![]() Rogan’s exclusive Spotify deal, announced in May 2020, should have been an easy win for the company, which has been investing heavily in expanding its podcast content across a wide variety of genres and target audiences. That, too, is a unique problem: If Rogan’s audience doesn’t agree that his guests or his rhetoric are problems to begin with, or that his pattern of platforming bigotry and misinformation is an issue, then who’s to say they’re wrong? Rogan’s tenure at Spotify has been beset with controversy After all, fans who are already prone to distrust the media are hardly going to support the journalism they dislike for trying to call out the podcaster they do like - especially not for what they see as foibles rather than serious flaws. The public’s growing lack of trust in traditional journalism and legacy media outlets - a wariness evinced by media throne usurpers like Rogan himself - has made it even less likely for him to be effectively held accountable or face real consequences for repeated mistakes. He has all of the audience, money, attention, and prestige of a traditional gatekeeper, but with barely any real pressure to assume responsibility for repeatedly making high-profile mistakes on the job. What we have, then, is a problem that is both unique to the internet and reflective of the giant problem of the internet as a whole: Like the internet itself, Rogan and whatever dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories, jerky bigotry, or offensive views he wants to serve up today are all unstoppable and essentially answerable to no one. But as the New York Times noted in a 2021 profile of Rogan, while his self-deprecating brand of authenticity has made his listeners view him as just another regular guy, his influence has grown “hulking,” enough to make him one of the most formidable single voices in media to exist - maybe ever. Rogan is always quick to defend his show’s content in the name of free speech and preserving the voices of straight white men. Alongside the reasoned political debates and philosophical arguments, his massive audience of primarily mainstream, middle-American men gets dosed with toxicity and extremism. ![]() When Rogan’s more polarizing guests and their unchecked influence join with his own long history of saying offensive things, the results can be grim. And without a background in journalism or seemingly any type of journalistic editorial oversight, Rogan, who has spent most of his podcasting career as a fully independent media host, hasn’t always been the best person to critique or fact-check his highly influential guests. One of the things that make Joe Rogan so popular among his millions of fans is that his politics are so difficult to pin downĪs his critics are quick to point out, in portraying himself as open-minded, Rogan platforms a lot of people whose ideas are dangerous. But his contrarian tendencies lead him to embrace and toy with lots of ideas, including those from the fringe. Rather than simply and easily slotting into a box labeled “conservative,” “liberal,” or even “ reactionary,” he mainly holds both the far right and the far left in contempt depending on which day you check in, he’s either a left-leaning centrist or a right-leaning libertarian. In fact, one of the things that makes Joe Rogan so popular among his millions of fans is that his politics are so difficult to pin down. It’s not even easy to peg the podcaster, who famously endorsed progressive candidate Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election (before anti-endorsing Biden), as right-wing. ![]() He also can’t be easily pigeonholed as an anti-science bigot, despite having made misogynistic, anti-feminist, fatphobic, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-vax statements. These things seem like the hallmarks of a far-right ideologue, but Rogan, who called Barack Obama the “best president we have had in our lifetime,” can’t easily be pigeonholed as racist. Then a jaw-dropping compilation video of Rogan saying the n-word 24 times in his 12 years hosting the podcast surfaced. ![]() First, hundreds of health experts complained that he was frequently spreading Covid-19 misinformation through his massively popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. 2022 has not started off well for Joe Rogan - even before the headline-grabbing Spotify controversy that has made him a perhaps unwitting figurehead for extremist rhetoric. ![]()
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