump Department of Justice says it has initiated a broad investigation of Netflix’s business practices and it’s planned $82.7 billion merger with Warner Brothers. The Trump DOJ’s pretense is that they’re just suddenly really concerned about media consolidation and monopoly power (you’re to ignore the U.S. right wing’s generational and indisputable quest to coddle and protect monopoly power across telecom, energy, air travel, banking, and countless other industries):

“Questioning how Netflix competes with rivals suggests the department is looking at whether its planned Warner deal could entrench its market power, or lead to a monopoly in the future. U.S. law gives enforcers broad power to oppose mergers that could lead to a monopoly.”

In reality, the Trump administration has made it extremely clear they’re hoping to scuttle the Netflix deal to help Larry Ellison acquire Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. If they can’t kill the deal, they aspire to at least leverage the merger approval process to force Netflix executives to further debase themselves before the Trump administration, which I suspect they’ll all be happy to do.

It’s part of a longstanding trend by Trumpism to pretend that they’re engaged in populist antitrust reform, claims historically propped up by a long list of useful idiots across the partisan spectrum, and parroted by a growing coalition of right wing propaganda outlets. This bogus populism helps obfuscate what’s really just some of the worst corruption America has ever seen (which is really saying something).

The original (paywalled) Wall Street Journal report (and this aggregated Reuters recap) dutifully help sell the claim that the DOJ is also “investigating” Ellison’s Paramount/Skydance, whose Warner Brothers acquisition bid was repeatedly rejected by the Warner board over worries about dodgy financing and Saudi money involvement:

“The WSJ reported that the DOJ is also reviewing Paramount’s proposed acquisition bid, which Warner Bros’ board unanimously rejected by labeling it “inadequate” and “not in the best interests” of shareholders.”

The outlets fail to remind you that there is generous reporting discussing how Larry Ellison and Trump have had extensive meetings discussing who Larry Ellison would fire on Trump’s behalf should he take control of CNN. They also fail to remind you that the right wing “press,” with Trump’s help, has been engaged in a broad effort to undermine the Netflix merger chances using false claims.

After Warner Brothers balked at Larry’s competing bid and a hostile takeover attempt, Larry tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that not going anywhere, Larry, MAGA, and the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 fame) have since joined forces to try and attack the Netflix merger across right wing media, falsely claiming that “woke” Netflix is attempting a “cultural takeover” that must be stopped for the good of humanity:

More recently that included scripted questions provided by the Heritage Foundation at a Congressional hearing, where lawmakers like Republican Senator Josh Hawley resorted to bogus trans panic attacks to try and paint Netflix as some sort of vile leftist cabal.

As we keep noting, ideally a functional regulator would block all additional media consolidation, since these megadeals are consistently terrible for labor, consumers, and product quality (see: Warner Brothers entire corporate history since 2000).

That’s clearly not happening under a Trump administration that has lobotomized all key regulators. So ideally, while not great, Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is the best of a bunch of bad options. It’s arguably notably better than furthering Larry Ellison’s obvious plan to gobble up CBS, TikTok, and CNN, and turn what’s left of America’s already dodgy corporate media into Hungary-esque state television that lavishes hollow praise on our mad idiot king.

Because we’ve already let media consolidation run amok (thanks to the Trump administration’s attack on bipartisan media consolidation limits), our shitty corporate press is incapable of explaining to the public that the Trump DOJ inquiry into Netflix isn’t being conducted in good faith. It’s a perfect circle of greed, regulatory capture, and corruption that will ramp up in the weeks to come.

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🔥 OBAMA: “IMAGINE IF I HAD DONE ANY OF THIS… I say this not on a partisan basis. This has to do with something more precious — who are we as a country, and what values do we stand for?” 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/zSFKNzNDhR

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 4, 2025

Funny or not, these became the grounds for deciding which narratives were state doxa and which would fall under the umbrella of the “woke mind virus” or whatever term talking heads felt like using to dismiss thoughts that fell out of line. The thought must have been that these were brief detours on a moral arc that bends toward justice or that free speech and the circulation of ideas would ultimately be the disinfectant best suited for a nation dirtied by misinformation, propaganda and fake news. Maybe we just thought things would never get this bad. But it is getting a lot harder to deny facts, alternative or not, when they’re right in front of you.

A couple of months after Stephen Colbert got a delayed axing for sharing thoughts critical of Trump, the Jimmy Kimmel show has been indefinitely suspended after making a Charlie Kirk joke:

This is the most straightforward attack on free speech from state actors I've ever seen in my life and it's not even close. https://t.co/uMjEZkIpat

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 17, 2025

You can see the offending joke below:

The way this softass joke resulted in threats from Trump’s FCC chair and Jimmy Kimmel yanked from air should scare literally everyone. This isn’t even a Charlie Kirk joke. It’s a Trump joke. It’s a Republican joke. This is censorship. This is authoritarianism. This is fascism. https://t.co/KQlnZmvh2q

— chris(tine) (@ichris_tine) September 18, 2025

I know that it’s easy to point at this or that thing as partisan, but have we reached the point where you can get fired for pointing out that someone redirecting conversation to decor changes when asked about the death of a friend doesn’t exactly scream mourning a deep loss? Will Smith takes jokes about his wife better than Trump’s administration took this. What’s next? Getting fired for saying Trump was focused on the wrong hole in the ground because he went to a golf course instead of going to Charlie Kirk’s vigil? We’re Americans Goddammit it –the right to speak our minds without fear of government backlash is one of the most foundational aspects of our country’s mythos. And to think that all of this censorship is coming from the right: remember when they were the ones screaming that any state restriction meant that we were sliding down vaguely orientalist social credit scores and Communism? Because the internet does:

I ain’t know we was in North Korea https://t.co/uqldTxIxmf

— BASED SAVAGE (@crackcobain__) September 18, 2025

Think what you will about Jimmy Kimmel — he’ll always look a little lonely to me without Adam Corolla by his side — but what this late night comedy show’s “indefinite suspension” means for free speech is no laughing matter.

The details of that “suspension” only makes things worse. It looks like the show won’t be restored unless Kimmel does a great deal of ass kissing and pays tithe to Kirk’s family and Turning Point USA:

NEW: Sinclair Broadcast Group says it will air a one-hour tribute to Charlie Kirk on Friday across all of its ABC-affiliated TV stations. The special will air in the 11:35 p.m. time slot that is typically reserved for "Jimmy Kimmel Live." $SBGI pic.twitter.com/esTGsXjhGk

— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) September 18, 2025

Right wingers have already taken to the this-isn’t-actually-a-free-speech-issue grift because ABC ultimately made the decision instead of the FCC or Donald Trump, but the funny thing about the internet is that there is an archive of all the shit you’ve previously said:

Guess who wrote this https://t.co/5vQIZJK9It pic.twitter.com/BdTgCC9urQ

— Andrew Fleischman (@ASFleischman) September 18, 2025

Back to Obama’s point of imagining if he did this, here is JD Vance railing against the Biden administration for “encouraging private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth”and promising that things would be different under Trump:

JD Vance: "Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people...Under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square." (Feb. 2025) pic.twitter.com/cQWAIZzCV1

— Home of the Brave (@OfTheBraveUSA) September 18, 2025

Quite the difference a couple of months makes:

Here is JD Vance today calling on Republicans to call people's employers and get them fired if they are saying things about Charlie Kirk that they don't like. This is the first step in the GOP's weaponization of Kirk's murder to silence dissent. It won't be the last. https://t.co/4VWvg7StjM pic.twitter.com/j2qr5oguQu

— (((DeanObeidallah))) (@DeanObeidallah) September 15, 2025

This isn’t just blatant hypocrisy — this is jawboning. It is hard to think of a better textbook of example of quelling speech by removing someone’s speaking platform than what Donny Boy is trying to do here:

Trump: Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.

That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! pic.twitter.com/O28JCW3T0H

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 18, 2025

Despite the consequences of speaking out, we (thankfully) aren’t at the point that people are too afraid to speak out on the news. That said, no promise this doesn’t get CNN’s White House pass revoked again:

David Frum on Jimmy Kimmel: "This is not cancel culture because it's not culture. It's state repression. It's an order from the government. Here is the script, you must read, if you do not read it, you will be taken off the air." pic.twitter.com/RF7tiSZX4r

— Blue Georgia (@BlueGeorgia) September 17, 2025

You know things are bad when Tucker Carlson is ringing the same bell:

🚨 The Earth just tilted off its axis.

Tucker Carlson is now calling out Trump’s own regime, accusing it of using Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a pretext to abolish the First Amendment, round up Americans, and Nazify the country.

Yes. He said that. And he’s not wrong. pic.twitter.com/cy5oYXbJb4

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) September 17, 2025

Maybe the real bipartisan politics are the First Amendment violations we fight along the way?

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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What a lot of us lawyer types predicted is now extant: the blowback effect that those of us sitting in the cheap seats have been waiting for. Now clients are wondering about the tenacity of those firms. If they won’t fight for their own survival, how can those clients expect them to fight on their behalf? They are not only asking that question but starting to pull work back from those vaunted Biglaw firms. It’s hard to bite the hands that feed those firms while simultaneously giving free food to one who definitely does not need it.

 The Wall Street Journal thinks, and rightly so, that journalists write the first version of history. Never more so than as of January 20, 2025. What will historians think, with the leisure of retrospection, about these tumultuous times that have just begun? For a person who is inordinately concerned with his own public image (we called them “media hounds”), I wonder why 47 doesn’t seem to be concerned outwardly with how history will view him. His control of the narrative will not last forever.

As one who started as a journalist and has spent almost five decades as a lawyer, I am still fascinated by the intersection of journalism and law, never more than in the past 10 years with the rise of “fake news,” “unsocial media” (my phrase, I don’t know if anyone else uses it, but feel free to do so), and the inability of people to accept factual reality. Disinformation has never been higher, and trust in the media and other institutions has never been lower.

Long gone are the days when people trusted “Uncle Walter” or ”Huntley-Brinkley,” (Google them) and others. When Walter Cronkite returned after a tour of Vietnam and said that the war could not be won, LBJ responded that if Cronkite didn’t believe the war could be won, then he, LBJ, had lost middle America. LBJ then decided not to run for re-election in 1968.

Flash forward to today. No one believes anything that anyone says. In fact, reading about Cronkite’s remarks (and I remember them vividly as it was the height of the Vietnam war protest era), the AI summary of his remarks disclaimed that it “could contain mistakes” An admission of AI imperfection? Really?

We lawyers also value precision in facts. If you get facts wrong, then we are not trusted. It’s not just the facts anymore; it’s cases, too. Hallucinations live among us. If we don’t take the time to make sure the cases stand for the propositions we argue, and even more fundamentally, that the cases actually exist, then we are in, to use a nonlegal term, deep shit with clients, opposing counsel, and the court.

Has anyone (I’m looking at you legal ethics gurus) considered whether the deals cut between various Biglaw firms and Trump could run afoul of our professional responsibilities? Who is now the client of those Biglaw firms? The German Bar Association is cautioning its lawyers to be careful about potential conflicts. Who do the Biglaw firms represent? Their pre-existing clients or 47? A PRE question or two?

Is there Taco Tuesday behind bars? It doesn’t matter whether you prefer hard shells or soft tortillas. You should know that TACO is now an acronym for 47’s whirling dervish changes of mind. Perhaps Tom Girardi, the disbarred California lawyer who had been known for his trial prowess extracting huge dollars from various defendants, will have them on his prison menu. He starts serving a seven-year sentence in July for stealing from clients, along with other misdeeds. Yet another example of how the State Bar of California did its best Rip Van Winkle (Google it) impersonation for years. And do you think that the 86-year-old Girardi will actually serve any time in the clink? Your thoughts?

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com

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Because we live in hell, the share price soared by more than 1,500% in its first two days of trading. From its opening at $14 per share, by market close on Tuesday intrepid investors were shelling out $233 for a single share of Newsmax stock.

This brought Newsmax’s market capitalization close to $30 billion. In comparison, Fox Corp.’s current market cap is around $24.75 billion, despite having far more viewers than Newsmax (among other cable news channels, MSNBC and CNN also have Newsmax beat when it comes to viewership). It’s not even close either. According to Nielsen data, Newsmax averaged 309,000 prime-time viewers and 211,000 daytime viewers from December 30 to March 20, while Fox News averaged about 3.1 million and 2 million viewers, respectively, over the same period.

In case you were in danger of having this IPO make any sense at all, you should also keep in mind that Newsmax is a money-losing company facing several big lawsuits over the lies it tells on air. Though revenue was up compared to a year prior, the company lost $72 million over the course of 2024, and it is facing a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for false claims made about the 2020 election. Newsmax also previously settled a lawsuit brought by election tech company Smartmatic for $40 million, $20 million of which it has paid so far. The Dominion Voting Systems case is scheduled for trial later this month. Dominion received $787.5 million from Fox in a similar case.

The concept of a dramatically overvalued meme stock is nothing new. Yet, its latest iteration has taken on a markedly different flavor compared to the early 2021 GameStop short squeeze. At least many of the retail investors hyping GameStop’s security on social media claimed to have a noble purpose: holding long enough to blow up the positions of Wall Street short sellers who’d been pushing around the average Joe for long enough. With Newsmax, it’s become baldly cynical: get in, get out at just the right time so as to leave the guy behind you holding the bag.

There were not a ton of big short positions as Newsmax stock started trading (although there surely are some now that the share price took off like it did). Additionally, any investor would look at an IPO much differently than they’d view a flagging legacy company like GameStop. No, Newsmax is not the next GameStop: it’s the next Trump Media & Technology Group.

Trump Media, owner of the president’s boring social media platform Truth Social, went public last March. Like Newsmax, the only things Trump Media seems to do really well are promote lies and lose tremendous amounts of money. That didn’t stop Trump Media shares from initially surging, albeit at a much more modest pace than those of Newsmax.

Publicly available Trump Media shares peaked two days after their debut at $61.96 on March 28, 2024. They never reached those heights again. At market close on April 1, 2025, a single Trump Media share cost just $20.26.

Sure, Trump inspires an irrational fervor in some of his most ardent supporters, and a portion of the initial surges in both Trump Media stock and Newsmax stock can be attributed to that. Mostly, though, the Main Street traders piling into right-wing meme stocks know exactly what they’re doing.

These people don’t really think that Newsmax is worth more than Fox News with one-tenth the viewership. They do realize, though, that meme stocks can generate a substantial amount of wealth for those who get the timing right — at the expense, of course, of those who don’t.

For there to be a few big winners on a meme stock, there have to be a lot of small losers. If you are a hardcore right-wing news junkie who bought into the Newsmax IPO believing that the share price really should be something like $233, I would recommend that you think over which of these two groups you are in. Don’t take too long though.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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But that’s not actually the reason they just cut off the SEC’s Westlaw access. And while on the surface, the canceled contract looks like another ill-conceived cost cutting measure from Musk’s bumbling speedrun through the federal budget, the reality appears to be much dumber.

So, in the parlance of our times, “Shot.”

