To identify the microphones in that river, here’s Apple:
That river began with the copious red pissings of Rush Limbaugh. Now eight Rushians comprise most of the News Commentary flow on Apple Podcasts, and much of the whole podcast watershed as well. (None are so skilled as Rush, but that’s another story.)
It’s not much different on Spotify:
And, of course, there’s Fox News (and hell, all of News Corp), and Elon Musk’s X .
As Michael Tomasky puts it in The New Republic,
Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
In case that doesn’t hammer the point home hard enough, he adds this:
Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
And he barely mentions podcasting.
According to Newsweek, Joe Rogan‘s interview with Donald Trump was viewed over 26 million times in the 24 hours after it went up. And that was just the video. Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify alone for his all-audio podcast.
We can see the reason why Spotify paid $200 million for Joe Rogan back in 2022. Hell, you could buy the whole AM band in New York for less than that today. Wait a few years and the FM band will be on the bargain shelf as well, because radio is being eaten alive on the talk side by podcasting and on the music side by streaming. (EMarketer has lots of numbers here.)
Fox owns what’s left of news on cable. Since Trump won the presidency, viewing of MSNBC has tanked, while Fox News continues to grow. (And stars of its shows are named to Trump’s new cabinet positions. It’s a system, folks.)
Scott Galloway, the raging moderate, expands on one part of this in” The Podcast Election. An excerpt (from both post and podcast):
New(er) Media
New forms of media periodically reshape our culture and politics. FDR mastered radio, JFK leveraged TV, and Reagan nailed cable news. Obama energized young voters via the internet. Trump hijacked the world’s attention on Twitter. This year it was podcasting. The three biggest media events of this fall were the debate and Harris and Trump’s respective appearances on Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience.
Almost half of adult Americans, 136 million people, listen to at least one podcast a month. The global audience is now 505 million, a quarter of the internet’s reach. When Trump went on Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and This Past Weekend w/Theo Von, he was embracing the manosphere and riding a tectonic shift in media: The most efficient way to reach the largest and most persuadable audience (i.e., young men) is via podcast. Nothing comes close.
Reach and Focus
Rogan has 16 million Spotify subscribers and can reach many more people across a variety of other platforms: In just three days after the live podcast, his three-hour-long conversation with Trump was viewed 40 million times on YouTube. The audio downloads likely exceeded 15 million. There will be a lot of second-guessing re what the Harris campaign should have done. Getting on a plane to Austin to visit Rogan would have been a layup.
Obviously, this is a very big thing: so big that we need a label for the sum of all these popular right-wing news and commentary outlets: one we can pose against what’s still called “mainstream,” but isn’t.
I suggest redstream media.
Spread the words.
[Later…18 November 2024] Pew Research: Influencers too.
[Later… 5 May 2025] Axios: 1 big thing: 💪 MAGA media muscles up
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