The SF Chronicle Has Problems with an Area Restaurant Getting Help from 'Controversial' Barstool Sports
This was from yesterday. The Tadich Grill in San Francisco getting relief from the people who have contributed to The Barstool Fund. A restaurant that has not only been in the Buich family for four generations, but is the oldest establishment west of the Mississippi.
It's impossible to see these videos and not get emotional about the pure good being done here. To hear the pride in the voices of the family as they describe the place they've made into a local institution. The despair as they explain how they're in danger of losing everything they've worked so hard to achieve. And the pure joy in the voice of the woman who got the call from Dave, knowing now her family business has a chance to survive. Absolutely impossible not to feel all the positivity about the pure good that's being done here. Not just by this company, but by the more than 157,000 people who have contributed more than $20 million to help their fellow Americans, more than 90 businesses so far. And counting.
Impossible, that is, unless you have another agenda. Unless you're part of the failing old media. Unless you're still trying to deliver news and entertainment to people printed on reams of dead trees on their front steps 24 hours after it happens like this is the 1849 Gold Rush days. Unless you decide it's part of your mission to question the very people who's livelihoods are being helped by the "controversial Barstool Sports." And for that, I give you, the San Francisco Chronicle.
I could excerpt the article, but it's behind a paywall. I've read the content on another site and it's nothing we haven't seen a million times before. Suffice to say that in the middle of a major economic collapse in their city, when a beloved cultural institution was on the verge of going out of business forever until Barstool readers threw them a lifeline so they can keep paying their employees a while longer, the Chronicle's reaction was to contact one of the Buich family members and ask how she feels about getting help from Barstool. You can fill in the rest. All the accusations of -isms and -phobes we've been hearing since the KO Barstool days. With allusions to comments made that have long been owned up to and apologized for. With a link to an old Deadspin hatchet piece from fucking 2017. Even bringing this up right now is not only the worst kind of Gotcha, hit-and-run clickbait journalism, it's blatantly unfair to these business owners to ask for a response at a moment when they're just struggling to keep the lights on.
We shouldn't be surprised. And yet I still find it astonishing that the newspaper industry is still operating off the same old playbook even as they sink into the abyss of irrelevancy. This horseshit article is currently at the top of their website begging for clicks along with such hard-hitting investigative pieces as the one about the lady who had her dog stolen, someone tearing the flowers off the Cherry Blossoms in Japantown, and one headlined - and I am not making this up - "How to Talk to Your Kids about the U.S. Capitol Riots." Right. Because there's nothing little Xander would like more than to pause from two-screening Fortnite games on Twitchy and girls in belly shirts dancing on Tik Tok to get a briefing from mom and her new boyfriend about security breakdowns on the Hill. And no better place to get your parenting advice than from newspaper articles.
Here's an idea. It's crazy, but just crazy enough to work. How about instead of harassing the owners of small businesses getting the help they need into repudiating the people who are working to save them, outlets like the Chronicle take their thumbs out of their collective ass and help? How about make a donation to The Barstool Fund? Or help promote it? Or how about if you think this site is so disreputable you can't be associated with it, start your own fund? That would be great with everyone. Every bit helps. There literally cannot be enough of these kinds of effort.
But if you somehow can't bring yourself to do any of those things - and I don't know why that would be the case unless you truly don't give a Tuppenny fuck about the community you claim to serve - how about just staying out of the goddamned way? You don't have to work with us, but is it too much to ask that you stop trying to work against us?
I've never been prouder to be a part of this empire Dave started. And never been happier to hear us criticized for something we're doing than this.