The US State Department is forcing all of its employees to cancel subscriptions to any Trump-unfriendly media. pic.twitter.com/QTDENWiq9g

— Dave Keating (@DaveKeating) February 19, 2025

Yesterday, we learned that the word had gone out to executive agencies to purge all access to a variety of media that don’t meet the administration’s editorial standards. It’s a vague book burning but the running theme seems to be publications that say things that hurt Trump’s feelings. The New York Times won’t renounce that Pulitzer they won reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia, the country he’s currently claiming Ukraine attacked for some reason. Or the Associated Press who refuses to stop calling it the Gulf of Mexico just because that’s actually what it’s called. Let’s just pause to appreciate that we’ve now reached a stage of epistemic collapse where The Economist — a publication that denounced city sewers as creeping socialism — branded as a leftist rag.

Note the inclusion of Reuters.

And so, as sure as the night follows the day, may we present “Chaser.”

View the original article to see embedded media.

Yeah, maybe this is just about “media contracts,” but in light of the other report it seems likely the administration saw “Reuters” and starting purging agencies of everything in the Reuters family. Including the ubiquitous research tool.

Make America Shepardize Again!

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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You know this is true in litigation: The other side in a lawsuit takes a stupid position. You explain why the idea is stupid. The other side stands by the stupid position until you brief the argument and are about to present it to a judge. The other side realizes that it’s about to be publicly exposed as a moron, and the other side abandons the stupid argument.

This idea also applies to public fights, such as political fights over public policy issues. Politicians and parties will take a stupid position until their position is about to be made public. At that point, they abandon the stupid position.

Unfortunately, in our current world of political silos, it’s no longer possible to make an issue public.

Take, for example, Donald Trump’s request that the Senate go into recess to allow him to make recess appointments of Cabinet secretaries and thus avoid the need for confirmation hearings. This request is transparently stupid. If it were possible to cause the public to focus on the issue, any reasonable person would see that Trump’s position is stupid, and Trump would abandon the request. But it’s no longer possible to make the issue public, so Trump will never abandon the argument.

Why is Trump’s request silly? Here are just two reasons. First, the United States Constitution requires that the Senate give advice and consent about certain Executive Branch appointees. Since the Constitution requires this, the president should not ask the Senate to ignore its constitutional obligations, and no self-respecting senator would consider doing this. (Every senator did, after all, give an oath to support the Constitution.) Law-abiding senators would explain to Trump that the Constitution requires the Senate to advise and consent on appointments; the Senate cannot go into recess for the express purpose of abdicating its constitutional duty.

Second, the merits of political arguments can often be judged by hypothetically switching the positions of the political parties involved. Suppose that it were not a Republican president, Trump, who was asking the Senate to ignore its constitutional duty, go into recess, and let the president make his appointments unencumbered. Suppose instead that it were a Democratic president — say, Biden — who asked the Republicans in the Senate to go into recess to permit him to make his appointments unencumbered.

Everyone knows how that would go: The Republicans in the Senate would be up in arms. They’d howl that the Constitution requires them to advise and consent on appointments. Biden’s outrageous request was an obvious power grab to allow him to staff the Executive Branch with incompetent loyalists to achieve partisan ends! It’s an outrage that Biden would even suggest such a thing, and there’s no way that Republicans would consent!

See?

Trump’s request that the Senate go into recess to allow recess appointments is on its face absurd. If the argument were about to be made public, Trump would concede the point rather than defend this idiocy before all of America.

The difficulty is that Trump’s argument can no longer be put before the public to reveal how silly it is. This column, for example, appears in an online publication that generally leans to the left. Conservatives will never read this column and thus will never see Trump’s point exposed for the foolishness it is.

Other outlets may repeat my argument, but those outlets will be along the lines of The New York Times, the Washington Post, and similar liberal media. Neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Post nor Breitbart News will ever repeat these points.

Nor will the algorithms controlling online access to information permit the argument to be spread. The Facebook and TikTok feeds of conservatives, designed to spoon-feed people only arguments with which they agree, will weed out my points.

Rather, conservative outlets will continue to say, “Trump won the presidential election in a landslide. He’s now asked that the Senate use a procedural vehicle to let him make the appointments that he wants without interference by others. Of course the Senate should heed that request. Trump has the right to appoint the people he wants without Senate interference.”

The United States will continue to see people pursue silly arguments until we can once again allow those silly arguments to be considered by the public generally. When sources of information are put into silos, people are not forced to abandon silly arguments, and proponents of silly arguments do not pay the price of being publicly exposed as fools.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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The company’s satirical CEO Bryce P. Tetraeder explained that the decision was “an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.”

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

The guys who brought you the recurring headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” will now own the media outlet used by smear merchant Alex Jones to defame the families of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. And the purchase was financed, at least in part, with a multi-year advertising commitment from Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun violence prevention non-profit which is itself financed by Michael Bloomberg.

In addition to The Onion, through its parent company Global Tetrahedron, the deal includes the Sandy Hook plaintiffs who filed in Connecticut (but not the Texas plaintiffs).

From bankruptcy trustee Christopher Murray’s notice of the successful bid:

In his reasonable business judgment, the Trustee has designated the joint bid by Global Tetrahedron, LLC (“Global Tetrahedron”) and the Connecticut Families as the Successful Bid at the IP Assets Auction and Global Tetrahedron and the Connecticut Families, jointly, as the Successful Bidder.

“By divesting Jones of Infowars’ assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones’s ability to do more harm,” their attorney Chris Mattei told the New York Times.

Jones appears to be taking it well.

View the original article to see embedded media.

Earlier this week, he seemed optimistic that a fellow troll would pony up the cash to buy the business in the bankruptcy sale of his assets and allow him to continue to run it. CNN reported that one of his allies had made a “seven figure offer” for the bankruptcy assets. But it would appear that Jones, who notably tried to buy off the Sandy Hook plaintiffs with a measly $10 million, undershot again.

It’s not clear whether this ally was the backup bidder First United American Companies, LLC, nor is it clear who is the AC that this LLC is FU-ing. FUAC is represented by a Texas attorney named Walter Cicack, who previously represented Charlie Cicack, whom the New York Times described as “an entrepreneur who had sold products through Free Speech Systems in the past.” Charlie Cicack was deposed last year in the now-dismissed FSS bankruptcy.

FUAC is furious, and moved for an emergency hearing today “to address the apparent defects in the sale process, including changing the procedures, lack of transparency, and inaccurate disclosures to interested bidders.”

“Because the value of the assets is in the process of being destroyed at this very minute, FUAC requests a status conference today if the court’s calendar can accommodate it,” Walter Cicack added on behalf of whoever is throwing middle fingers behind that LLC. The hearing is at 2:30CT, and available to listen to through US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez’s public access line.

As CEO Bryce P. Tetraeder would say, “All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.”

Alexander E. Jones and Official Committee Of Unsecured Creditors [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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So let us then deal with the plain facts. Watson, a former media personality and Goldman Sachs alum, is facing 37 years in prison after being convicted of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

That last one, of course, was a doozy: Watson’s co-founder and eventual cooperating witness, Samir Rao, impersonated (badly) a YouTube executive in a failed effort to secure a $40 million investment from their former firm. This, a jury decided after hearing from both Rao and Watson, was not the result of nervous breakdown on Rao’s part (as Ozy explained at the time) nor an individual initiative on Rao’s part to help Ozy survive “at all costs and by any means necessary,” as Rao himself put it, with Watson being none the wiser, but instead a non-star turn planned and executed by both men in tandem. (Rao has pleaded guilty to his part in the Ozy fraud.)

Of course, Rao and Watson weren’t the only ones taking the stand during the month-long trial. Prosecutors also saw fit to force Google CEO Sundar Pichai to fly across the country to confirm that his company never contemplated buying Ozy, for $600 million or any other amount, even though Watson agreed that no such offer was ever on the table. Of course, prosecutors say Watson told other potential investors that Google had sought to buy the company, much as Rao allegedly turned a potential $25 million investment from Alphabet in exchange for luring Watson away from Ozy into a done-deal $30 million contribution to a fundraising round to convince others to invest in said fundraising round.

Watson continues to deny all criminal wrongdoing. That said, there are a few things he’d probably do differently in retrospect.

Watson, who hosted multiple Ozy shows and podcasts, told jurors he concentrated on the company’s content, staff, vision and partnerships more than on “making sure that every decimal is in the right place.” He said he traveled about four days a week and left finance and operations largely to Rao and others.

“I couldn’t be as hands-on as I probably wanted to be,” he testified.

Former TV host Carlos Watson convicted in trial over collapse of Ozy Media startup [CNBC]
Carlos Watson, Founder and Former CEO of Ozy Media Inc., Convicted of Multi-Million Dollar Fraud Scheme [press release]

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Carlos Watson, founder of Ozy Media, was arrested for allegedly lying about the company’s financials to investors. In touting the action, Peace wrote a press release that reads:

“As alleged, Carlos Watson is a con man whose business strategy was based on outright deceit and fraud — he ran Ozy as a criminal organization rather than as a reputable media company. Investment fraud undermines confidence in our nation’s markets and investors and makes it harder for honest businesses to compete. Our office and the Department of Justice have made it clear that prosecuting corporations and their corrupt executives who flagrantly violate the law are top priorities.”

But Watson is seeking the removal of the release from the U.S. Attorney’s website, saying it could impact the fairness of his trial.

The judge seems sympathetic, saying grouping Watson with “corrupt executives who flagrantly violate the law” could impact the trial.

As reported by Law360:

“Despite being styled as a statement of law enforcement priorities, rather than a comment on the defendants themselves, this language (and its placement) directly implies that Watson’s and Ozy’s indictment reflects these priorities in action,” Judge Komitee wrote. “Accordingly, this statement, too, walks the line between legitimate and illegitimate commentary.”

Ultimately, Komitee reserved judgment on the motion, but indicated what he’s thinking on the matter:

Judge Komitee on Monday reserved a decision on the motion but said the comment that Watson ran Ozy Media “as a criminal organization rather than as a reputable media company” might be “gratuitously hyperbolic.”

“Even if the court was to presume, solely for the sake of argument, that all of the grand jury’s allegations are true, Ozy was not a Cosa Nostra family,” Judge Komitee wrote. “Indeed, the indictment describes Ozy Media as a business engaged in actual content dissemination: it was a media and entertainment company whose businesses included digital newsletters, television production, podcasts and live events.”

The judge went on to ask the government “to consider whether it wishes to excise or modify the language in light of the discussion above.” Which sounds like a request, but feels a lot like an order.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon 

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I know I can’t trust the mainstream media. I’ve been hearing since Sarah Palin’s assault on the “lamestream media” that any reputable source of news is not trustworthy.

I know I can’t trust the thousands of government employees officiating over elections in the United States. Those bastards all conspired to make it look as though Trump didn’t win the presidency in 2020.

I know I can’t trust academia. The universities are all left-leaning pillars of corruption.

I know I can’t trust grand juries. Two of them have indicted Donald Trump, for heaven’s sake.

I know I can’t trust petit juries. One of them has held that Trump is liable for sexual battery.

I know I can’t trust state prosecutors. Trump has been indicted.

I know I can’t trust federal prosecutors. The Department of Justice has been “weaponized” and Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is “deranged.” No one would trust those clowns.

I know I can’t trust any of the other government agencies.

The FBI can’t be trusted, of course. They’ve investigated Donald Trump over and over again.

The CDC lied about COVID.

The FDA approves vaccines that aren’t safe.

I can’t trust physicians. Those jerks tell me that I should be vaccinated against COVID.

I can’t trust any government officials. They’re all part of the deep state.

I can’t trust attorneys general in particular. Shoot — Republicans in the Senate tanked Merrick Garland’s chance to be on the Supreme Court. How could he ever be fair? And former Attorney General Bill Barr is a “gutless pig.” They’re all worthless.

I can’t trust current members of the Cabinet. Joe Biden appointed them. And I can’t trust Trump’s appointees either. John Bolton, for example, is “grossly incompetent and a liar.” Former White House chief of staff John Kelly was “born with a VERY small brain.” And who could possibly have appointed such morons as former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, former White House Counsel Ty Cobb, and all the rest of them? Liars, one and all.

I’m trying to find just one person whose word I can trust. One person of integrity. One person with vast knowledge of all public affairs. One person known for telling the truth and pursuing the national interest without fear or favor.

Like Diogenes, I’m searching for an honest man.

Oh, wait! There’s a guy who fills Truth Social with ungrammatical, all-caps rants! And he wears a red baseball cap! I think I’ll take his word against all others.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Well, the private equity firm that owns Forbes must be pretty desperate to be rid of it, because in spite of all of that significant outperformance, it’s willing to countenance parting with the company for the same $630 million. How desperate? This desperate:

In recent weeks, an offering document describing Forbes’s financials compiled by Citigroup has been circulated to media companies, including Yahoo….

Of course, Apollo Global Management was happy to overpay for Yahoo, so perhaps they’ll be happy to let Yahoo overpay for Forbes. That said, they might have a bidding war on their hands: We can think of a couple of people with a serious interest in overhauling the way Forbes does things (well, one thing), including a budding media mogul with some SPAC problems of his own.

Forbes Explores Sale After SPAC Deal Collapses [NYT]

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Jason Peltz, 39, entered the plea in Brooklyn federal court to two counts of insider trading and tax evasion a year after initially pleading not guilty…. Peltz also provided a tip about the takeover bid to a reporter, who wrote an article about the offer that resulted in an increase in Ferro's stock price, [U.S. Attorney Breon] Peace's office said on Tuesday.

Prosecutors did not name the journalist or the media outlet, but Reuters and other media have identified him as Ed Hammond, a deals reporter with Bloomberg in New York, based on a review of articles mentioned in Peltz's 2021 indictment. Hammond is not accused of any wrongdoing.

Totally unrelated to the above, if you’ve got some advance news of something big, tips at dealbreaker dot com. Just sayin’.

New York man admits to insider trading following takeover tip [Reuters]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

In the world of media, there is nothing more valuable than a passionate audience.

And it’s hard to get more passionate than the surf community - just ask those who brave brisk water temps for a solid Nor’easter swell. In New Jersey. In January.

The News: Yesterday The Chernin Group announced a $30 million investment into Wavetrak, the company behind surf forecasting site Surfline.

Shredding The Details
The 25-year-old, Huntington Beach, Calif.-based Surfline has a scrappy history. The company started as a $1.99 dial-up service where surfers could call and receive a surf forecast over the phone.

Fast forward a few decades and Surfline is a global operation:

• With more than three million users, the site utilizes its 35-year-old data set and a team of experts to forecast surf conditions across the globe.
• Surfline has live, HD cameras at 700-plus locations and publishes award-winning editorial content.

Premium users pay $9.99 per month for access to proprietary surfing forecasts, exclusive original content and perks like discounts on surf retailers.

The brand portfolio includes Surfline, Magicseaweed, Coastalwatch, Buoyweather and FishTrack. If it involves the ocean - Wavetrak has an interest.

The Strategy
For Chernin, the deal fits squarely into a pattern of niche media investments:

• Chernin reportedly invested $25 million over two years for a controlling stake in Barstool Sports, which has since soared in value and completed a deal with Penn National Gaming.
• It also took a majority stake last year in Food52, a home and food site, for $83 million.

Going forward the company will be led by Kyle Laughlin, a big-name hire with recent experience at Amazon and Disney.

