Carl Diggler


Carl "The Dig" Allison Diggler is a fictional American journalist. The character was created by Blake Zeff and mostly written by Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas for CAFE, an online publisher of political news and satire.
Diggler, a middle-aged, centrist pundit who prides himself on his "inside the Beltway" knowledge of the Washington, D.C. political scene, is the purported author of a column published at CAFE and a keen, if clueless, Twitter user. Portrayed as a smug, ignorant blowhard, the character comments on political news and delves into backstory from his personal life, particularly the details of his failed marriage and protracted family court proceedings for custody of his son Colby. Diggler also hosts The DigCast, a podcast featuring weekly guests, with Biederman giving voice to Diggler and Texas playing Diggler's millennial intern.
Writing as Diggler, Biederman and Texas began using their intuition to guess the outcomes of primary contests in the 2016 United States presidential election. By the end of the primary season, Diggler claimed to have correctly predicted more winners than data journalist Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog. However, that comparison may be misleading: depending how predictive success is measured, Diggler either comes out ahead or roughly on par with FiveThirtyEight's model. Texas ran an op-ed in The Washington Post about their predictive success and the ways Diggler exposed the flaws of supposedly objective data-journalistic techniques.

Authorship

Cafe editor-in-chief Blake Zeff came up with the original idea for Carl Diggler, and hired Biederman and Texas to develop the character and write his columns. Biederman was then a freelance writer on various topics, and Texas was a former contributor to The Onion; both were popular Twitter personalities. Zeff still contributes ideas, edits the columns, and helps to run Carl Diggler's in-character Twitter account, but the articles and social media posts by the character are largely the work of Biederman and Texas.
In addition to ongoing tweeting as Diggler, Biederman and Texas typically write one to four Diggler columns a week. Splitsider writer Eddie Brawley said Texas has "the more polished, literary style" and a skill for tonal imitation of writers like Hunter S. Thompson when the occasion calls, while Biederman possesses a "preternatural ability to observe and exploit the tiny absurdities of online behavior."
Biederman and Texas have semi-fictional counterparts under their own names as Diggler's interns. They have occasionally broken the fourth wall in the column to write articles as themselves when they were, in real life, on-location covering political events on the 2016 campaign trail — under the fictional pretext that Diggler, meanwhile, is stuck moping back in his Park Slope apartment.

Character

Diggler's personal life

Mediaites Sam Reisman described Diggler's personal life as a "richly detailed canon" and a "batshit American picaresque." Diggler is an unhappily divorced father of a "round son," Colby, over whom he is locked in a never-ending custody battle with his ex-wife, only called Ex-Mrs. The Dig. The custody battle has caused Diggler to resent the family court system, and he constantly invokes his concerns about family court in his column and even incorporates them into his political thought in contrived ways. It is also often implied that Diggler is a sex addict, with the character unwittingly making references to his foot fetish and interest in sex tourism and camgirls. In search of love, Diggler briefly dates a feminist NYU student referred to by her Tumblr handle, . During his period of dating Diggler became "" and, claiming to follow his newfound understanding of intersectional feminism, endorsed Carly Fiorina in an attempt to impress his girlfriend.
After a bad breakup sparked by destroying his posters of Senator Lindsay Graham, Diggler disappeared from the website. He later emerged as the subject of a hostage video, after being captured in Syria by Assad loyalists and then turned over to the Russian government. However, he was able to return to America after the Russians decided he wasn't worth keeping around and put him on a plane to New York.
Diggler's life took a turn for the worse when his horribly-mistaken predictions for the 2016 US Presidential Election led to Cafe replacing him with Diggler superfan David "The Milk" Milkberg as their "Chief Politics Writer" at the site. On top of that, Diggler was evicted from his studio apartment and lost partial custody of Colby. Diggler has partially recovered by writing independent political analysis pieces and posting them on Medium, but his efforts to crowdfund his future journalism work have been hamstrung after he previously used crowdfunding sites to donate to Russian camgirls he met online and accidentally "donated several thousands of dollars to Hamas."

