Crooked Media: The Aftermath

With the second term of President Obama coming to an end one must wonder where do we go from here. 

Three former staffers to President Obama are launching an anti-Donald Trump media site called “Crooked Media.” 

Keepin’ It 1600 Crew Launches New Podcast, ‘Crooked Media’ Company

By Margaret Hartmann

Those distraught about the lack of Keepin’ It 1600 episodes in recent weeks can stop drowning their sorrows in Bloomin’ Onions. The popular podcast from former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor — which started last March and amassed 400,000 listeners by Election Day — is being retired. But it will live on as Pod Save America, the debut podcast from the trio’s new company, Crooked Media.

As the name suggests, their departure from the Ringer Podcast Network was inspired by the election of Donald Trump, which hit them particularly hard, since they regularly urged fellow liberals worried about Hillary Clinton’s chances not to “bed-wet.”


“If Hillary Clinton had won the election, like we all wrongly prognosticated, I think all of us would have been content to keep doing this as a hobby,” Vietor told the Daily Beast. “But that night changed things for a lot of people, us included. I woke up feeling like sitting on the sidelines wasn’t an option anymore. I wanted to be part of whatever is going to happen over the next four years to preserve the things we fought for at the White House.”

Thus, they’re leaving their consulting jobs to focus full-time on their new L.A.-based media venture. (Keepin’ It 1600’s Dan Pfeiffer is keeping his day job, but he’ll appear on Thursday episodes of Pod Save America.) According to the company’s mission statement, there will still be openly biased snark and analysis, “but with a new emphasis on activism and political participation.”

Eventually they hope to add more podcasts, live video, and written content to Crooked Media, but for now they’re still working out how they’ll challenge the Trump administration. 


“We want to give people an outlet and a vessel to figure out what to do,” Favreau told The Hollywood Reporter. “The biggest question we get is ‘What do I do now?’ and we didn’t have an answer in those early weeks. We want to find an answer.”