The Takeaway: Hopefully Chernin doesn’t get wiped-out on its investment.

William Katz, an analyst who covers Apollo shares at Citigroup Global Markets, said the issue was so-called headline risk: the chance that Mr. Black shows up again and again in negative news reports.

“It will come down to the nature of those headlines,” Mr. Katz said.

The Times' meta-analysis of headlines about headlines doesn’t seem to offer much hope that the nature of those future headlines will be much different from those already leading all of those column inches and online stories about why Black paid Epstein at least $50 million long after Epstein’s illicit sexual proclivities became a matter of public record or why Black would visit Epstein on his private sex-trafficking island or why Black would continue to have any relationship with a disgraced man whose primary business seemed simply to be having relationships at all. In fact, they may be getting worse, insofar as investors and potential investors have been moved by said headlines from shrugging their shoulders to covering their asses, generating new, unfavorable headlines.

“Investors are concerned about reputational risk,” Kenneth Worthington, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase who covers the company’s shares, wrote in a client note….

Most clients who have given money to Apollo to invest appear to be taking a wait-and-see attitude…. But in the world of private equity investing, even that can have an impact if it means a client chooses not to commit any new money.

One pension fund that invests with Apollo, the $63 billion Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, said on Wednesday that it had told Apollo it would not invest additional money with the firm until the review was complete…. Other pension funds — in Texas, California, Illinois and Ontario — did not go as far, but acknowledged that they were watching the investigation closely.

Unfortunately for Black and Apollo, however, this is guaranteed not to be the last unwanted headline of the week.

Apollo will report its quarterly earnings on Thursday, and an analyst note from investment firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods said the effect of Mr. Black’s dealings with Mr. Epstein on client relations will be a “focal point” of the private equity firm’s earnings call.

Apollo Clients Await Inquiry’s Findings on Chief and Jeffrey Epstein [NYT]

"The Wall Street Journal has opposed President Trump's trade policies going back to 2016. When The Mainstream Journal starts criticizing president trump and myself, that's when we'll worry" 

Ya burnt, WSJ! Because Navarro and his real dad Donald Trump don't give a shit what you have to say! In fact, they only care about what's written in The Mainstream Journal, a publication that does not exist, has never existed and would actually be a great nickname for The Wall Street Journal. So, suck it! 

And he wasn't done dropping the hammer on the libtard snowflakes at the NewsCorp building, just a few floors above where Maria was broadcasting! He had more fire to spit!

"WSJ will write what it writes. It doesn't sound a lot different from The People's Daily in terms of the news that it puts out."

DAAAMN, Pete, you nasty. The WSJ is basically like a state-run socialist newspaper parroting the message of the regime. It's so true! Especially in this case when it's explicitly critical of both the American and Chinese regimes...

Wait, this reminds us of the time that Navarro felt triggered by a Citi note to clients warning that tariffs from his border adjustment tax proposal would lead to problems for US retailers, and Navarro fired back on television that Citi was essentially a tool of the mainstream liberal media. That was funny because he had everything so ass-backward. You know, like today...and literally every day.

It's becoming pretty clear that Peter Navarro is not really clear on how insults or Socialism work.

The Broncos are so entrenched as Denver’s most important sports institution, there has been an AM radio station there for the past two years called Orange & Blue 760 AM. That’s right, year-round, non-stop talk about a team that plays 50 hours’ worth of games in a calendar year. At least, there was such a station, until this week, as the Denver Post reported the arrival of “patriotic rock and country music” on the station to replace what had to have been truly riveting 24-hour coverage of a team that has gone 11-21 since Orange & Blue’s launch in 2017.

Not having a station officially devoted to tracking their every move doesn’t mean the end of Broncos coverage on Denver radio. Far from it, as the website for 104.3 The Fan on Thursday evening had the look of a Broncos fan site, complete with a “Countdown to Training Camp 2019: Road to Redemption,” and one stray item about the Rockies. 

If you listen to The Fan on a weekday between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., you will hear a show hosted by a former Broncos player.

What the demise of Orange & Blue – which had a partnership with the Broncos and featured exclusive interviews with organization honchos – indicates is that there is a limit to the Denver market’s passion for a team that might be in better shape these days if Homer Simpson were really running the show. The Rockies have been to the playoffs the last two years, while the Nuggets and Avalanche were just in the second round of their respective playoffs, with bright futures ahead for each, and the Broncos in this offseason traded for Joe Flacco, who lost his job to a rookie last season and has not been actually good since about a year before Donald Trump called him “very elite.”

Much as it clearly stinks for the good people who worked at Orange & Blue, for iHeartMedia, which owns 760 AM in Denver, this isn’t that big of a deal. They took a swing on an all-Broncos station, missed, and will reprogram the station as they see fit from now until they hit on something that draws an audience. For the Broncos, though, it should be a wake-up call, especially as transplants without an inborn allegiance to the team flock to Colorado, that this isn’t Green Bay where you can coast on being the only game in town for generations. But even for the Packers and other sports businesses who feel like a part of the fabric of the culture that cannot be torn, well, did you see the ratings for the MLB All-Star Game this week?

Then came Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. People started to realize they'd rather pay a few bucks a month for a streaming service than overpay for the privilege of sitting on the phone with Comcast support for hours every few months. Cord-cutting has gained serious steam with more than 10 million subscribers leaving pay TV since 2012.  Many people have simply added streaming services to supplement their traditional TV packages.

These days, everyone is rushing to get into the streaming market. Disney, NBC and Apple have all announced plans to launch streaming services by 2020. Now AT&T is entering the market. Surely there will be more to come.

Meanwhile, Netflix will be losing two of its most popular shows. 'The Office' is going to NBC's service while 'Friends' is going to AT&T's. With the frequency these shows are moving between streaming services, you'll have to keep adding them as they pop up to get all of the content that was once available on only a handful.

While you could subscribe to all these services and still pay less than the average cable TV bill of $107 per month, at this rate, we may go full-circle and end up where we started before the cord-cutting began. With the way old technologies such as vinyl records and cassette players are returning, it wouldn't be surprising if in a few years people realize how practical the old way of watching TV was all along and return to traditional satellite and cable TV.

Get more Hipster Trader on Twitter @Hipster_Trader

Wait, sorry, that is actually Chase Coleman III. 

Right, Bloomberg?

Born into New York aristocracy and educated at fine schools, Charles Payson “Chase” Coleman III was all of 25 when the hedge fund legend Julian Robertson handed him $25 million to start his own fund.

At 29, he married a chemicals heiress who’d been featured in the documentary “Born Rich.” A gifted athlete, he’s been known to catch a few waves in the morning near his $19 million Hamptons home before helicoptering to his Manhattan office. He’s surfed with world champion Kelly Slater, invested with Snoop Dogg in a cannabis company and he’s almost a scratch golfer.

Today, at 44, Coleman sits astride a $30 billion behemoth, Tiger Global Management. Bets on public and private technology companies have helped him amass a $4.6 billion fortune and made him the youngest financier among the world’s 500 richest people, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

This is a fun piece of profile writing that could also do double duty as the new intro to Bernie Sanders' stump speech.

...Coleman, who grew up on the north shore of Long Island, the son of a lawyer and an interior designer. A descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, he attended Deerfield Academy, the elite boarding school in Massachusetts, and went on to co-captain the lacrosse team at Williams College.

“I’ve known Chase since he was a young boy on Long Island and a good friend of my son Spencer,” [Julian] Robertson said. So it was natural that his first hedge fund job was at Tiger Management.

We have never appreciated the use of the word "natural" more than we do in this context. 

But before you populist Warrenista types get too wound up over meeting this human personification of the causes and effects of America's growing wealth gap, just try to remember that every life holds some darkness:

Not everything’s perfect, though, of course. For one thing, the firm may actually have too much money—something Coleman himself addressed recently. 

“It’s not easy to manage a big pool of capital, and I’m challenged every day,” Coleman said last week at a Morgan Stanley conference, according to people who attended the event.

See? Coleman is less like a Bret Easton Ellis character comparing business cards while putting his victims' body parts in the freezer,  and more like a John Cheever character on the verge of being emotionally broken by the crushing expectations of his station, about to be murdered in a pool by his bitter, pregnant mistress/secretary. Either way, he's essentially a character of meta-fiction.

What we love most about this post is that the everyday Bloomberg reader will digest it and enjoy getting a peek into the life of a rather opaque bold-faced name in the hedge fund game who has managed to remain profitable through the bad times, but if this story ever makes it into the hands of a HuffPost editor...stand back and behold the Millennial class war word bluster.

But this is where we need to step back and point out that Chase Coleman III appears to be a very good hedge fund manager:

In the early 2000s, Coleman and partner Scott Shleifer added private investments to the mix, realizing before many of their peers that they might find higher returns outside of public markets.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Coleman’s hedge fund lost 26%, followed by a paltry 1% gain the next year. The young investor regrouped, vowing to return to his tech roots and avoid industries where politics or macro events could interfere.

Investors say his success comes from concentrated bets, pressing winners and quickly cutting losers—skills he learned from Robertson. He told the Morgan Stanley crowd that the person who does best is the one with the panic button farthest from his keyboard.

And if you're left debating "Is his talent a byproduct of his privileged upbringing and the relationships he has made living life in a manner that even the elite would see as elite?" our answer would be "It doesn't really fucking matter if he returned 25% last year with an AUM around $30 billion."

This is finance, and the end result is really all that matters. Asset management is something of an outcome-based industry, making it hard for a shitty investor to be shitty and still hold assets in the low-to-mid eleven figures. Established relationships and inherited wealth are obviously huge factors in growing your future wealth and relationships, but Coleman's success is a little too monstrous to be explained away via the prism of "The One Percent."

So we'll just go ahead and reserve our impotent populist outrage for the next time some blue blood, born wealthy graduate of Exeter and [shudder] Middlebury who married a real estate heiress loses his ass after bragging to Cheddar about how he's ingeniously shorting the VIX. Because, as much fun as it is to behold a living caricature like Chase Coleman III, it's important to remember one key thing about caricatures like Chase Coleman III:

Coleman, who associates describe as reserved and a quintessential WASP, declined to comment for this article.

Exactly.

The Charmed Life of a Young Tiger Cub With a $4.6 Billion Fortune [Bloomberg]

US private equity giant KKR wants to take the owner of Business Insider private in a deal that values the European publishing company at nearly $8 billion.

KKR (KKR) on Wednesday offered investors in Axel Springer €63 ($71.40) per share in a deal that has support from the company's largest shareholder, Friede Springer, and CEO Mathias Döpfner.

"Axel Springer" ring any bells? Well maybe because...

Axel Springer, which owns a range of publications, including top German tabloid newspaper Bild and the website Business Insider, has been under intense pressure from investors in recent months.

So, yes, Henry Kravis is about to own Business Insider, and the name of that website has changed forever.

KKR is buying the publisher of Business Insider and Bild in a $7.7 billion deal [CNN]

The story continued: “But MiLB is adamant that this memo will not be an attempt to prevent or significantly limit teams from posting highlights to their social media feeds. ‘Our goal in this is we want the most reach for our content to the most fans possible,’ said Katie Davison, MiLB’s senior vice president for digital strategy and business development.”

Fast forward to Thursday, and a Baseball America piece titled “Why We’re Not Posting MiLB Videos,” and…

“You can no longer find videos of prospects in Minor League Baseball games on BaseballAmerica.com or on Baseball America’s YouTube channel. That is because Minor League Baseball demanded Baseball America remove them all.”

Oh.

It would seem that if Minor League Baseball really wanted “the most reach for our content to the most fans possible,” demanding that a publication specializing in coverage of Minor League Baseball remove all videos of its product would run counter to that goal.

So, let’s go back to that Wednesday article and find out what may be happening here.

“The memo stems from a new formalized agreement between MiLB and Major League Baseball Advanced Media. … This offseason, MiLB and MLBAM came to a new agreement that codified what minor league teams are officially allowed to post in terms of videos of in-game action to social media sites. … It is worth noting that after regularly posting highlights to YouTube in past years, MiLB has not posted any highlights on YouTube this season.”

Minor League Baseball here is just following Major League Baseball’s lead, as this season has started with a sudden shift from MLB.com having a dynamic, expansive, shareable library of video highlights to a godawful mess. This follows a winter in which MLBAM laid off a dozen and a half people, the likely cause for the highlights MLB does make available getting captions like “Kyle Gibson In play, run(s) to Michael Conforto,” which is not a one-time error

Also, if you don’t have the right brand of TV, then MLB would like to say screw you, no baseball unless you hook up a Roku or Chromecast or something. Perhaps you don’t want to go to that trouble, or you find yourself blacked out of MLB coverage as a cord-cutter… well, too bad. Also, you’ll have way fewer opportunities to watch baseball on Facebook this year, which is probably for the best, but still, the people who run baseball are going out of their way to make it as hard as they possibly can for people to watch baseball.

At least when MLB and MiLB skimp on player salaries, it’s easy to understand why: simple greed, to the point where two elite pitchers, Craig Kimbrel and Dallas Keuchel, remain unsigned two weeks into the season. That’s taking things to the point of making the game worse, but not even close to being as self-destructive as purposely alienating paying customers of MLB.tv and people engaged enough with the minors to subscribe to Baseball America.

There have long been jokes about how people proclaim “baseball is dying” when revenues have never been higher and the list of the top 25 per-game attendance seasons is the last 23 seasons plus 1993 and 1994. Maybe it’s time to apologize for mocking that sentiment, because maybe baseball is dying – just not for the reasons the critics have said. The people who run the sport are doing it on purpose.

The genesis of this paradigm followed, a year or two behind, the genesis and evolution of social media. Its driving force is speed, and if it had an associated superhero, it would be The Flash. The time-honored marketing tools used in the conventional paradigm are useless, or even counterproductive in this new paradigm of instantaneous media awareness. They would be laughable, except for the tragedy which their uselessness brings with them: - the unraveling of all conventional media empires, properties, and families, which will ignite great turmoil throughout the business world

To illuminate the disparities between the old and new paradigms, let's look at an example in the “news” arena.

Conventional news media (television. newspapers, radio, signage, etc) requires time for the acquisition of content, editing, setup, and prep for broadcast or publishing, etc. This time requirement can stretch into hours, and sometimes, days.

In Social Media, posts are instantly available and nearly everything can be considered news: a fortuitous video of a dramatic event, an announcement by someone that they are getting married or divorced, or a public spat between two or more major influencers. Conventional news outlets have adapted well enough to scour social media trends and major Social Media sources and re-package them. The results of the repackaging, however, have created a sort of caricature of the news which is uncomfortable to watch and chillingly suggestive if its own demise.

For example: the blizzard in the US this past weekend occupied much of the News. A single 10-minute segment on Fox, representative of every outlet, consisted of a homemade video of a traffic accident, a few seconds long. It was of course sourced from social media. Parts of the short video were replayed as many as five times while two different reporters described the contents of the video as if the viewers were blind and could not see for themselves. Because of the time required for setup and broadcast, this tiny video had to stretch itself out to almost ten minutes. This, unfortunately, is the norm in conventional media news. And it can be no other way since conventional news is now largely secondhand news.

