Like conservative talk radio or Fox News, “Pod Save America” is an authentic partisan response to the perceived failings of the mainstream media. While many conservatives hate the mainstream media for its supposed liberal bias, many liberals have come to despise what they see as its tendency toward false equivalence — a grievance particularly inflamed by the coverage of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Liberals don’t want a hermetically sealed media ecosystem of their own, so much as one that does away with the pretense of kneejerk balance: a media that’s willing to say one side is worse than the other. “I screamed at the TV a lot in the White House,” Favreau says. He and his co-hosts particularly loathe the bipartisan on-air panels of blabbering pundits that cable networks deployed during the election. “If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news,” Lovett says, “it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.”

“Pod Save America,” to its hosts and its listeners, is a twice-weekly reality check. “I think that when you have a president gaslighting an entire nation,” Vietor says, “there’s a cathartic effect when you have a couple of people who worked in the White House who are like: ‘Hey, this is crazy. You’re right, he’s wrong.’ ”

What is absent from the podcast, significantly, is any of the usual liberal squeamishness (or, depending on your point of view, principle) about using media as a tool of partisan advantage. Liberal activists point regretfully to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who in their Comedy Central heyday were happy to savage Republicans but refused to champion Democrats: In 2010, the pair drew some 215,000 people to the National Mall a few days before the midterm elections, only to keep the rally strictly nonpartisan. “Pod Save America,” by contrast, isn’t afraid to, as Ben Wikler of MoveOn puts it, “actually touch Excalibur.” At the theater in Richmond this month, shortly before bringing Northam and the rest of Virginia’s Democratic ticket onstage, Favreau asked the crowd: “Is everyone registered to vote? Is everyone going to be doing phone-banking and canvassing? Because if not, you have to leave.”

Crooked Media’s headquarters consists of a few bargain-priced rooms on La Cienega in a seedy section of West Hollywood, cater-corner to a lingerie shop and across the street from a strip club. On the summer afternoon I visited, I was greeted at the entrance by a goldendoodle. Favreau, materializing behind the animal, said: “This is Lovett’s dog, Pundit — the thing that we hate and the thing that we’ve become.”

The office, like the company itself, was still very much a work in progress. An entire wall was covered with “A Beautiful Mind”-style scribbles about “webseries,” “daily micropods” and “chat convos” — the handiwork of Tanya Somanader, who was the director of digital rapid response in the Obama White House and is now Crooked Media’s chief content officer. “This,” she said, pointing at the wall and summoning as portentous a tone as she could muster, “is how you build a media empire.”

The self-mockery about Crooked Media’s ambitions belies how outsize those ambitions are. In addition to “Pod Save America,” the company now has six other podcasts and plans to roll out at least two more soon. It has hired two producers, one from MTV and the other from the Oprah Winfrey Network. In October, it poached a New Republic writer to helm its website. A nationwide “Pod Save America” tour, Crooked Media’s first serious stab at live events, has so far played to sold-out theaters in seven cities. For the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race, Crooked Media is hoping to host candidate forums and debates.