2016 presidential primary predictions

Following the practice of many other political journalists and news publications, Diggler published predictions for who would win each contest of the 2016 presidential primary season. Diggler's predictions were actually made by Biederman and Texas, without reliance on data or traditional analysis. Diggler backed up his picks with absurd, often grotesque rationales, based on the character's "gut" reading of a state electorate's supposed tendencies and mindsets. Biederman said the predictions were made based on "personal hate of a candidate, the broad prejudices of their voters, anecdotal experience, and sexual pathology." In an in-character interview with Complex, Diggler himself attributed his predictive success to "two variables: gut and experience."
In a surprise to observers, as well as to Biederman and Texas themselves, Diggler's predictions proved to be highly accurate, and even seemed to match or outperform rigorous, statistical predictive models used by other publications. Most conspicuously, Diggler correctly predicted more primary outcomes than the models used by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, a prominent data-journalism and statistics blog owned by ESPN.
After his predicting streak became apparent, Diggler gloated to Silver on Twitter and in his column, even challenging Silver to a head-to-head contest. Cafe launched "SixThirtyEight," a tally of Diggler's predictive wins over FiveThirtyEight. According to the "SixThirtyEight" tally, Diggler predicted with 89% accuracy, calling 81 of 91 total contests comprising the primaries for both major parties in every state and United States territory. By contrast, FiveThirtyEight had a 56% success rate in the total 91 contests. FiveThirtyEight had chosen not to make predictions in some contests, all of which Diggler counted as forfeits. The FiveThirtyEight predictive model left contests without a prediction if there was too little data to make a prediction or if the race was too close to call, while Diggler made a prediction in every race. Diggler predicted many more total winners, but if FiveThirtyEights non-predictions are ignored rather than counted as forfeits, then Diggler and FiveThirtyEight still had a roughly equal rate of success.
Following the attention given to Diggler's results, Texas wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post explaining the Diggler character, their methodology, and what he believed Diggler's results revealed about the flaws of purportedly objective, detached journalism. In the editorial, Texas said that Silver's predictions were, despite their reliance on data, not falsifiable and thus unscientific, and that they overstated the statistical impact of factors like endorsements based on subjective assumptions about historical elections. Texas wrote that readers of data journalism—such as voters, other journalists, and members of the political establishment—rely on quasi-scientific predictions and analysis when making political decisions, in ways that adversely shapes the real outcomes:
In interviews, Biederman said that they do believe there is a place for data journalism, but that its prominent practitioners had relied on outdated theories of how elections work and failed to account for the unprecedented anger of voters in an ahistorical election.

''The DigCast''

Diggler is voiced by Biederman, who increases the pitch of his ordinarily deep voice and adopts an accent similar to The Simpsons character Ned Flanders. Either Biederman and Texas speaking about Diggler, or Biederman playing Diggler, appeared on multiple podcasts prior to getting their own show, including District Sentinel Radio, Reply All, Chapo Trap House, and a live taping of The Katie Halper Show on WBAI. Biederman and Texas launched The DigCast on July 1, 2016, with Biederman voicing Diggler and Texas playing his intern. Guests have included former Gawker editor Alex Pareene, comedian Brandon Wardell, Braddock, Pennsylvania Mayor John Fetterman, writer and MSNBC host Steve Kornacki, and The Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald. Biederman tweeted on February 25, 2017 that The Digcast had ended. Episodes can be streamed from SoundCloud or iTunes.

Episodes

Reception

According to Eddie Brawley, Diggler's writing has a niche appeal, because understanding the column's many elaborate in-joke references requires a reader to closely follow media discourse on Twitter and the character's own idiosyncrasies and intricate storylines. Diggler's audience and social media following include many "hip" establishment media figures who are "in on the joke." Biederman said he had seen positive feedback to Diggler from people with a wide variety of political identifications.
Diggler's primary predictions have generally received a positive response. Corinne Grinapol wrote in the blog FishbowlDC that "Diggler exists in opposition to objective analysis, but is also a reminder that the idea of objective analysis is an often-impossible ideal disguised as an attainable one. Diggler's biases are not the only ones worth being aware of." In National Review, Theodore Kupfer cited Diggler's predictions and Texas' op-ed as prescient, in contrast to Silver and other pundits who had been blindsided by the unexpected rise of Donald Trump. However, Washington Post blogger Callum Borchers dismissed the SixThirtyEight project as misleading, believing Biederman and Texas inflated the appearance Diggler's success, and urged readers to "not be silly and pretend like 's some kind of proof that data journalism and poll-based prognostication is B.S.; he isn't more accurate than Nate Silver."
In 2018, Yale University's humor magazine The Yale Record resurrected its "Humorist of the Year Award" and gave it to Biederman and Texas, in recognition of their work on Diggler and Chapo Trap House.