Anyone who spends substantial time on social media cannot help being aware of new or newsworthy events as soon as they log on. Notifications, posts from friends, etc. invariably inform the user within seconds about anything of interest. If the user wants to dig deeper it requires only a few clicks or searches to dig in. Contrast this with the TV watcher who is at the mercy if the outlet in terms of what he/she is allowed to peruse. And this is the crux of the matter: who controls the media experience?

Obviously, a subject's media experience is more satisfying and useful if the subject has the ability to choose which threads to follow or which tangents and exits to select. This ability leads to a deeper, more meaningful experience which enlarges the user's knowledge and expands their awareness. Those people not well connected to social media and who must rely on conventional media are largely frustrated by wanting to dig deeper into this or that but are constrained by the whims of conventional media.

There is no way that conventional media can bridge this chasm. Time is the constraint, and speed is on the side of social media.

John McAfee can be found on Twitter @officialmcafee

After what seemed like an epoch of consecutive days with markets ending in the red, the White House has finally unleashed it's smarmiest weapon in the fight against investor cynicism.

That's right, nerds, Larry Kudlow is back on television to pump up the stock market!

FoxNews managed to get Kuddles back on camera by [we presume] leaving a Paul Stuart gift certificate inside a tiger cage on the White House lawn. In the resulting interview with Bret Baier, we got our answer to our 48-hour long nightmare of slowly panicking over Larry's whereabouts.

Apparently, homeboy was recharging the old batteries, because we got Peak Kuddles last night.

According to Larry, trade talks with China are going swimmingly, the economy is strong as fuck, tariffs have actually been great for the US economy, free trade is bullshit, economic growth will cure every problem in America, the US tax code is actually too progressive, and he's going to put socialism on trial like OJ. 

None of it was logical but dammit if it didn't sound right. Larry Kudlow is magic and 4 long days of bearishness requires a real magician! 

And did it work? You bet your sweet ass it di-

Clearly, we just need more Larry Kudlow.

Game 2 on Wednesday night, in which the Dodgers mustered only three hits and runs were scored in only three of the 17 half-innings, lasted 3:12 and ended at 11:22 in the East. Then there was the historic Game 3, an 18-inning affair that started at 5:10 p.m. in Los Angeles and didn’t end until 12:30 on Saturday morning there, 3:30 in the East when Max Muncy finally homered to end it. The Red Sox won, 9-6, in a brisk 3:57 on Saturday night, then wrapped up the series in three hours in Game 5, the World Series climaxing at 11:17 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, after a game that was uninteresting unless you were excited to see Boston clinch.

“How can kids, even adults, stay up so late to watch the games? Why don’t the games start earlier?” Shaikin wrote. ��The Pacific Ocean? Yeah, well, never mind.”

The commissioner agreed with this sense of things, saying, “There is a little bit of East Coast prejudice in these questions. … I think L.A. is in the western time zone. We are cognizant of the fact that we are trying to serve those fans as well. I understand game times can be difficult. It’s hard when games finish late. By the same token, when you start games at 5 o’clock Eastern, it’s in the middle of the workday in L.A. That’s not quite right either.”

It would not be right for World Series games to start at 5:00 Eastern/2:00 Pacific, at least not on weekdays, but also nobody is asking for that. It is, however, a deleterious notion for the man in charge of Major League Baseball to look at what’s happening and not at least give some consideration to the idea that 8 p.m. starts on the East Coast are a bad idea.

The average game lengths in the past 10 World Series have ranged from 3:05 in 2010, when the Giants dismantled the Rangers in a five-game series that was generally forgettable, to 3:49 in 2015, when the Mets and Royals played two extra-inning games on the way to Kansas City’s five-game win. This one, thanks to Game 3, with two other long nine-inning contests, checked in at an average of 4:26.

You may have noticed in recent years that there’s been something of a discussion around baseball about the sport’s struggle to connect with young fans. It also happens that the World Series is played during the school year, and the most consequential parts of the biggest games baseball has to offer are happening after pretty much all kids in the east have gone to bed. Why would baseball be having trouble ingraining itself in kids’ lives? It’s a puzzler!

It’s not a matter of ignoring the West Coast, but a stark reality: 47 percent of the population of the United States is in the Eastern Time Zone. When games stretch past 11 p.m., out of prime time, you’re going to lose a significant chunk of the audience, particularly at this time of year. Eventually, it also comes to a point where adults figure they don’t even want to bother tuning in because they’re not going to see the end anyway.

The question that MLB has to ask itself is whether it’s better to have people in the most populous part of the country go to bed before games end, or have people in one of the four main time zones (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii, you’re gonna be kinda screwed here no matter what) still be working when they begin.

The answer should be easy. Radios do, after all, exist, and baseball happens to be the best sport in that media format. It’s immeasurably better for MLB to tell West Coast fans, sorry, you’re gonna have to listen to the first couple of innings and tune in when you get home, than to tell East Coast fans, sorry, you’re gonna have to choose between staying up for the end of the World Series game and getting a decent night of sleep.

That’s not East Coast bias, but simple business. Start the pre-game yakkery at 7:00 Eastern, get the games going at 7:30, and the average game will end somewhere in the 10:30-11:00 range, which, yes, is only 7:30-8:00 on the West Coast, where if fans are really that concerned about watching the whole game, they do have the option of a DVR – it’s not exactly like someone on the East Coast is going to record the remainder of a game and catch the conclusion in the morning.

What should be obvious is that the current way of doing things is not working: despite having the West Coast’s largest market and the East Coast’s most passionate one about a single team in the World Series, ratings for the first two games stunk. Maybe flatly dismissing an obvious concern of something in the neighborhood of half the audience as “East Coast prejudice” isn’t the greatest idea.

Given that those RSNs were valued (by a firm not totally disinterested in the proceedings) at $22.4 billion as a package, more than 30% of the total deal, there is an interesting situation ahead should Disney’s purchase go forward. In a 90-day period to divest, how much would Disney be able to extract from the very few potential purchasers, all of whom are either straight-up rivals of Disney or involved with the company in some kind of business already?

The only other chains of RSNs in the game are AT&T, Comcast, and Spectrum – all of which operate pay-TV systems, with Comcast standing out not only for its pursuit alongside Disney of the Fox assets, but for NBC Sports Network’s national competition with ESPN.

Would Disney’s best move to be to try to sell all 22 as a package? Or would it make more sense to try to break up the assets? In New York, for instance, might the Madison Square Garden Company have an interest in getting Yankees games back under its umbrella with the YES Network, or at least drive up the price of it for one of the three nationals? Is there a premium to be paid for Prime Ticket, home to the Angels, Clippers, Ducks, and Kings? At the same time, some of the Fox networks are interconnected – Fox Sports Oklahoma has Thunder games, while also taking Rangers and Stars coverage from Fox Sports Southwest, while Fox Sports Kansas City, the television partner of the Royals and Sporting KC, gets Thunder games from Fox Sports Oklahoma and Blues games from Fox Sports Midwest, which in turn brings Sporting KC action to the St. Louis area. What’s more, multiple Fox Sports channels currently get college football games from ESPN Plus. It’s a tangled web they weave, as they practice to… ah, there’s some word that finishes that phrase.

There’s still a lot to come in this deal, but one thing that should be assured is that some very rich people are going to get much richer, and when it’s all said and done, your TV bill is going to go up. Meanwhile, millions of people in southern California still can’t watch Dodgers games on television because Spectrum cannot come to an agreement with AT&T to get SportsNet LA on DirecTV.

This is the fifth year of that blackout, which makes it hilarious that the Department of Justice decided to step in and wag a finger at Disney over the purchase of regional sports networks, when the second-largest market in the country shows perfectly well that when television distributors own television networks, their business animus can leave consumers – who often do not have multiple choices for TV providers – in the lurch.

As many of you know now, Wall Street has a very unique social media scene and shortly after I wrote my article about the various Instagram accounts of finance, I was surprised with comments about how I missed out on one of the more interesting accounts, specifically @MrsDowJones.

Run by Haley Sacks, @MrsDowJones is one of the only accounts that focus on the female perspective of Wall Street. And, as I scrolled through her posts, I quickly discovered an extra X chromosome wasn't the only thing that separated the account from the herd. It also has a name and a face behind it. All of the other financial memers have to keep their identities a secret, as they work in banking and don’t want to risk their jobs. But, seeing as Haley Sacks, a 26-year-old Manhattan native, works in digital media, she is willing to show her face and publicly embody her persona. She’s not just commenting on Wall Street life through memes, she’s building her brand. And, with almost 30,000 followers, I think it’s working….

Because Sacks grew up around Finance (her Dad works on Wall Street), she has a unique understanding of the world. But some on The Street write off her posts because she’s never had a job in banking. "Some people chirp me for not working in Wall Street, like pretend I’m hiding it from my followers, but I’m really upfront about my background.” She doesn’t let it bother her, thanks to an innate understanding that it's just the nature of the industry.

Growing up with a Dad who works on Wall Street, finance terms were thrown around all the time but never defined for me. I was always confused but embarrassed to ask for definitions. I felt like an outsider- which I think is a big part of Wall Street culture. They sort of wanna confuse you so it remains exclusive.

And until October 3rd, 2017 Sacks didn't mind being an outsider herself,

So, instead of reading business news, I stuck to celeb gossip. But when Kim Kardashian got robbed in Paris, I realized things had gone too far lol. I was like, woah I need a break. And without any gossip mags to read, I decided to (gasp) reach for financial news instead. It was so random of me, but I sort of surprised myself with how much I took to it/ it shaped my world. Like duh I had to google so much at the beginning and there was a huge learning curve, but I realized that by understanding the markets, I was starting to understand the world. Like a store closing in my area suddenly meant the end of brick and mortar instead of just the end of a local business- it was shaping my perspective. Then I discovered blockchain and cryptos and soon I was full Gordon Gekko- with signaling groups blowing up my phone and alarms set so I could trade in the Chinese market.

And personal educational experiences inspired her to become the public figure she is today.

I feel like there’s gotta be a lot of people who feel as intimidated by finance as I once did, so I wanna help bridge the gap. The ethos of my brand is financial literacy. Like I literally wanna be Suze Orman meets Paris Hilton.

Sacks is right. Financial literacy education for people that don't work in finance is very hard to come across. Well, let me rephrase that: It's not hard to come across content, it's just hard to come across content that is both entertaining and education. Try it. Take a walk through finance YouTube and ask yourself, "Would the average millennial take a break from binge-watching Vine compilations to watch these videos?" The answer is most likely no.

Sacks has experience on YouTube, with a comedic video she previously posted reaching 600k views. And now she is using her producing talents to make finance videos instead. And as much as I love reading Investopedia, I must admit that the pure entertainment quality is superior to anything you'll find in the same field.

Haley Sacks is revolutionizing financial education for individuals outside of the field, and she continues to shape her brand. She's launched a merchandise line, has gone to financial conferences to cover the industry and even plans on launching a podcast before the end of the summer. Make sure to follow her on her journey to establish herself as, "The Cardi B of Finance Merch."

Intern's Note: Haley and I started off on a rough note because I didn't have a glass or rosé waiting for her upon arrival. However, I quickly learned she's able to forgive small mistakes (the best quality about someone if you're an intern like myself) and we had a wonderful conversation. Make sure to check out @MrsDowJones on Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter.

Leaving aside a truckload of easy jokes about the U.S. following Russia (this year) and Qatar (2022) in the hosting lineup, this surely will be a big deal for somebody. Maybe for people on the Manhattan side of the Lincoln Tunnel who want to walk through the streets selling bottles of water to drivers who are stuck in traffic on the day of the final?

The dirty not-really-a-secret of the World Cup is that it’s a tremendous boondoggle. Four years ago, Brazil got words of caution from the previous host, South Africa, but by then, of course, it was too late to avoid a future of stories like “Brazil’s World Cup Legacy Includes $550M Stadium-Turned-Parking Lot.” Qatar’s preparations for the next World Cup have basically been a humanitarian crisis. And the current event in the once and maybe future G-8 nation of Russia? No different.

Construction of facilities in North America won’t be so expansive – and therefore dangerous – but there also are questionable decisions like finally making the roof retractable at Stade Olympique in Montreal, at a cost of at least $200 million, 50 years after the stadium hosted the Olympics and two decades after the Expos left town because the building was such a dump. As Montreal city councillor Rosannie Filato noted, that waste of a quarter of a billion or so bucks already was going to happen anyway, though those were not quite her sentiments.

If infrastructure projects, no matter how poorly thought out, are happening regardless of the World Cup, then what’s the big deal?

Well, exactly.

In another place, the World Cup can be an event that an entire hosting country gets wrapped up in. That’s not to say it won’t be a big deal here – it was in 1994, and soccer is much more popular now than it was then in the United States, in part because of that event’s success. It’s just a reflection of what makes an event like the World Cup what it is here.

Consider the scenario for Wednesday, when Uruguay faces Saudi Arabia in a group play game at 11 a.m. Eastern, live from Rostov-on-Don, or maybe the 2 p.m. game between Iran and Spain, in Kazan. Think about the fun of ducking out of work for a long lunch with an oat soda or two, and how good of an event this is for bars and restaurants across America.

Now think about Uruguay vs. Saudi Arabia in a 7 p.m. game in Cincinnati, followed by Iran-Spain coming your way from Edmonton at 10 Eastern. The games will still be on television, of course, but you are more likely to be at home, flipping channels to see if the Mets’ bullpen can hold on to a lead (they won’t) or what’s happening on House Hunters (someone is considering not buying a house because they don’t like the way it’s painted).

In the cities hosting games, it will be exciting for fans to get a chance to go see World Cup games in person, and there will be some tourism benefits, but “hosting the World Cup” sounds a lot sexier than “hosting four or five soccer games between teams from randomly selected countries, requiring an astounding amount of expenditure on security and preparation for a stadium that may not even be full.

The World Cup is an outstanding television event. So is the Super Bowl. New York hosted that once, too, and it was just another thing that happened. That’s a far cry better than Qatar’s situation, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly good for anyone.

Shares of Netflix Inc. NFLX, +4.35% are up 2.4% in Wednesday trading after Goldman Sachs analyst Heath Terry raised his price target on the stock to $490 from $390. With his price target increase, Terry became the most bullish Netflix analyst among those tracked by FactSet.

In addition to instantly becoming the Adam Jonas of internet analysts, Terry is also the first person in our memory to raise a stock this joltingly hard on such a blue chip stock.

We are intrigued to see if this is all part of the new David Solomon-led Goldman. A virtual hotbed of pushing limits and making bold calls as EDM music pumps over the newly-installed speaker system and Marty Chavez prowls the halls shooting Red Bull out of a SuperSoaker imploring everyone to get rich or die trying.

We love Lloyd Blankfein as much as any Regular Joe, but if this is what Solomon's Goldman is gonna look like, December can't come soon enough.

[AIR HORN SOUND EFFECT]

Netflix stock rises after Goldman boosts target to $490 [MarketWatch]

After their catty sorority flight home from China resulted in everyone admitting that they hate everyone else because, like, they are all wrong about China - and also Lighthizer is a real bitch when he's hungry - Steve Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow managed to get Pete Navarro benched from further negotiations with the Chinese. Rumor had it at that time that Navarro got in trouble by acting like himself and throwing a tantrum on the plane home, yelling at Mnuchin that he was being too soft on China, a country that Navarro has come to believe is the sworn enemy of justice and truth in the universe.

