Hello, welcome to your Wednesday FOIAball. Before I launch into a passionate defense of the media, let me tell you something I don’t like about our industry.
Journalists are often happy to let our errors and corrections be quietly buried. We do own our mistakes, but we also plug them in at the bottom of a story and kinda hope everyone moves on. I’m guilty of that.
But I would like to try and do things differently here. With that in mind, after I published my story calling Bespoken’s NIL whiskey AI slop booze, I had a great email exchange with its CEO, Scott Savage (dope name). He made some reasonable points about a few things, and I’ve updated the piece with his comments.
And, because I’m a softie (and because it’s Libra season), I offered to buy a bottle of their best expression and give it an honest try.
I’ll let y’all know how it is.
I mentioned something I don’t like about the media. Now let me tell you something I really love about the media. Everything! It rules. Most importantly, I love how they inform everyone about what is going on in the world. Literally, no one else does this!
Especially not people in positions of power these days.
I’ll be honest, I’ve been fuming lately about how everyone just straight lies to all of us. I mean, I’ve known it forever, but I hit a tipping point last week when Kirk Herbstreit claimed, with a straight face, to not know anything about Ted Cruz.
Like, I was listening to him call the Ole Miss-LSU game the next day and just thinking throughout, “This man is a liar.”
Herbstreit being pressed on Cruz happened right around the same time the Trump administration banned several prominent news outlets from the White House, fuming as always, about “fake news.”
And while those two stories are somewhat unrelated, they’re not. Together, they’re just more proof that the most powerful people in the world feel utterly removed from any consequences for their actions. Ever. I mean, if you or I thought about junking the entire First Amendment, we’d feel bad.
But no one has any shame anymore.
Except, I refuse to believe that’s true. I think there’s still stuff that can make even the most publicly unrepentant individuals squeamish. We just have to find out what it is. Maybe it isn’t war profiteering or insider trading or crypto scams, but I know it’s there.
Which brings me to Steven Cheung. Cheung is one of Trump’s most blustery aides, and now the top White House communications official.
When Politico, CNN, and MSNOW sued over their ban, his name was right below Trump’s in the filing.
Cheung loves to call his political opponents beta males online. It’s one of his favorite insults.
And I thought, I wonder how an outspoken alpha might feel if everyone knew he was cosplaying? That he actually follows a bunch of different sex coaches who preach respectful boundaries in kink play and the importance of aftercare in BDSM. I tell ya, that ain’t MAGA. That’s Bluesky-ism. That’s grosser than outdoor masking.
But that’s Cheung’s Instagram. In fact, after spending some time scrolling through it, I am starting to think he might be the most progressive, pro-sex work civil servant the White House has ever seen.
Just how 🍆 💦 is Steven Cheung’s Instagram?
Sure, you can scroll through it yourself, but I did the work for you!
Become a paid subscriber for a guided tour through the OnlyFans creators, lingerie CEOs, bikini models, and sex coaches Trump’s comms director follows. There’s a lot of them!
Steven Cheung via Kevin Dietsch / Staff / Getty Images
