As RedState reported, because conservatives love to find ways to harm each other instead of the left, Steven Crowder and The Daily Wire are currently in the middle of a fracas. Crowder recently put out a video going after an unnamed outlet on the right, describing the contract he was offered as “slavery.”
He then spent several minutes going over the more controversial provisions. Some of them included reductions in contract fees (i.e. the total Crowder was set to make), depending on whether certain content quotas weren’t delivered or if the show was unable to be monetized on social media. Crowder noted that his show has been demonetized on YouTube for three years, which would have immediately put him in breach of that part of the contract.
A day after Crowder’s video, The Daily Wire’s Jeremy Boering responded given it was obvious that was who the contract was from. He revealed it was worth $50 million over four years, that it included a month off a year, and that it gave Crowder every Friday off. In that light, suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad, and the formerly exorbitant-sounding penalties were placed in a more proper context.
Naturally, some on the right are having a good time at Crowder’s expense, and it didn’t take long for The Babylon Bee to enter the arena.
— Dani the Georgia B2B Natty Girl 🏆 (@NewYearsDani) January 19, 2023
We could all use a little humor in these tumultuous times, right? Seth Dillon appears in the video, joking that Crowder was actually talking about The Babylon Bee and that it’s “cute” that The Daily Wire thought the situation was about them. He then quips that building his conservative empire took “a lot of effort, not mine but effort nonetheless,” before asserting that his company “earned our subscriber with our joke.” It’s only a minute long and worth the watch.
I think humor is the right move here. While I’m not totally sympathetic to The Daily Wire and could list a few things I don’t like about how they do things, it sure seems like Crowder overreacted here. If someone is offering a $50 million contract, then of course the penalties for breaching it will be large. A $100,000 reduction sounds like a ton of money–until you put it in the context of the contract’s value. Certainly, it’s not “slavery.”
On the other hand, I can respect that Crowder wants to keep control of his own brand, and he’s got the right to do that. That means he’ll have to raise his own funds in the process. That’s business, and it would have been much better had this fight never gone public. Conservative media needs to save its energy for battles with the left, not with each other.
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