All in all, the whole episode was just another batshit moment of messy drama in the highest policy levels of the Trump White House, but it also felt like the final time that Navarro would be pushed aside for being a radical loon. And that feeling was compounded by Mnuchin going on the Sunday shows and telling everyone that the trade war with China was "on hold."

But, this is also the Trump White House, so things changed almost immediately after that and Trump announced $50 billion worth of new tariffs on the Chinese, putting the trade war firmly back on "Play."

While most governments would attempt to band together and get on message, presenting a unified face to explain a sudden shift in tone with regards to a trade deal between the worlds most important economies. Not this one though!

Instead, jilted maniac Pete Navarro decided to pull a page form the Drake/Pusha T playbook and throw a diss track on Mnuchin live on the radio. So Navarro went on NPR (because who in the Trump White House doesn't listen to NPR?) and framed the entire about-face on China tariffs as a case of Mnuchin opening his weird yap.

“That was an unfortunate soundbite, basically for two reasons,” Navarro told NPR's Steve Inskeep . “One is that what we’re having with China is a trade dispute, plain and simple. They engage in a whole range of unfair trade practices.”

The most marginalized economist to ever work in a White House also went on to not talk about ZTE (he claimed the privilege of being "a government employee" which is nonsense and then bullied Inskeep to stop asking about it) and then went full angry asshole when Inskeep dared to ask if he was concerned that China might be leveraging the president through his daughter.

All in all, it was another batshit performance by the most batshit Trump employee. We assume Wilbur Ross will be pissed when he wakes up form his 6 hour morning nap.

Trump Administration Announces New Restrictions On China [NPR]

Beyond the clear Jay Leno parallel of a guy – a guy who was innovative and edgy in the 1980s, then blossomed into a megalomaniacal caricature of himself – coming back to his old place of work and bumping his successor to a less desirable timeslot, there is something else rotten about Francesa’s grand return to the airwaves, namely his show itself, and the mindset of WFAN.

Francesa as a solo act never was as good as he was in tandem with Chris Russo on “Mike and the Mad Dog,” a show on which two insufferable blowhards were the perfect foils for one another. It took a long time for any competition to really challenge Francesa, but Michael Kay’s show on ESPN Radio was making inroads by the time Francesa “retired,” and became New York’s top sports talk show as CMB – Chris Carlin, Maggie Gray, and Bart Scott – found their footing.

Surely, Francesa will get some early buzz when he returns, but getting listeners back full time from Kay is a huge challenge for someone with nothing fresh to offer, whose solo show is a one-note act of ego-driven puffery and berating callers. A multi-host show simply has more to offer, but there is still more of a hurdle for Francesa to clear.

That would be politics. Given talk radio’s bent toward serving older white men, it is not a surprise that even in deep blue New York, conservative-leaning sports shows would find a niche – and, conversely, that CMB, with a woman and a black man being put on equal footing to share views, might struggle, especially at first. But the bet with CMB would be on the future, on reshaping the radio landscape into one where hosts of different backgrounds and viewpoints help shape an audience beyond the traditional audience sitting in offices or driving around town.

One way that a radio station can boost its reach in 2018 is to take content that airs live and make it available in podcast form. WFAN does do this, but a comparison between an iTunes search for ESPN New York and WFAN shows just how much better Francesa’s rival station is at this.

Kay is active on Twitter. Francesa is extremely not. While in some ways, that can be seen as an endorsement of Francesa, it’s also a clear signal of his lack of interest in growing or changing with the times, or cultivating a new audience. When you hear about the “media landscape having changed,” that is part of it, and it’s why Francesa’s return can be called “doomed” before it even happens.

WFAN had its plan in place with CMB to move into a new era. They’ll still have a show, and Francesa may be fine at first in his return, but the smarter play would have been to follow the mantra that’s now paying off for the Philadelphia 76ers, and that even Anthony Scaramucci could echo: trust the process.

The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page is begging the court to maintain its prohibition against requiring out-of-state companies to collect sales tax, arguing that court’s 1992 Quill decision establishing that standard “protects small businesses across the country from tax-grubbing politicians across the country,” and that overturning it would unleash a “Pandora’s box” of unaccountable taxation.

Cross-border taxation is an interesting problem constitutionally, as the founders explicitly grant Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce. The courts have interpreted this to mean that constitution prohibits states from passing laws that favor in-state trade over trade between states, a doctrine that Georgetown University Law professor Brian Galle has described as a “judge-made free-trade zone.” In the The 1992 Quill decision, Galle writes “The Supreme Court concluded that obliging an individual retailer to comply with the rules of what were then more than 6,000 separate possible sales-tax jurisdictions (a number that has now grown into the five figures) would be so burdensome that it would be a de facto restraint on interstate trade.”

There’s no surprise that the Wall Street Journal and other anti-tax activist groups agree with the assertion that such an obligation would be burdensome. What’s surprising is that the Journal is now arguing that Congress needs to settle the problem by passing a law that streamlines and rationalizes requirements to collect taxes across more than 10,000 American jurisdictions. That’s because Congress has been trying to do just that for years, only to be thwarted by the complaints of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and like-minded activists in Washington.

The Marketplace Fairness Act, which was first introduced to Congress by Republican Senator Mike Enzi in 2011, and has been consistently mischaracterized by the Journal as a new tax on goods and services sold over the Internet, and groups like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Heritage Foundation argued that it would be apostasy for conservatives to vote for it.

Meanwhile, state tax revenues continue to suffer from the Americans shopping more online, with half the states in the union still raising less tax revenue today than they did before the financial crisis. Though many large companies, like Amazon, have reached agreements with various states to collect online sales taxes for sales of their own inventory, third-party sellers on Amazon’s platform, and countless other smaller online players still benefit from the ability to charge a sale tax-free price at purchase.

Now, after years of filibustering a bipartisan solution to a thorny problem that has arose from a combination of America’s unique federal system, the Journal is decrying Pandora’s box the Supreme Court would unleash by figuring a non-legislative solution to this obvious problem.

This is a microcosm of the conservative movement of the past decade, when the Republican Party amassed large majorities in Congress and unprecedented levels of power in state and local government, but have made far less little impact public policy than they may have due to their refusal to compromise. This was true in both the crafting of Obamacare and its later implementation, and now the national party has ceded power over the issue of state sales tax enforcement.

The GOP claims to speak for the small business owner who has legitimate fears of serious disruptions to his business from a change in court doctrine. Instead of telling these folks that change can be fought and blocked, the conservative movement could have been be shepherding a compromise that takes its constituents into account. Now the issue is going back to the Supreme Court, the only game in town when our elected officials prefer to make speeches rather than laws.

Christopher Matthews is a writer who splits his time between New York City and Accra, Ghana, with an interest in the intersection of markets, the economy, and public policy. He previously held staff positions at Axios, Fortune Magazine, and Time Magazine, and has been published in Forbes and Debtwire.

The Wall Street Journal has to fill its pages somehow, and one strategy its employed for the past year is to pretend that there is a serious debate over whether cutting taxes on corporations helps corporations or its workers.

You can’t blame the Republican Party for arguing that cutting the top corporate rate from 35% to 21% is about freeing corporations to build shiny new factories or raising wages, rather than growing their bottom line. After all, they have to convince that the majority of Americans, who work for a living, that this is good for them, too. Nor can you blame large corporations leveraging their PR machines to make big shows of linking tax reform to their issuing wage increases and and small, one-time bonuses—Corporate America doesn’t want the GOP to take a shellacking in the polls in November for spending $2.2 trillion on the very small share of Americans who own most of the stock in these suddenly much wealthier corporations.

But the Journal, and the New York Times, should know better. There’s a journalistic saying, attributed to several different long-dead editors, that goes: “"When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” The Journal’s analysis that the vast majority of Corporate America’s lower tax bill is being retained as earings or spent on share buybacks, rather than new plants and equipment or higher wages, is a classic dog bites man story—that is, it shouldn’t be news to anyone at all.

The best evidence for this is the stock market itself, which rose roughly 20% last year on the promise of deregulation and tax cuts, and analysts are expecting S&P 500 earnings to rise a lusty 19% in 2018, which has kept markets in the black despite growing volatility and skepticism over the U.S. government’s long-term fiscal health. Companies don’t grow their profits 20% by spending more on worker salaries.

The other way for companies to grow their earnings-per-share, rather than just pocketing the tax savings is to buy back their own stock. And the Journal’s analysis, published Thursday, describes just how enthusiastically Corporate America is employing this strategy. “Share buybacks announced by large U.S. companies have exceeded $200 billion in the past three months, more than double the prior year,” it reports. The Journal also points out that the stock buyback boom is being driven in part by the ability of multinational corporations to pay dividends and buyback stock with profits earned overseas, after paying a one-time repatriation tax on the money held abroad at the time of the bills passage.

But at the end of the day, it’s simple common sense that a tax cut on business profits will almost exclusively help make the small share of Americans who earn their living from business ownership richer. The Republican Party has an army of economists who concoct theories about how low corporate taxes spur business investment or enable companies to pay their workers more, and the Democratic Party has its own army of PhDs who say just the opposite. This feeds into the media’s desire to rely on experts to tell the public what the one, true, optimal public policy should be.

This is not to say that there aren’t things the government can do to make the majority of people better off, but in most instances politics is just the simple, but vicious, practice of fighting over limited resources. The Republican Party is funded by owners of business, who not coincidentally have adopted the ideology that making a lot of money is the best thing they can do for the society at large. Of course it wants to pass laws that lowers the burden that business owners bear to fund the government.

There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s how democracy works. But it’s a fairly simple story, that if told straight, would leave very little for the Journal and Times to sell ads against.

Christopher Matthews is a writer who splits his time between New York City and Accra, Ghana, with an interest in the intersection of markets, the economy, and public policy. He previously held staff positions at Axios, Fortune Magazine, and Time Magazine, and has been published in Forbes and Debtwire.

Riot is, in many ways, the poster child for the absurd digital gold rush that accompanied Bitcoin's meteoric rise to $20,000 late last year. I profiled it at length back in October. Here is a brief retelling of Riot's corporate history as originally expounded in a December post:

And lest you should forget about the original poster child for this mania, Riot Blockchain, they announced a secondaryon December 18, issuing 1.64 million restricted units at a purchase price of $22.50 each. Don’t let the history here be lost on you. This is a company which, just five years ago, was licensing “intellectual property relating to recombinant single chain reproductive hormone technology for use in non-human mammals,” and which, just 21 months ago, sold its headquarters only to rent space in the back and try to build another business based on “Enhanced Surface Plasmon Resonance technology,” and which, in the final act, decided to rename itself “Riot Blockchain” and go into the cryptocurrency business.

The latest 8k lists a different address than what the company listed in the filing that detailed their transformation to a blockchain adopter. And it’s a good thing because the former address (834-F South Perry Street, Suite 443, Castle Rock, CO) matches that of a mailbox rental company called PostalAnnex that sits next to a Colorado Blimpie shop. Here is the actual location:

So that's funny. And the amusing headlines from Riot just kept on coming. They never let up. It's just one story after another, after another, after another.

Last week, for instance, they bought something called Logical Brokerage Corp., which is apparently a Miami-based cryptocurrency trading op. Then yesterday (Thursday) there was this:

ahahhah.... Riot Blockchain To Acquire 3,800 S9 Bitcoin Miners

— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) February 15, 2018

Oh, and late last month, they won some of the Bitcoins auctioned off by the U.S. Marshals Service. I previewed that auction several weeks ago and until I started writing this piece, I actually hadn't followed up to see who won. As you can imagine, I was thrilled to learn that Riot was involved. Here's Bloomberg:

Riot, which invests in cryptocurrency and blockchain startups, sought many more of the 3,813 Bitcoins in the auction Monday but was outbid, Chief Executive Officer John O’Rourke said in a phone interview. The company acquired the Bitcoins at about the market price at the time, he said. That works out to about $5.2 million, based on Monday’s closing price of $10,354.

“I believe we’ll be heading north of $50,000 market price within the next 12 to 18 months,” O’Rourke said. “Our strategy at Riot is to accumulate Bitcoin and to provide our investors as much direct exposure as we can, hence we decided to participate in the auction.”

So about the above-mentioned John O'Rourke. John has come under some scrutiny lately after pocketing a cool $869,256 of sales of Riot shares following the massive run-up that accompanied the company's name change. Here's the filing (dated December 29; click to enlarge):

And here's a fun chart (click on it to enlarge):

That's obviously hilarious and unlike most other things, the absurdity there wasn't lost on CNBC. Here's what they wrote back on January 2 about John's rather rapid rise to the top of Riot:

O'Rourke rose to the head of Riot Blockchain in less than a year, public documents show.

He is a managing member of ATG Capital, which focuses on small- and mid-cap growth companies.

O'Rourke was appointed a director of Riot on Jan. 6, 2017. A few weeks after Riot's name change, an Oct. 23 release mentioned O'Rourke's "recent appointment as President of the Company."

Riot's board then appointed O'Rourke chairman and CEO on Nov. 3. Outgoing chairman and CEO Michael Beeghley's "resignation was not the result of any disagreement with the Company," a filing said.

The board approved a monthly salary for O'Rourke of $25,000 — $300,000 a year — a restricted stock award of 344,000 shares of common stock that will vest in 24 monthly installments and the option to purchase up to 100,000 shares at $10.

Ok, so fast forward to Friday and here's what's going on with Riot's shares:

What happened there, you ask? Well, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera happened. To wit:

Yeah. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say things are going to be a lot tougher on Riot going forward.

As for John O'Rourke's response, he told Benzinga this on Friday:

This was a garbage, biased hit piece.

Sure, John. That's what it is. Riot is actually a veritable bastion of legitimacy. "A lot of people are saying that."

Lazard Ltd. announced today that Dennis K. Berman, Financial Editor of The Wall Street Journal, will join the firm as a Managing Director in Financial Advisory, effective February 26.
Based in New York, Mr. Berman will join Lazard's growing Shareholder Advisory practice, which serves corporate leaders and boards of directors with insights on shareholders, helping clients prepare for and create defenses against activists or unsolicited takeover attempts, and build shareholder support for strategic transactions.

Losing Berman as a journalist is a bummer -and we of course feel covetous rage at watching a fellow wretch get that cheddar- but what stings the hardest is that we hate seeing anyone to "The Backwards Matt Levine." And considering that snarky niche financial blogs were once capable of poaching from Goldman Sachs, it feels like the exchange rate has gone truly upside-down when a bona fide award-winning WSJ editor ends up at, well, Lazard.

But, yeah, congrats to all!

The annual confab of the hedge industry, the media that supports it, the famous people paid to speak to them and the middle-rung entertainment dragooned into performing at it will not take place in Las Vegas this year. The host with the mostest, a little-known financial figure named Anthony Scaramucci, is a bit too distracted to throw his party in 2018...

