Barstool’s Dave Portnoy says young people don’t trust traditional media, but they trust him

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy believes he has built up enough trust with his loyal fanbase that he could build a powerful and successful news outlet because so many Americans simply don’t have faith in mainstream news organizations. 

"It’s all about trust and I think a lot of young people do not trust the traditional media, and they trust somebody like me because I've been talking to them for 20 years," Portnoy told Fox News Digital. 

The Trump administration has been offering a coveted seat in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room to "new media voices who produce news-related content," and Barstool personality Jack Mac has expressed interest in joining a White House press briefing and Portnoy seems onboard with the concept. 

"I do think there’s a spot for it, for a younger generation to consume news from a very different type of person," Portnoy said. 

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Portnoy said the White House moves to include new media, which were announced by press secretary Karoline Leavitt in January, open up new ways for Americans to consume information without relying on newspapers or television. 

"There’s a million ways to get it," he said.  

"Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they're all new and people just consume media a lot differently than they used to," he continued. "And I don't know that the mainstream media has really caught up to that."

Portnoy, who interviewed President Trump at the White House in 2020, noted that people often try to paint Barstool as a political platform. While he couldn’t pass on the "surreal" opportunity to sit down with the president in the Rose Garden, Portnoy feels the company has largely stayed out of politics. 

"We still kind of consider ourselves a comedy site at times, sometimes more serious, sometimes not," he said.

The New York Times Magazine recently published a lengthy feature on Portnoy headlined, "How the ‘Manosphere’ Became Mainstream Entertainment," that said Portnoy has "long been vilified as a toxic guy" but still generates millions of views for his often-viral pizza reviews. 

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The negative terms are nothing new for Portnoy, who has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years and started Barstool as a "gambling and sports" newspaper he distributed around Boston back in 2003. 

"Manosphere, bro culture, all those things, we've heard a lot. So, it certainly didn't surprise me that they used it that way. I think it's really like a simplistic way to look at Barstool and what we've done, but it's certainly not the first time that I've heard that," Portnoy said.

Portnoy feels that the piece, which he "has long been treated as an avatar for everything that elite media is not," backs up the notion that he’s trusted enough to someday launch a news organization. 

"In a weird way, [the Times] was explaining why people like me. It's like they followed me, not only on pizza. I've been doing Barstool for, like, two decades, and they've seen me speak and talk and react to everything. So that's the trust I have," Portnoy said before critiquing Willy Staley, who penned the story. 

"He just kind of puts it as like an outlier, like, ‘Oh, here's this pizza thing that, you know, it's actually kind of interesting, and he's not the person I thought he was,’ and then in the next sentence is like, ‘But he is a jerk,’" Portnoy said. "But you're actually saying when you watch me, you don't think I'm a jerk, you're just saying I'm a jerk because of something in your own newspaper that you read."

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Portnoy doesn’t think that a news consumer should know exactly what a publication is going to say about a person based solely on the outlet, but the New York Times Magazine piece is the latest example of the opposite being true. 

"That’s why people don’t trust it," he said. 

He suggested that reporters who paint him in a negative light would be wrong "like 50% of the time" if they were grilled on where he truly stands on key issues. 

"Why would you trust anybody if you already know what they're going to think, regardless of the issue, before you even ask the question?" Portnoy said. 

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The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.