We’re in a tough moment for legacy media. Tech companies and social media platforms are soaking up a lot of the ad revenue that once went to newspapers and digital publications, making it tougher to keep the lights on every year. This has opened the door for hedge funds, billionaires, and other private interests – that may or may not have “keeping the public informed” as their top priorities – to swoop in and take ownership of an increasingly large slice of the American information and journalism pie.
For these reasons and more, the American public has increasingly lost faith in the journalism establishment – what many dismissively call the “mainstream media” or MSM – to actually provide clear, relevant, and accurate information in a timely way. This is not a right or a left problem, either, but a situation that extends across both sides of the political divide.
In fact, distrust of the traditional legacy media has directly fed a massive boom in independent media, much of it coming from digital creators. Many, if not most, of the breakout moments and comments from candidates that have come to define this year’s presidential race were spoken not on televised debates, or in the pages of The New York Times, but on podcasts.
Vice President Harris chatted about abortion rights with host Alex Cooper on “Call Her Daddy,” and tried to ease the concerns of Black voters with Charlamagne tha God on “All the Smoke.” Trump, meanwhile, did a veritable tour of what the internet sometimes refers to as “bro podcasts” (due to their significant appeal among male listeners) that included chats with pro wrestling legend Mark “The Undertaker” Calaway on “Six Feet Under,” YouTube pranksters The Nelk Boys, comedian Andrew Schulz on “Flagrant,” the Barstool Sports podcast “Bussin with the Boys,” and a talk with computer scientist Lex Fridman that featured a sidebar about UFOs. In a clip that went viral on social media, podcaster Theo Von dazzled Trump with a description of the physical effects of cocaine, which Trump claims to have never experienced.
Podcasts, in fact, have loomed large over the entire election. A Trump appearance on the wildly popular “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast has become one of the main storylines of the entire final stretch of the presidential race. First, there was the content of the nearly 3-hour interview itself, in which the duo discussed their shared distrust of polling, Trump suggested potentially eliminating the income tax entirely and replacing it with tariffs, and Rogan pushed back against Trump’s repeated claims of election fraud back in 2020.
Then, Trump supporters and Rogan listeners noted that it was difficult to find the interview via YouTube search, prompting YouTube to respond, apologize, and work to resolve the issue. Then, questions started swirling about why Kamala Harris had not also sat down with Rogan, inarguably one of America’s most popular podcast hosts. Earlier this week, Rogan stated that he and Harris’ team had been discussing an appearance, but the Vice President wanted him to travel to her, and limit the appearance to just one hour. Rogan felt that the only way forward was a traditional interview in his studio in Austin, Texas, so it simply didn’t happen.
There has been a tremendous amount of attention and focus on these podcast appearances, along with other “independent media” and commentary from pundits on YouTube, Twitch, Kick, TikTok and elsewhere, much of it coming from the hated, traditional, mainstream media itself.
Still, it’s worth asking whether or not these new platforms and sources for information are actually changing the nature of newsgathering and reporting, or just delivering the same kinds of information in an updated format.
To take Joe Rogan as just one example, as an actor and comedian whose show is designed to entertain rather than inform, it seems unwise to expect him to do the same job as a conventional news reporter would do with a 3-hour interview. In 2021, Rogan made this same argument himself, pointing out that he is a comedian, and people should not be taking his show quite so seriously as “a respected source of information.” Rogan does not have a research department, and is not capable of doing real-time fact-checking, allowing Trump – by CNN’s estimate – to bombard him with 32 false claims during the course of their discussion.
Again, lest you think this critique is partisan, you could make the same argument about Harris talking to Alex Cooper on “Call Her Daddy.” That’s a show that’s focused on love and sex advice, not politics, and though she strongly and publicly favors abortion rights, Cooper tends to avoid speaking about current events on the show through a partisan lens. When asked earlier this year about potentially having President Joe Biden on, she said she’d only want to ask about his sex life.
There’s also the question of whether or not these podcasts and niche, independently operated media sources, are actually reaching the American mainstream in the way that cable news or the Washington Post once did. A recent USA Today and Suffolk University poll showed that fewer than 30% of survey respondents had heard either candidate speak on a podcast. Polling between the two candidates barely shifted, even as they released a flood of podcast and radio appearances, suggesting that these conversations largely reinforced listeners’ previously-held beliefs, rather than prompting people to change their minds or see these candidates in a new light.
It’s undeniable that our elections and the way we cover them have clearly and permanently changed. Back in August, the former President appeared from his Florida country club and home, Mar-a-Lago, as a guest on a livestream with popular gaming personality Adin Ross, the most popular creator on the Kick platform. The duo gave away a Rolex watch and a Tesla Cybertruck that had been wrapped in a photo of Trump immediately following the attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump told Ross that his 18-year-old son Baron is a big fan of his content. This happened in spite of a number of controversies around Ross, who was banned from Twitch for displaying racist and antisemitic messages, and using homophobic slurs. (He’s also divisive for things like featuring pornographic images during streams, and promoting gambling to his young and impressionable audience.)
This would all have been a significant issue in previous elections. Should Trump have appeared in a livestream with this person? Does Ross regret the behavior that caused him to be removed from Twitch? Is it appropriate for Ross and Trump to give away luxurious gifts to potential voters? But in the 2024 race, it was just another day. In fact, the most attention-grabbing moment from the entire event was a peculiar, unexpected moment when a person dressed as The Grinch became briefly visible in the background.
A recent “Saturday Night Live” sketch also speaks to the strangeness of Election 2024, and how creators and digital media have both changed the landscape entirely without necessarily making anything clearer or easier for voters themselves. The sketch simulates scrolling through TikTok, featuring parodies of a number of popular channels and creators. But also, Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph) and Donald Trump (“SNL” regular James Austin Johnson) seem to keep popping up in everyone’s videos. It’s a commentary both on the candidates’ embrace of social media and online creators. But also the fact that these appearances and the memes that grow up around them have removed almost all real-world context from our politics. Harris and Trump are personas now, rather than candidates. They’re just more characters in our ongoing internet discourse, like Grimace or The Rizzler.