Anthony Scaramucci said he’d like to have a role again in the future of SkyBridge Capital, the fund-of-hedge-funds firm he founded, and scrapped plans to hold his flagship SALT conference in Las Vegas this year.
“If the sale goes through I would like to -- and I’ve talked to the HNA people about -- retaining some equity in the firm and being active in terms of trying to help the firm’s growth and prosperity,” he said Wednesday on Bloomberg TV from Davos, Switzerland. Scaramucci last year agreed to sell his stake in SkyBridge to a group including an American subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co. The transaction is still awaiting approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.
The SkyBridge Alternatives Conference, the annual bash that made him a celebrity in the hedge fund world, won’t happen this year because of “the logistics around the closing of the deal,” Scaramucci told Erik Schatzker of BTV.

So, Steve Cohen will not play Russian roulette with Jeff Gundlach in a secret basement lounge at the Wynn whilst a 23-year-old Business Insider intern looks on in terrified bemusement and Lawrence Delevingne wonders "This again?" And there will be no chance to watch Neel Kashkari pretend to care about blockchain as he hits on Blythe Masters poolside at The Bellagio and Steve Eisman takes notes. And no one will be forced to pretend that the pasty weird guy sipping Strawberry daiquiris in the pool wearing a soaked white cotton t-shirt isn't Jeb Hensarling. And, sadly, there will be no chance for a bunch of tipsy power brokers in some windowless banquet hall to get caught in a preter-macho, kabuki fistfight by Charlie Gasparino.

But don't fret you guys, The Mooch is still down to have fun. He's just looking to do something a little more cerebral and (coincidentally) more China-focused...

Instead, he intends to take a group on a five-day trip to China for an event he’s calling the SALT Platinum Partners Experience. It will introduce participants to business leaders and entrepreneurs in cities including Shanghai and Beijing.

Judging from his interview with Bloomberg, The Mooch has a nice little itinerary planned. It won't be the kind of fun that SALT-goers might be used to, but things have changed and Anthony Scaramucci is nothing if not adaptable to the world around him.

Before some of you start blubbering about "The end of an era" please just fucking relax. Did you really think that a man who was the belle of the ball at Davos 2017 then had one of the most publicly humiliating years in modern history and still returned to Davos this year won't go back to being Desert Mooch?

P'shaw...

Scaramucci said SALT will return to Las Vegas in 2019 and that he would continue to own 51 percent of the conference business if the sale proceeds.

Whether anyone from the Paul Ryan White House sends a speaker to SALT 2019, however, is a question best left to the fates.

Scaramucci Considers Return to SkyBridge, Scraps Vegas SALT Conference in 2018 [Bloomberg]

What it will take to make Facebook streaming viable is a combination of creativity and exclusivity, which are exactly the things WWE will be banking on for the inaugural Mixed Match Challenge, which begins Tuesday night on Facebook Watch, right after SmackDown Live signs off from the USA Network.

The event itself is set for a 12-episode run of 20 minutes a pop, with mixed-gender tag teams battling for a $100,000 prize to be donated to charity. When it was announced in December, WWE promised “elements optimized for mobile consumption, experimentation, and social interaction,” which sounds nice but cannot change the fact that watching things on mobile is generally a nightmare. Even so, it’s about the platform on the whole, not just device-specific experiences.

Obviously, WWE has an ability that major sports leagues do not in that wrestling events can just be created and put on, with whatever rules the organizers want to have – and part of the Mixed Match Challenge is allowing fan interaction to set stipulations for some matches. The NBA cannot go out and say, “Alright, this Thursday, the Knicks are going to play the Bulls on Facebook, and fans will get to vote on how long the shot clock will be and whether Chicago plays zone defense or man-to-man!” even if Sports Illustrated did postulate something similar in 1991, imagining a world in which television viewers might be able to pay for a voice in NFL play-calling decisions.

While sports that are not “sports entertainment” are limited in how much creativity they can put forth in packaging events for online audiences, exclusivity is less of an issue because they control the rights. The problem is that every league has a subscription service where people pay to be able to stream games, and to deny them games on those platforms to shunt them to Facebook is a nonstarter.

The lesson that WWE can provide for the big sports leagues here is that events can be created specifically for an online audience. Fans of a certain age, or fans of a certain lesser age who enjoyed the Classic Sports Network before it became ESPN Classic, will remember “Home Run Derby,” in which Mickey Mantle and his contemporaries squared off one-on-one, crushing dingers at an empty ballpark in California. There is no reason that MLB could not pull off something similar now on Facebook Watch, getting stars to take a few days out of the offseason for a fun event that also would be ripe for fan interaction.

Every sport has something like this that they can do, whether it’s the NFL Quarterback Challenge, NBA/WNBA 2Ball, the NHL breakaway contest, or something new that hasn’t been previously done at All-Star weekends. Not to go all Bill Simmons, but wouldn’t you watch an NBA H-O-R-S-E contest on Facebook? Of course you would.

The holy grail, though, is out there for all sports. Bring back “The Superstars.” Yes, it was just “Battle Of The Network Stars” with professional athletes, but at the same time, it was “BATTLE OF THE NETWORK STARS” WITH PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES. At the very least, this should be WWE’s follow-up to the Mixed Match Challenge. Braun Strowman on the obstacle course. Make it happen.

As noted by The Wall Street Journal, there are several explanations for the NFL’s declining business on television, ranging from people upset at players taking a knee during the national anthem (which is hardly ever televised anyway, and which became less prominent of an issue as the season went on), to the league oversaturating the TV market from Thursday through Monday, to the NFL finally being dragged down by the industry-wide struggle to keep people watching television.

The last of those holds the most water, especially with the fact that, “Despite its falloff, NFL programming still accounted for 33 of the top 50 programs on TV in 2017, according to the league.”

The biggest problem that the NFL has might just be that the product stinks. The Jaguars are the No. 3 seed in the AFC playoffs, behind the two actual good teams in the conference, the Patriots and Steelers, yet in October, Jacksonville’s championship hopes were lampooned on the NBC sitcom “The Good Place.” Granted, the show features a lot of Jacksonville jokes, but it wasn’t as if this gag in particular was written in the summer, then fell as a dud because the Jaguars were unexpectedly awesome: they just happened to be not godawful in a division that featured two truly terrible teams in the Colts and Texans, and a Titans team that snuck into the playoffs despite being outscored by a total of 22 points for the season. According to Pro Football Reference, the Jaguars played the easiest schedule of anyone in the NFL on their way to going 10-6, a record that some years doesn’t even get teams into the playoffs.

On a weekly basis, the NFL foists garbage matchups upon large swaths of America because there simply are not enough good games to fill every broadcast window. When there’s actual good football to watch, people watch. The Patriots-Steelers game last month, which wound up deciding home-field advantage through the AFC playoffs, brought CBS its biggest football rating since 2015. The previous week, Fox had its highest-rated game of the season when the Eagles and Rams, two of the four-to-six actually good teams in the NFC, squared off.

But even those games highlighted two big problems with the NFL in 2017. The Patriots’ victory over the Steelers came after Pittsburgh was denied a touchdown in the final minute because nobody knows what a catch is anymore. The Eagles’ win in Los Angeles included a season-ending ACL tear for quarterback Carson Wentz, which, while not a brain injury, still served as a reminder that football chews up and spits out human bodies like no other sport we have.

Now that the playoffs are here, we’ll get three weeks of quality matchups that people want to watch, then a week off before the Super Bowl, which for all the problems in the television industry, remains a behemoth. The NFL’s championship game has a seven-year streak of doing at least a 45 rating and 69 share, with the price of a 30-second ad rising from $2.8 million in 2010 to $5.002 million last year.

The NFL has a lot of problems, some of which may not be fixable. Every football game is televised on a network, so there’s no rigging the schedule the way the NBA can to get the best possible matchups on, beyond flexing a few games to prime time. Games are not going to start taking less than three hours. Television viewing habits in general are out of the NFL’s control. The sport itself still has the nasty existential crisis of maybe killing the people who play it. Yet, the Super Bowl remains the crown jewel of the television year and the NFL remains the top sport in America. With all the red flags about the future, the present is not as bleak for the league as it can be made out to be by two years of downward-trending television ratings.

Meg James’ story for the Los Angeles Times, “Disney wants Fox’s regional sports networks to boost ESPN,” is a strong summary of all that is in play, including the value that adding local content would bring to the planned ESPN streaming service. One thing, though, jumps out as a red flag – hidden though it may be in corporate wordplay.

“Fox’s regional sports networks are valued at $22.4 billion,” James wrote, “according to an analysis Wednesday by Guggenheim Securities.”

Not to impugn the work done by the folks at Guggenheim Securities, while also remembering that money totals at this level are generally flights of fancy anyway, there is a whiff of conflict of interest at play.

Guggenheim Securities is part of Guggenheim Partners, which also includes under its umbrella Guggenheim Baseball Management, the consortium that owns the Los Angeles Dodgers. The regional sports network that airs Dodgers games, Spectrum SportsNet LA, is a 50-50 venture between Charter Communications, which is Spectrum’s parent company, and Guggenheim Partners.

So, here’s Guggenheim, valuing regional sports networks at an average of a little north of a billion dollars apiece, while at the same time holding a 50 percent stake in one… and it just so happens that the regional sports network in which Guggenheim holds a 50 percent stake is a regional sports network that is widely unavailable in its own region.

Spectrum SportsNet LA has broadcast Dodgers game for four seasons so far in its 25-year, $8.35 billion rights deal, and thanks to an inability to reach a carriage deal with DirecTV and other non-cable distributors, less than half of the Los Angeles area has been able to see any games on the channel.

What might Spectrum SportsNet LA be worth now? What might it be worth if people in Los Angeles could actually watch it, carrying a team that just went to Game 7 of the World Series? What does this valuation of a cadre of regional sports networks mean to the other major player in the Los Angeles dispute, DirecTV, which happens to own AT&T SportsNet, a chain of four regional sports networks that in addition to airing games, also make use of Fox Sports Net programming – subject, perhaps, to change if Disney brings Fox Sports Networks into the ESPN fold?

It’s all of this interconnectedness that makes it impossible to tell, if Guggenheim had insidious intentions of any kind in its Fox valuations, which way it might tip the scales. Making regional sports networks appear more precious than they really are might give the other half of Spectrum SportsNet LA’s ownership an inkling to sell, perhaps leading to a carriage deal and better days ahead for that channel. Undervaluing the networks would benefit Disney, a company whose stock price dropped in October after negative analysis from… Guggenheim.

On Wednesday, Disney stock closed right at Guggenheim’s price target of $105, which certainly speaks well for the work the firm is doing. It’s just that, with all the overlap all over this industry, the system ever more has the appearance of being set up so that the same people can make money both coming and going.

Quite frankly, we thought this whole thing might be good for our business model. Little did we know that the first name would be so big and that he would tar himself so stupidly whilst not even harassing or assaulting anyone. According to a thorough follow-up report from the New York Times about how Harvey Weinstein was allowed to live a double life as a rampant sex criminal, many powerful people in Weinstein's universe looked the other way for decades, acting as passive enablers and putting many young women in danger. Now that Weinstein has fallen however, all of those enablers have beat hasty retreats to distance themselves from America's most notorious sexual harasser.

Well, almost all of them...

After years of support for Mr. Weinstein, most of the board members have now quit, while publicly staying silent. Privately, at least one expressed loyalty. On Oct. 7, the day before he was ousted from his own company, Mr. Weinstein received an email from the investor Paul Tudor Jones.

PTJ? One of the most notoriously private and careful manager of his public persona in all of finance? PTJ must have taken great pains to strike the perfect tonal mix of vague personal care and fury, especially if it was going into an email...

“I love you,” he wrote, while detailing the steps Mr. Weinstein should take to rehabilitate his image. Mr. Jones told The Times that he condemned Mr. Weinstein’s alleged misconduct and wanted to encourage him to get help.

WTF, PTJ? "I love you"? Keep it in your double pleated chinos, homeboy. And for the love of volatility, please don't keep fucking typing...

“Focus on the future as America loves a great comeback story,” he wrote to the movie producer.

The only comeback you should be focused on is your global macro fund, dude. Apparently, Harvey was your ride or die home (and let's talk about how that works later) but what are you doing? AND WHY DID YOU PUT THIS IN WRITING?! At least it can't get any worse...

He finished: “The good news is, this will go away sooner than you think and it will be forgotten!”

Morality aside, how will Tudor survive this scandal if you are making predictions as stupid and terrible as this one?

Weinstein’s Complicity Machine [NYT]

Even before whatever happens with the FCC, though, one has to look askance at certain things about the way business is done in this stream-it-all world, because through various rights deals, the Internet already is not as free and open as it might seem. This is obvious to anyone who has been to Iowa, for instance, and wanted to stream a baseball game featuring the Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Royals, Twins, or White Sox, all of whom are blacked out on MLB.tv and the Extra Innings package in the Hawkeye State for reasons that can only be described as “huh?”

But it’s even starker elsewhere.

The Winter Olympics are two and a half months away, which means that this is an exciting time for fans of fringe sports getting ready for their time to shine in Pyeongchang. One sport that should get some attention here is women’s bobsled, where the reigning world champion is Elana Meyers Taylor of the United States, the reigning World Cup champion is Jamie Greubel Poser of the United States, and former Summer Olympics sensation Lolo Jones has made the move from track and field to regularly serve as Meyers Taylor’s brakewoman.

So, let’s say you want to get hyped for the Olympics by watching what amounts to bobsled’s regular season, the World Cup campaign. It kicked off two weeks ago in Lake Placid, with Meyers Taylor finishing three-hundredths of a second behind the sport’s other giant, Kaillie Humphries of Canada, and Greubel Poser in fourth. Two weeks ago in Park City, Utah, it was Greubel Poser on top, followed by Humphries and Meyers Taylor, this time with Jones in the back seat. Last weekend at Whistler, in Canada, it was Humphries who was victorious on her home track, followed by Greubel Poser and Meyers Taylor.

An already strong rivalry between American and Canadian sleds at the top of the women’s bobsled world is only getting better as the Olympics approach, but good luck following it in the United States.

The International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation has a robust YouTube page, streaming all the World Cup races with highlights and interview packages cut quickly into their own videos after the live feeds wrap up. The streams are archived, so if you’re not able to watch live, you still can catch the action when it’s convenient to you. Unless, that is, you are in the U.S., in which case the IBSF’s YouTube page is a weird mix of Heat No. 1s and post-race content, with the decisive parts of each race geoblocked.

There is, at least, a simple workaround to this issue, which is to watch those bobsled races on the Olympic Channel, which is free online and is part of many popular streaming packages like PlayStation Vue, so it can be watched on actual televisions.

The problem here is that unlike with most sports streaming services, once the races are over, they might not be available. Heats from Park City were available online for part of Thanksgiving week, but the races from Whistler were nowhere to be found on the Olympic Channel’s site.

Once they’re gone from the Olympic Channel – fair play to them on the live stuff and while they have it available in the archive, they’ve got the rights after all – shouldn’t these races revert back to the IBSF? Who stands to benefit in any way from preventing people who want to watch bobsled from watching bobsled?

