Pod Save America is coming to Salt Lake City — the Pod Tours America will land at the Eccles Theater on July 18.
It will be the 28th stop on a 2019 tour that will take podcasters Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor from the West Coast to the East Coast, with dozens of stops in between.
The four former Obama White House staffers have built a podcasting empire at Crooked Media, with Pod Save America — the wildly popular, twice-weekly program — as its flagship. Their progressive, anti-Trump rhetoric, delivered with considerable humor, averages 1.5 million listeners and has been downloaded upwards of 400 million times. And it spawned four HBO specials that aired in the weeks leading up to the blue wave of the 2018 midterm elections.
Favreau, Lovett, Pfeiffer and Vietor are partisan, and they’re not trying to hide it.
“We’re Obama people. … You know what our beliefs are,” Favreau told TV critics before their HBO specials aired, adding that “part of the problem in political journalism” today is that people with partisan beliefs go on cable news channels and “have to pretend that they’re nonpartisan.”
“We have our biases. Now, what we try to do that’s different from Fox [News] is we try to make sure we are factual, that we are providing people true information. And if we make mistakes, we try to correct them.”
And …
“We don’t have a three-hour block of racist crap,” Lovett added. “That’s one thing we’ve tried to avoid.”
Tickets, which range in price from $39.50 to $149.50, go on sale to the general public on Friday. They’re available at artsaltlake.org, by calling 801-355-ARTS (2787) or at the box office at 131 S. Main St.
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