Bari Weiss’ newest slopaganda, *not* “sponsored by Jack Daniel’s”

Yesterday, Zeteo’s Prem Thakker reported that CBS was prepping a new show called Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil. A bleak revelation indeed, but unfortunately very much in Fingers’ wheelhouse.

As you may recall, the right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison and his oafish failson David acquired the once-storied news network midway through last year and promptly installed anti-woke grifter Bari Weiss as its new head honcho. Her manifest inexperience at running a complex national media property has already produced spectacular case studies in media bootlicking, such as trying to suppress a damning 60 Minutes segment about El Salvador’s Trump-abetted torture of American residents but forgetting to pull it from CBS’ international partners’ feeds, thus allowing the critical report to reach the air and calling exponentially more attention to it in the process. Masterful gambit, ma’am!

In December, Weiss elevated Israel apologist Tony Dokoupil to chief both-sides correspondent anchor of CBS’ venerable Evening News desk, where he’s already succeeded in bringing shame to himself, the program, and the profession many times over. If Thakker’s scoop holds (he’s broken a bunch of news sourced from leaks with CBS, where rank-and-file journalists apparently loathe their new charlatan boss), Whiskey Friday would be just another example of the BariTone era’s unserious reputation-damaging misadventures in misinformation. The concept is indistinguishable from a half-assed digital media pitch from last decade’s pivot-to-video era that would’ve been rejected by Thrillist’s senior video producer (i.e., me) for being pointless and corny.

Conservative male influencers performing masculinity with the aid of brown liquor is not news. (Indeed, Whiskey Fridays is a not-subtle rip-off of the Backstage series from right-wing outrage farm The Daily Wire, as Rolling Stone’s politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez and others have pointed out.) But in images of the show’s set obtained by Thakker, the logo for Jack Daniel’s is clearly visible in a prominent “sponsored by” placement, so I contacted parent company The Brown-Forman Corporation (B-F) to find out whether it was indeed underwriting something so cringeworthy at the Trump administration’s most-captured major network. The firm’s director of corporate communications, Elizabeth Conway, told Fingers this morning in no uncertain terms that it has nothing to do with the Whiskey Fridays:

It’s not unusual for media organizations to mock-up hopeful sponsor logos to showcase ad inventory for a new franchise. It is unusual for something like this to get leaked so early, but again, all the actual reporters at CBS seem viscerally disgusted by Weiss’ sycophancy-as-a-service approach to journalism, so I guess it’s not surprising it happened to Whiskey Fridays. Funnier still, the rendering suggests that Jack Daniel’s——a mid-shelf juggernaut, sure, but hardly a “dream big” pick—was considered an aspirational sponsor for Doukopil’s new slopaganda segment. If that’s the brand Weiss was hoping to land in the best-case scenario, and B-F ain’t interested, imagine the one she’ll actually end up with.

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🚛 The RNDC of it all

Yesterday I reported that Republic National Distributing Company was selling a chunk of itself to Reyes Beverage Group, less than a week after reporting that the former firm was losing Proximo Spirits nationwide. RNDC’s woes are once again the biggest news in the booze business, but after breaking those stories, then recording an episode of The VinePair Podcast about them yesterday (dropping Thursday), I’m a little RNDC’d out. I’ll have more on the beer angles of this deal in my column this Friday at VinePair. Until then, check out all my latest RNDC coverage if you haven’t yet. And of course, if you’ve got tips about what’s going on inside RNDC (or any other company for that matter), please send them to me. You can remain anonymous.

💊 Remembering PBR’s tongue-in-cheeks Dry January

Welcome to Fingers Time Capsule, an occasional feature spotlighting the weird, wild, and otherwise notable detritus from the annals of American drinking history that I’ve come across in my research and reporting.

On January 3nd, 2022—the very first day back at work after that holiday season for most people—Pabst Blue Ribbon’s official Twitter account posted one of the funniest tweets a beer brand has ever produced:

This is a real thing that happened, and it seems to have been at least partially planned. As Brewbound’s Justin Kendall reported at the time:

How analingus relates to the self-imposed tee-totaling ritual of Dry January wasn’t totally clear, and by midday, someone at Pabst had had enough of all the rimjob chatter on main. The tweet was unceremoniously scrubbed from the account, though of course screenshots live on in infamy. Pabst Brewing Co. eventually blamed the risqué on “poor judgment by one of our associates” and promised to “handl[e] the matter internally.” In what has always struck me as an absurd overreaction, the employee responsible, Corey Smale, was later fired.

Beyond the undeniable humor of the situation, the Blue Ribbon Butt-Munching Scandal of 2022 was emblematic the shifting marketing landscape for large legacy lager brands. Roughly four years ago, I filed a column here at Fingers unpacking some of the dynamics at play. The piece is old, and a lot has changed. For example, Twitter is now “X,” and X is now awash in AI-generated child sexual abuse material at the behest of the world’s richest man, a fascist. (Ah, how young we were.) But I think my column at the time remains a useful primer on how big, established brands have struggled to navigate the media ecosystem as online discourse superseded offline discourse over the past half decade. And if not, at least it stands as a monument to one of the funniest slogans American booze marketing has has ever produced.

💊 Previously: Way before RNDC, California had "No Delivery Complete"

🗳️ Cast your vote for Buzzwords of The Week of The Year 2025

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📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately

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