The first heat of that Park City race had 2,800 YouTube views as of Tuesday afternoon, four days after it was completed, so it’s not like this particular issue is one that is putting a lot of people in a spot of frustration. But it’s the same principle that makes it confounding when Major League Baseball or the NFL go after people for posting GIFs or video clips of their sports: people are interested in your product, and you are doing everything in your power to keep them from being able to access and enjoy it. In this case, it can’t even be about protecting the rightsholders – the rightsholder is the International Olympic Committee, the rights are no longer even being used, and the world governing body of the sport is unable to effectively promote itself to whatever means it can in the home nation of the world champion and World Cup winner. Even one of the most dramatic moments the sport has had – last season’s gold medal tie at the world championships between two German four-man sleds – remains geoblocked on YouTube in the United States, and absent from the Olympic Channel.

It all makes as much sense as skeleton being part of the bobsled federation instead of headfirst luge being paired with, well, luge. Usually in these situations, you just need to figure out who’s making money off of something for everything to become clear. In this case, there is only money being squandered with a failure to build up interest in a country that is home to a quarter of the IBSF’s season schedule.

Sam Zell is also a man who knows how to bankrupt the holy shit out of a media conglomerate and then write some revisionist history about it later so he doesn't feel too bad.

That's what happens sometimes when you're an eccentric billionaire. Sometimes you call the top by passing a flaming $39 billion hot potato to Blackstone just before the market collapses in what amounted to the largest private equity deal in history and sometimes you orchestrate a no-money-down L.B.O. of a bunch of newspapers and TV stations and drive that fucker right off a cliff into Chapter 11. I mean, it wasn't all Sam's fault - unless you ask all the people who say it was all Sam's fault.

As he told Tribune employees in 2008, "Guys, if this doesn't work, it’s not going to change my life style. But if this does work, it’s going to change yours. So climb onboard." Yes, "climb onboard" - and buckle up dammit.

But hey, you win some, you lose some right? It's all about "thinking outside the box" and as he once put it, "anybody can do it."

Well, Sam sat down for an interview with Goldman's Allison Nathan recently and one thing he doesn't think "anybody can do" is justify Amazon's valuation. Here's what he said when asked if "there are places today where we are at or near the top of the cycle":

I can’t explain the valuation of the big tech companies, and can't believe that we won’t see a significant correction there. For example, in order to justify the multiple that Amazon trades at today, the company would have to be worth 25% of the US economy five years from now. This situation is no different from the one in 1997, when I pointed out that Cisco’s multiple would only be justifiable if the company represented 25% of the US economy five years later.

Obviously, that didn't happen, and I don't think it's going to happen with today’s big tech companies, either. I'm also generally concerned about the size, scale, and influence of these companies, which I think is out of hand and dangerous to our overall society. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and these companies are being set up to do exactly that.

Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but it sure sounds like Sam is worried that the sheer scope and brazenness of Jeff Bezos's world domination plans might just destroy the country.

Now look, perhaps Zell is like the rest of us: genuinely concerned about where we're headed as a society when one man has a monopoly on selling everything from clothes to pharmaceuticals to avocados and is now living in your bedroom and cooing at you in a woman's voice through a talking speaker he also sold you.

But it also kinda seems like maybe Zell is still hung up on the whole Tribune debacle and the reason I say that is because back in 2013, when Bezos bought the Washington Post, here's what Sam told Fox News:

Think about what you just did. You just ran 16 different versions of everybody making this announcement, you'da think we'da bombed Hiroshima. This is a $250 million transaction. You made reference to my $39 billion transaction. I didn't get ... uhhh... 20 anchors yelling about it. So that's the problem.

Yes, "the problem" is that more anchors talked about Bezos buying the Washington Post than talked about Zell selling Equity Office Properties - although it's not at all clear why that's actually "a problem" for anyone other than Zell's ego.

Note what else Sam says in that interview - namely that Bezos is going to "find out that he doesn't actually own the Washington Post." Well, Sam should tell that to Donald Trump, because the President sure seems to think Jeff is pulling some serious editorial levers.

In any event, it's good to know that people like Sam are looking out for the well being of the country. Because if I had to point to one person who can save us all from an increasingly omnipotent tech industry which is becoming "dangerous to our overall society," it's Sam Zell.

Of course if Zell keeps it up with this heresy, Bezos might just buy him - and Jeff damn sure wouldn't need to finance that deal with debt.

Per the FT:

“He said: I know you don’t like the media, but I do and I’m really good at it,” Mr Rodriguez said. “And if this gets into a public battle, it’s going to be bad for you personally, it’s going to be bad for the company, but I’m fine with it because — and he said this — I’m told that I’m only second to Donald Trump in terms of number of clicks on the internet, and hence you will lose if there’s a public relations battle.” 

Ok, let's parse this a bit.

First, since when is Bill Ackman "really good at media"? We are the media (and at times this whole blog looks like a Bill Ackman subreddit) but even we spend most of our energy making fun of the guy. And while there might have been a time when Ackman could go out and use the media to his own advantage, that time has passed. The New Yorker didn't exactly make him look like a world-beater a few months back, and many of his recent public appearances have gone...poorly. Ackman threatening to use his media prowess against you is like Michael Jordan warning some kid that he's going to dunk in his face; it's not that scary these days.

Second, the whole "bad for you personally/bad for the company" feels like a case of Ackman emulating the behavior of his own bully to feel empowered. As hard as Bill tries to sound like him, he will never be Carl Icahn. Threats are not The Ack-Man's strong suit, so he should stick to throwing out numbers and metaphors at such a fast pace that his listener feels obliged to agree with whatever he is saying lest they appear stupid. That is Ackman's true superpower.

And third, what even the fuck is Bill Ackman talking about?

"I’m told that I’m only second to Donald Trump in terms of number of clicks on the internet"

No. Just...no.

For a guy who loves logic and data and blah, blah, blah, this is inexcusable horseshit. If he said it, this quote doesn't so much make Ackman look desperate for leverage with ADP as it makes him look utterly fucking unhinged. Again, we are borderline obsessed with Bill Ackman, and even we can name about 100 people whose names "get clicked" on less than Donald Trump and more than Bill Ackman.

To be clear, this is simply Rodriguez's word against Bill Ackman's, but in this post-Herbalife, post-Valeant, queso-inflected reality, it is not too difficult to believe that Ackman is acting a little nutty. Hell, after 2016 we're shocked that Bill isn't running into ADP's boardroom in rags with his tie around his forehead yelling "YOU CAN'T STOP ME, I'M ALREADY DEAD INSIDE!!!"

But if this is true, we just want him to cut this out. You are still a smart and special man, Bill Ackman, and we will always care about you, but when you tell another executive that you are mainstream famous and good at media, you don't only insult yourself, you insult us, and why would you want to go and do that?

ADP’s Rodriguez squares up to activist investor Bill Ackman [FT]

Meanwhile, ESPN partnered with the inimitable Barstool Sports for a new show that drew 88,000 viewers for its premiere this week while also generating widespread negative publicity, to the point where FortuneandPeople magazines got in on it after ESPN’s own Sam Ponder looked back aghast at the sexist venom spewed her way from Barstool.

There also, of course, is the ongoing issue for ESPN of being a cable television network in 2017, as cord-cutting and other factors are siphoning away viewers and damaging the bottom line. Time to bring in a savvy businessman to turn things around!

LaVar Ball is the founder and CEO of Big Baller Brand, a clothing company whose emoji set trailed only that of Ariana Grande in the App Store rankings after its debut this week. Naturally, then, he was brought on the late-night edition of SportsCenter on Thursday for a live spot with Stephen A. Smith and Neil Everett to lead into the highlights of the Lakers’ season opener against the Clippers.

Ball, of course, isn’t just a fashion and tech entrepreneur, but the father of Lakers rookie Lonzo Ball, as well as UCLA swingman LiAngelo Ball, and high school phenom LaMelo Ball. So, after Lonzo made his NBA debut with a 1-for-6 shooting night, LaVar, wearing a $50 Big Baller Brand t-shirt, went on ESPN and trumpeted Big Baller Brand’s business success and his son’s nine rebounds. The only way it could have been more surreal would be if Everett had been replaced by a melting clock. If you don’t want to watch it, you should reconsider that, because it went from “oh, good lord, where’s the remote?” to “oh, good lord, this is impossible to look away from” in mere moments, but just know that Stephen A. Smith was the sensible and reasonable person in this exchange.

There is something here for ESPN to mine. Put aside questions about whether it’s good for a 19-year-old basketball player’s megalomaniac father to grab the spotlight, because between the Hill suspension and the Barstool association, ESPN obviously does not care about morality in any meaningful way. This is about how the network can make bank.

The NBA is a soap opera with dozens of storylines these days, but one that generally plays out on social media, whether it’s Joel Embiid feuding with Hassan Whiteside, Carmelo Anthony throwing shade at his old team, or Kevin Durant maybe having burner accounts to defend Kevin Durant from trolls. But the only way ESPN can capitalize on that is by making hay of social posts on its own website, or showing them on TV – where they’re secondhand.

But do you know what is a sports soap opera with dozens of storylines that does its biggest business on television? Professional wrestling. And, if nothing else, LaVar Ball is cut straight from the mold of a WWE manager, talking up his stable and his interests regardless of what the facts are, with effusive self-praise. Meanwhile, Smith is there to interject facts and make incredulous faces, while having his own, well-developed character – the Mean Gene Okerlund of his generation.

Having Ball on studio sit-down shows is arduous, because it comes off as a rehearsed act, but featuring him in the hullaballoo around games is golden – and a way to get some eyeballs outside of the live broadcast window. It’s a different formula than what TNT uses with Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, and Shaquille O’Neal to make “Inside the NBA” the perfect studio show, but if ESPN can develop a few more characters, they’ll really be on to something, and maybe won’t feel so desperate that they partner with misogynists just to get an audience 10% smaller than the population of Davenport, Iowa.

The protests are not going away, though they are being watered down by owners like Jerry Jones pushing players to kneel before the anthem and lock arms. They should not go away, because why stop protesting when the protests are driving conversation but progress has yet to be made on the issue being protested? But, for a moment, before this week’s NFL games get going, it’s worth talking about what the issue is that’s being protested.

“It’s important to remember why Colin (Kaepernick) decided not to stand,” activist Deray Mckesson said in an appearance on Monday’s episode of Pod Save America. “He decided not to stand because of the deep injustices in the country, and specifically because of police violence. I worry that in the past couple of days, people have been more frustrated with Trump than the actual inequity that caused Colin not to stand. That bothers me a little bit.”

The next day, noted Confederate flag remover (and thus American hero) Bree Newsome took the point a step further in a series of tweets that read: “The entire movement for black lives began during Obama presidency w murder of Trayvon Martin. Folks are just trying to narrow focus to Trump / Because, again, the topic is: SYSTEMIC RACISM & its origins in chattel slavery. This is the unavoidable topic that USA keeps trying to avoid / So lots of folks from the WH to NFL owners will try to find every which way to narrow or change the topic to avoid talking about racism / Instead, they’ll talk about ‘unity’ in way that has no real meaning or what counts as ‘appropriate’. Anything to avoid discussing racism.”

Sure enough, hours later on Tuesday, the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated was released, with the headline: “A NATION DIVIDED / SPORTS UNITED” in front of a collage of relevant sports figures from the news of the past week. Not among them, in an egregious oversight that cannot be explained away, no matter how hard anyone tries: Colin Kaepernick.

Obviously, Kaepernick is not on an NFL team right now, the result of a leaguewide blackballing that’s been evident since the spring. So, while he is the primary figure in this protest, his invisibility serves to further the point made by Mckesson, Newsome, and others that the real point of taking a knee during the national anthem is being obscured or erased, shifting from police brutality and systemic racism to Trump.

But… is that really a problem?

There are a lot of reasons to protest Trump, as seen since his first full day in office, when the Women’s March tripled the size of his inauguration crowd. Immigration, climate, general corruption, nuclear brinksmanship… the list goes on. Nobody, though, is mistaking what is happening in sports as calls for redress on any of those issues.

Every athlete who has followed in Kaepernick’s kneeprints has done so to address racial issues – if not specifically the continued ability of the police to get away with murdering innocents, then at least the general principles that have led to it.

If the protests are spinning into an anti-Trump direction, well, Trump is the face of institutional racism in the United States in 2017. It is Trump who made Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III the attorney general. It is Trump who built his political career on the concept of birtherism, attempting to delegitimize the first black president. It is Trump who called for the execution of the Central Park Five and continued to insist they were guilty years after they were exonerated. It is Trump who called for ESPN to fire Jemele Hill because she called him a white supremacist. And it is Trump who referred to the white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville as “very fine people” while labeling black athletes who protest as “sons of bitches.”

Trump fanned the flames of the sports protests by going on his days-long Twitter rant and inciting the crowd at that Alabama rally. So, yes, the focus has strayed from Kaepernick’s initial cause and become more about Trump. The fact of that being the way Trump likes it, though, does not matter. At a time when Jim Crow is being talked aboutas more than just history, the scope and urgency of protest should be broadening, and that is just what is happening.

Kaepernick might not be on Sports Illustrated’s cover this week, but he is quite clearly the inspiration for The Nation’s cover art. He’s also the inspiration for those who continue to protest during the anthem, the man who took a knee for what he believed in, and paid for it with his livelihood. While that fact may be drowned out in the moment, it remains present in the minds of all who follow, and will not be forgotten.

*

COLLEGE OOPS: In other news, “FBI brings Armageddon to college basketball, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Oh.

Dan Wetzel wrote the story for Yahoo about the indictment of 10 men, including NCAA assistant coaches and an Adidas executive, and that story has a very important paragraph:

“Top basketball talent is worth more on the open market than the NCAA limit of scholarship, room, board and a small stipend. NCAA limits are an attempt to stop the wheels of capitalism, which like floodwater will simply readjust and go where it wants.”

Hmm. Has anyone considered making it legal to pay the players? That might help deal with the whole “extensive bribery system so that the sport gets taken down by the feds” issue. Just a thought.

Maybe you’re offended by players not standing for the national anthem, or maybe you’re upset by what appears to be the league’s owners shutting out Colin Kaepernick over his protest.

Maybe you’re still distracted by politics outside of football, one of the major excuses offered last year for declining ratings, or maybe you can’t be drawn in by an increasingly mediocre product.

Maybe you can’t watch anymore, knowing in greater detail all the time how the sport ravages the bodies of the players from head to toe, or maybe you’re turned off by how the league has gone soft, everything is a penalty, and you just can’t hit like you used to – unless you’re a cameraman, apparently, in which case you just go out and level cheerleaders now.

Either way, it’s bad enough that even in this era of acting as if facts don’t matter, an NFL spokesman declared last Sunday’s ratings to be “kind of a mixed bag.” In other words, Week 2 in the NFL was terrible for business.

“Fox had a huge audience,” spokesman Joe Lockhart said, as quoted by USA Today. “Especially given there was a weather delay of about an hour.”

It’s true, the game between the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos was held up for an hour because of a thunderstorm, though that’s not really an “even though” situation. Games that run later should wind up getting more viewers, because people are coming home from their Sunday afternoon outings. There’s a reason, after all, that prime time is called prime time – it’s when the most people are in front of their televisions.

