BOSTON, Massachusetts: Comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan is caught in a spiral of controversies.
It began when The Joe Rogan Experience hosted COVID-19 vaccine skeptic Robert Malone and a number of musicians pulled their music off of Spotify in protest. It has continued with Rogan apologising for using racial slurs in past years, which prompted the streaming service to remove scores of his old episodes from the streaming platform.
Given the thousands of hours of content that Rogan has produced, the scrutiny is unlikely to stop there. As we argue in our forthcoming book, Rogan’s podcast has long promoted right-wing comedy and libertarian political voices, including some who trade quite gleefully in racism and misogyny.
However, what makes Rogan’s rise particularly important is that it goes beyond the standard partisan political battling that Americans have grown accustomed to in social and broadcast media.
Rogan is not just a purveyor of right-wing ideologies. He is also someone who has built an empire by introducing these ideas – and a wide range of others – to listeners from across the political spectrum.
His truly unique skill is drawing in from that spectrum a massive, young, largely male audience that advertisers highly covet.
IDEOLOGICAL WHIPLASH
When the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) introduced the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, radio and television broadcasters were required to present controversial ideas in a manner that reflected multiple perspectives.
However, the combination of cable television, niche consumer targeting and US president Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory FCC succeeded in toppling the mandate.
By 1987, conservative talk radio figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, embraced fully partisan approaches to content creation and audience accumulation. Ignoring their political opponents as potential listeners, they veered further and further to the right, garnering an increasingly homogeneous audience whom advertisers could easily target.
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