I Refuse To Let Deadspin Get Pageviews From Us Without Getting Pageviews From Them
Magary is right. The Barstool response to these articles is predictable. We are defensive about being called racist pieces of trash on a daily basis by a site with millions of readers, for some reason. They target Barstool because they see the pageview meters rocket off the charts, and they desperately need the engagement because (don’t tell Drew this, he already knows), they went bankrupt, and their parent company is desperately trying to sell them after they lost $100 million in the last 2 quarters. They tweet their blogs out as bait for the 0.001% of readers who will go too far on Twitter – whom we have condemned time and time and time again – and give them exactly what they want in their mentions to keep their narrative going. And we give them exactly what they want by fighting back every time. This is true. Unfortunately as an extremely petty man of principle I refuse to let them get those pageviews without getting some of our own so here we are again. A vicious cycle.
The bottom line is we shouldn’t be angry about this anymore. We should be happy. So happy. Barstool is acid in Drew Magary’s mouth. It consumes his thoughts when he’s awake and haunts his nightmares when he’s asleep. He wakes up in his Connecticut Prep School heather grey t-shirt, wipes the sleepies out of his eyes, slides into his slippers and walks straight to the computer to obsesses over what is being posted on BarstoolSports.com. He takes a 15 minute break every now and then to continue to delete his internet history* which he has admitted is racist and bigoted and sexist but has said “I’m sorry” for it so everyone is supposed to forget about it because he’s become enlightened. (Same principle applies to his colleague Barry Petchesky, who said “rape is just surprise sex” and fat girls give good head because they’re fat, then got promoted to Deputy Editor for it while getting mad at US for pointing it out because “it was a long time ago”.) He scrolls through every blog and every tweet just looking for something to blame the collapse of the free world on. He bends over backwards to make Trump comparisons about a site known by its readers as “Libstool” because he likes how that parallel plays. He takes his shot at Peter Chernin for making a business investment in a company that has 8x’ed its revenue and his shot at Erika for having the audacity to be a woman with more power than he’ll ever sniff. He takes another break to call into Pardon My Take to promote his new book, then goes back to the grind, looking for jokes to twist into proof of bigotry – because if there is one person you can trust to tell you what’s racist, it’s the white prep school kid from Minnesota and Connecticut who went to a private college in Maine whose boss brags about living with Puerto Ricans.
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And the thing that eats at him the most is that he knows Deadspin was invented to be the watchdog on those in power – always punching up at the big boys, mostly ESPN, and any other media outlet that they wanted to knock down a peg. Now the main beat in the newsroom is Barstool. Every day it’s a Barstool article. It’s their top focus. We are their Big Bad Company. And that makes me happy. I guess that’s kind of my own epiphany, much like the one Magary had when he woke up one day and decided to stop calling women cunts on the internet.
*This is the article I read when I need a reminder that the moral authority we’re dealing with bullied a kid for being fat so badly he literally had to transfer schools.