The football broadcast that’s regularly in prime time, NBC’s Sunday Night Football, saw its ratings drop in Week 2, as did Fox’s early slate of games, and as did CBS. Meanwhile, people aren’t coming to the games, either, at least in the league’s newest market, Los Angeles, where two professional games could not combine to outdraw Saturday’s college game between USC and Texas.

Monday Night Football did do better in Week 2, but even that Detroit Lions rout of the New York Giants demonstrated another pitfall for the NFL’s 2017 ratings, which is that the five teams in the nation’s three largest media markets are generally terrible, with a combined record of 2-9. That is a temporary problem, but one that comes at a bad time for a league trying to retain eyeballs.

The NFL remains No. 1, but with each passing week that’s a “mixed bag” or worse, it gets easier to see that primacy is not permanent. Just the narrative of football sliding is a dangerous thing for the league. It’s been percolating for some time, yet the league has done little to nothing to stand in the way.

After years of talk about how baseball needs to learn from the NFL, maybe it’s the other way around. Major League Baseball has been doing great business for a long time, yet remains confronted with “baseball is dying” thinkpieces. The response under Rob Manfred has been smart: acknowledge problems, address the identified problems with a series of initiatives like installing clocks to keep coaches’ mound visits brief, but don’t make any truly significant changes because, hey, business is still good.

This is only an option while business is actually good, and the NFL needs to act – or at least appear to act, a lot more than it actually has – while that is still the case.

***

Noted left-wing media outlet ESPN revealed this week that the wealthy are being unfairly taxed?

Yes, it turns out that professional athletes, in this case NBA players, do not really get all of the money that you think they would get as a result of their salaries being publicly listed. It turns out that the top-paid basketball players only take home something in the neighborhood of half that much money, as a result of the government’s sticky fingers – at the federal, state, and even local levels!

Groundbreaking stuff here. Maybe this can be a problem to overcome in the next NBA video game, given that soccer video games now include the possibility for players to sign virtual endorsement deals. Really, though, taxes should be part of soccer video games, given that they’re just another obstaclefor the world’s best players, and also Wayne Rooney.

Yesterday, all three major indices posted significant gains and broke yet again into historical levels. The VIX was almost unchanged.

The irony of this was not lost on Michael R. Bloomberg.

In an interview with CBS News, the former Mayor of New York City who also made billions charging Wall Street for news and data, seems to think that Wall Street is ignoring news in favor of data.

ANTHONY MASON: One of the first things that the president said in the speech today, which he often says, is that the stock market is at a record high.

BLOOMBERG: And it's up today.

MASON: What is that a reflection of?

BLOOMBERG: I have absolutely no idea. I cannot for the life of me understand why the market keeps going up. Our economy has some real challenges. The infrastructure's falling apart. We're destroying jobs with technology. We are keeping the best and the brightest from around the world [from] coming to America to create new jobs and create new businesses. All of those things would give you pause to worry about the future.

Basically Mike Bloomberg would like to ask the financial markets "Are you fucking high?"

Clearly, Bloomberg is shook by Trump walking into the UN and turning into the Andrew Dice Clay of global diplomacy and many other policies advocated by this administration. Bloomberg is also clearly ignoring all that deliciously positive data and unsinkable market sentiment, but he is part of that growing chorus of money-smart old dudes wondering aloud if this market is tethered at all to reality and if Trump has finally become the ultimate example of looking at an uncertainty and trying to price it as a risk.

Or maybe he just wants you to read your terminal.

Michael Bloomberg on North Korea crisis, U.S. economy and immigration [CBSNews]

This week saw the end of employment for talk radio host Dino Costa in Portland, Ore., and columnist Tom Powers of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Both men not only are out of jobs, but are off Twitter now, having deleted their accounts.

Costa’s case is the interesting one here, as Powers was already retired, just writing occasionally, and, after his Twitter rant on Tuesday night against Hillary Clinton specifically and Democrats in general, wrote, “Told PP I wasn’t going to write anymore. Don’t want paper to take heat for me. OK?”

Powers’ recent work had included such gems as referring to the young brain trust of the Minnesota Twins “sitting around appletinis one evening – or chai tea lattes or whatever front office whiz kids sip these days.” Clever, timely, hip stuff there, the kind of writing that screams, “oh, this guy was there for a long time, he’s got some friends on the masthead, and they’re throwing him a bone.” Which only partially applies to this column, so let’s just move on.

Costa is a different scenario because of the circumstances of his dismissal. Back in June, Costa had ranted on his show about Black Lives Matter, saying that if protesters blocked highways, police should simply let traffic through and let them be run over and killed. It’s a sentiment that’s been pervasive in conservative media for some time, but after last weekend’s killing of protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, the rant by Costa found a spotlight in Eugene Weekly.

Eugene is important because it’s the home of the University of Oregon, whose games are broadcast on KXTG, the station that had been home to Costa’s show. KXTG also airs Portland Timbers soccer, and when both the Timbers and the university made clear their disgust at being even tangentially associated with this mess, that was it for Costa.

It took time for it to happen, but what cost Costa his job was putting himself in violation of a pretty standard rule of business: don’t piss off the clients. Sometimes that means the listeners, viewers, or readers. Usually that means the advertisers. In this case, it meant the teams whose games air on the station. To break this rule and stay employed, you need to either have proven value and an ability to make things right with an apology, or a buddy in top brass willing to suffer a bit in capitalism for the sake of cronyism.

Some observers may see a double standard here, that left-leaning sports voices can speak openly about their distaste for Donald Trump and anything else on the right, while comments the other way result in termination. And, in fact, last year, Breitbart was out there calling for ESPN to fire Jemele Hill over tweets after the Orlando nightclub shooting. As writer Daniel J. Flynn put it there, “Translation? Say anything you want as long as you agree with your left-wing crackpot Disney overlords.”

Without agreeing that Disney is a “left-wing crackpot” organization, yes, this is the case. If your political speech mirrors the views of your employer, you’ll probably be just fine, just as a Breitbart columnist presumably would be shown the door for saying that Trump is a disaster and we’d all have been better off with Clinton.

This is not that complicated. Costa said on the air that people should be murdered in a very specific way, and two months later, after such a murder occurred, there was enough anger about it that his employers decided he wasn’t worth the trouble. Powers openly said that he was calling it quits to spare his old newspaper such backlash on his account.

There is a line between stating and defending an unpopular opinion – the job of a radio host or columnist – and stating and defending an indefensible one. The latter category would include such things as calling for street murder and writing “I think Hillary Clinton is worse than Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy.”

So the lesson here is not to stick to sports – it never is. The lesson is to stick to acting like a person who understands the humanity of others.

The Walt Disney Company has long produced movies, a successful and profitable endeavor. These days, a lot of people watch those movies on Netflix, which makes its money off of subscription fees from those watchers. Netflix in recent years has moved into the world of production, with compelling original programming, and now Disney is going to get into streaming, announcing plans on Tuesday to pull its content from Netflix as it prepares to launch its own streaming service.

To do this, Disney is ramping up its ownership stake in BAM Tech, spun off last year from Major League Baseball Advanced Media, moving from a 33 percent share to a majority stake in a $1.58 billion deal. Part of the plan includes launching an ESPN-branded streaming service next year.

The interesting thing here is that there already is an ESPN streaming service, WatchESPN, that already features thousands of sporting events each year. So, what’s the big deal here? Let’s check the Disney release.

“The ESPN-branded multi-sport service will offer a robust array of sports programming, featuring approximately 10,000 live regional, national, and international games and events a year, including Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, Major League Soccer, Grand Slam tennis, and college sports. Individual sport packages will also be available for purchase, including MLB.TV, NHL.TV and MLS Live.

“The new service will be accessed through an enhanced version of the current ESPN app. In addition to the multi-sport service, the ESPN app will include the news, highlights, and scores that fans enjoy today. Consumers who are pay TV subscribers will also be able to access the ESPN television networks in the same app on an authenticated basis. For many sports fans, this app will become the premier digital destination for all their sports content.”

The play that this got in the media was that the NHL will be back on ESPN, very exciting for fans who miss the classic ESPN hockey theme song, long for Barry Melrose’s mullet on their screens, and just generally want to see hockey get the boost in the public eye that comes from being televised on America’s top sports network.

Not so fast. NBC is the NHL’s national television partner through 2021, and it was just a few months ago that ESPN cut ties with some of the top talent in hockey journalism, with Pierre LeBrun and Scott Burnside as part of the network’s massive spring bloodletting.

The reason that it’s possible to say “ESPN will have hockey again” is because of the “available for purchase” NHL.TV package, which allows fans to pay to stream out-of-market games. As with MLB.TV, some games can be broken out as free, and voila, there will be live hockey on an ESPN service, produced by somebody other than ESPN.

Producing live sports coverage is expensive and difficult. What Disney is finding here is a workaround, with the ability to absorb league-owned streaming platforms, and make money for itself by selling subscriptions to the packages, with free samples handed out at their discretion. Meanwhile, ESPN continues producing its own content, but that remains accessible only if customers are paying cable subscribers.

It’s a much better business plan than spending millions of dollars per season on rights feels, then hoping to make it all back in cable carriage fees and advertising revenues. Instead, Disney spends nothing on rights, nothing on production, and can simply sit back and rake in the profits from fans who are interested specifically in the product for which they control the means of distribution.

The backlash to this is years down the road, when various TV rights packages come up and the networks doing the broadcasts wonder what they’re paying for when ESPN gets to so heartily enjoy the fruits of their labor. That, however, is not ESPN’s concern. It’s a matter for the teams and leagues selling their television rights, and it is they who must determine what to do with production now that Disney is seizing the means of distribution and bringing a new revolution to sports television.

Oh dear god!

So it turns out that having no real revenue plan and a business model that Mark Zuckerberg can copy in his sleep really is a not-so-great cocktail for public market success.

But, hey, it's still the early days. There's time to turn this around, especially since Evan Spiegel and his team have shown that they aren't totally devoid of ideas. Really all SNAP needs is a bleeding edge type of content strategy that Facebook would never try and has even notional monetization potential. Or at the very least something so brand new that people will at least start whispering about how creative Snapchat is being again. These guys have made millions of dick pics disappear, how hard can this really be?

Snapchat is getting its first daily news show in partnership with NBC News.
"Stay Tuned" will air at 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays and 1 p.m. on weekends local time. The segments will be two to three minutes and include current news topics and pop culture events in the vein of "NBC Nightly News." There will also be breaking news segments when necessary.

Umm...really? Snap is going to pull of its death spiral by introducing Facebook-type live video...while simultaneously partnering with the dying legacy news business?

Cool cool.

"If something happens in the world, we want people to go to Snapchat," said Sean Mills, Snap's head of original content.

No, no, no. Please stop talking. We need a moment to process our thoughts.

NBC News hired 30 journalists to staff the series and will be leading ad sales, with an undisclosed revenue split with Snap, the parent company of Snapchat.

This will end in tears.

So what we see here is a bid for deeper engagement of current users that relies on a revenue share through a partnership with an organization so on the forefront of modern media success that it is now paying Megyn Kelly at least $15 million a year to do stuff no one is watching.

Suddenly those hideous sunglasses seem like a creative high point.

Pretty soon, Blue Apron is going to stop providing cover as the worst IPO around (or maybe ever) and people will start to take a real look at what Snap has done to turn things around. And they are not going to keep singing the "It's so cheap" song much longer unless they see something. Partnering with NBC News to get a foot in a business that no one can seem to succeed with is not the kind of shit you want to be showing them.

You can now watch your daily news on Snapchat [CNBC]

First, from Andy Gray, on Wednesday afternoon: “I’ve been in digital media for 12 years. One thing I’ve learned is that nobody wants to read anything over 1,000 words. MTV is more proof.”

Then, from media reporter Richard Deitsch on Thursday afternoon: “Sources: The total visits for Fox Sports’s website were down about 60 percent yesterday when compared to Sunday.”

These two tweets, one opinion and one reported fact, do not seem to mesh, and it’s because one of them is wrong. Even when Gray backtracked, he was still off base when he wrote, “Didn’t mean to offend anyone and could’ve worded better. Just saying that ppl today prefer shorter, viral content compared to longer pieces.”

It’s not that “people today” prefer short and generally mindless content to deep dives. That’s always been the case. Look outside of sports, and People magazine has three times the circulation of Vanity Fair, same as the advantage for Reader’s Digest over The New Yorker. Online, a story about a dog running on the field at a 49ers-Browns game will do much bigger numbers than a story about Venezuelan baseball players fearing for their families’ lives back home.

The lowest common denominator is not a new phenomenon. The idea in media traditionally has been that the fluffier stuff is what pays for the real journalism. The problem online is that nothing pays for anything.

When’s the last time you were reading a story on ESPN.com and clicked an ad on purpose? But if you want to watch highlights of last night’s game, and there’s a 15-second commercial before the clip, you’re trapped and the advertiser gets their message across.

It’s the advertisers, the financial lifeblood of the industry, pushing these changes. It’s entirely possible, depending on the breakdown of content, that Fox Sports would wind up better off with 60% less traffic, so long as more pre-roll ads are playing, especially considering all the savings from laying off writing staff.

People will read long pieces of writing if they’re good pieces. Just ask The Washington Post and The New York Times (granted, both behind paywalls, but cheap ones and avoidable ones for anyone who knows how to use Incognito Mode, NOT THAT THIS IS HOW WE READ THOSE PUBLICATIONS, OF COURSE) how their juicier and more extensive pieces on Trump administration scandals are going. In sports, there are no more vital reads than Jon Heyman’s “Inside Baseball” or Elliotte Friedman’s “30 Thoughts” hockey column. On a different level, Bill Simmons rose to prominence as a writer whose columns got printed out by 20-something bros to read on the toilet.

You don’t need to print anything out to read on the toilet now, because of the advent of smartphones to allow people to have reading material with them at all times. But it’s something else about smartphones that makes this “pivot to video” strategy from so many media companies misguided.

Phones are great for a lot of things. Watching videos is not one of them. Whether it’s streaming a full Major League Baseball game through Twitter or catching two minutes of Colin Cowherd screaming nonsense, the problem is the same: phone screens are tiny, videos drain phone batteries faster than anything, and the phone is rendered otherwise useless for the duration of the video.

With audiences for content constantly shifting from desktop to mobile, this is a major problem without a realistic solution on the horizon. Plus, think again of the toilet consumer, particularly at work. If someone wants a sports fix in the office restroom, is that person going to want a seven-minute read, or risk discovery as a result of Skip Bayless shrieking through a tiny speaker?

Sports media companies – all media companies – cater to advertisers because that’s where the money comes from. It doesn’t mean the advertisers have any idea how to bring in traffic. The problem is that the media companies, 20-plus years into the Internet game, still have not figured out how to make money while giving away their content for free.

Meanwhile, The Athletic just launched this month in Detroit, the outlet’s fourth city after Chicago, Toronto, and Cleveland. The editor-in-chief for the new site is Craig Custance, and the managing editor is Katie Strang, both accomplished reporters formerly of ESPN. A subscription-based site where the business depends on getting people to pay for quality content rather than catering to the whims of advertisers who just want whatever is viral so they get eyeballs? It’s crazy enough, it just might work.