Ok, Zennie62Media has generally ignored Barstool Sports Founder Dave Portnoy’s content simply because the perception here has been it was the work of someone who had to be what others called him: a massive asshole. But, as Zennie62media CEO, I, Zennie Abraham, have decided that being just that is not really a bad thing.
And that maybe this Dave Portnoy fellow’s on to something.
After all, Mr. Portnoy picked up something like $250 million for himself with this PENN Deal, while making them look stupid in the process. Why? Because the Barstool Sports “Elpresidente” takes chances and somehow winds up falling up, and not down.
Dave Portnoy Does Not Back Down From Controversy
Portnoy, the media mogul, said this to NBC in 2013: “We don’t back down from controversy – we fan the fires. People think we go out of our way to create it, but we don’t. We’re not trying to gain new readers by being crazy-outrageous. Our readers get what we do, and I don’t think about what it’s going to look like to the outside world. I don’t really care.” That sums up who Dave Portnoy is from a media perspective, and that he is about what he wants. Period.
The definition of “asshole” is, according to Britanica, “a bad, stupid, or annoying person”. And that fact is represented in what he said to NBC, ending in “I don’t really care”. That means Dave Portnoy doesn’t care that what he does is considered to be bad, stupid, or annoying. Here’s an example: the whole Deflategate Protest Dave started.
Reportedly, Mr. Portnoy hated how the National Football League managed to punish Tom Brady in the wake of the Deflategate scandal. The Deflategate scandal is where the New England Patriots were accused of under-inflating footballs to make them easier for quarterback Tom Brady to grip, and thus throw with better control of the spiral of the ball.
ESPN’s Chris Mortenson claimed that 10 of 11 footballs were found to be in that deflated state, but a study revealed that not to be the case, and so ESPN retracted Chris’ story. But Brady still got a four game suspension, even though there was no evidence and nothing was proven.
This would cause Dave Portnoy and three other Barstool Sports employees to hold what they called a Deflategate Protest. The event held by Portnoy and employees would take place outside of the NFL’s very.headquarters. The protestors had Tom Brady jerseys on and clown nose masks.
Dave Portnoy Upset The NFL And Gained A World
Dave Portnoy would go even further in the protest, expressing his view on how The NFL Commissioner and the NFL itself approached the Deflategate matter being his guide, by making towels that had Goodell’s face on them. The towels had Roger Goodell’s face with a clown nose on them. Barstool Sports had upwards of 70,000 towels made with Roger Goodell’s image on them. That’s not something Roger would like.
The NFL Headquarters Protest would not be the last time that Barstool Sports and the NFL would have a row. Dave Portnoy and a man named Eric Sollenberger managed to get themselves escorted out of one of the biggest media days in the NFL. They did something one should never do: made fake NFL Super Bowl Press Credentials to get into the 2019 Super Bowl Media Night Event in Atlanta.
(By contrast, Zennie62Media has enjoyed real NFL Media Night Press Credentials and has no desire to have fake ones. For example, here’s what a real media credential gets you: the author was able to interview the legendary Civil Rights Leader and Atlantan, Andrew Young in the NFL Media Room in Atlanta and during the same Super Bowl 2019 week that Mr. Portnoy was kicked out of opening night:
)
What was all of that really for? Was it for Dave making a point that would change society? No. Dave just saw a major way to promote the then-new Barstool Sports – by pissing off the NFL. Both objectives worked. Dave and Barstool are still banned from the NFL and Dave’s making money. And that’s who Dave is: a man who shamelessly uses pop-culture news controvery to draw attention to make money. The issue could be Deflategate, sex in sports, or race.
It’s the race part that’s particularly annoying and the sex part that’s just plain criminal.
Dave Portnoy has used racist words and encouraged his content producers to weigh in on subjects regarding race, and not in a good way. One of the topics was SF 49ers NFL QB Colin Kaepernick, and where Portnoy said he “wasn’t an ISIS guy”, and before that said “So I’m going to say something that’s racist” and then added that throwing a towel around his head makes him look like a terrorist.
Now, in fairness to ElPresidente, a comment like that is not classically racist, but looking at the topic as if he’s being racist is, well, racist. But Dave’s not trying to be classically racist, just annoying by touching on the subject, and all in the objective of drawing attention, which leads to money. In all of this, Mr. Portnoy recognized that , in an Internet age, attention matters. And he’s turned that idea to the topic of sex, but then elects to inexplicably focus on young women – a bad idea that makes one think he’s drunk half of the time.
Now, one would think that the form of media he practices has seen better days. Indeed, ElPresidente’s approach is not new, and reached its height of effectiveness in the second decade of the 21st Century. The time of Gawker and the blogger.
Gawker Media Paved The Way For Barstool Sports
Gawker Media helped usher in the digital media age by employing a mixture of edgey gossip with personal headlines rather than professional ones – and it did so as it was breaking stories. The most notable story it broke was about Hulk Hogan and the sex tape. And inspired this vlogger to weigh in:
And while it turned out to be true, that also landed Gawker Media with a $140 million defamation lawsuit. That was the straw that broke Gawker Media’s financial back. It drove the company to bankrupcy – and its not been able to come back with a rise in traffic since.
So what do we make of Dave Portnoy’s success? For this article, the best way to understand it is that Barstool Sports represents the id of the young, straight, white male – and increasingly, young straight men, regardless of race or ethnicity. Now the “id” is defined in Frued’s psychoanalytic theory as “the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.”
Now, is there a place for what Dave does? Yes. And the one place where one can see that’s the case is in what’s popular in media right now. The Drudge Report, Matt Drudge’s 25 year old single-page website of news links, is either the most-visited news site in the World, or one of them, depending on the source. Drudge Report features headlines that feature pop-culture buzz words like “neo-nazi”, and sensationalism like “Humans No Longer Needed In Newsrooms”, and so on.
However, while that style of media still works, it’s not for everyone, and PENN learned that you can’t buy Barstool Sports, take out Dave’s style, and expect success. That’s how one best explains PENN losing $850 million, Portnoy taking back his media organization for a buck, and pocketing a net of $250 million in the process.
In an age where computers are replacing journalists, Dave Portnoy just may have the formula for news media success for humans – or a key part of it. All one has to do is avoid lawsuits.
Stay tuned.