Does Joe Rogan owe his audience anything?
Why we need to think about how we platform fringe voices
Note: This Substack includes an article voiceover, in case you would like to listen in the car on your way to or from work. Let me know if you would like me to include it in future articles.
The man walked into the Dothan Eagle office at the corner of Troy and Oates streets some time around 2012 and demanded to speak to a reporter.
Sometimes our front door receptionist could detect whether this was worthy of a call upstairs, or whether she needed to respond with a polite “I’m sorry. All of our reporters are busy at the moment. Can I take your number?”
The call came upstairs. I drew the short straw. I welcomed the man into the conference room. He told me we needed to write a story about the Dothan Police. He said they were trying to entrap him.
We talked further. I asked for some evidence.
“The trains,” he responded in a matter of fact tone. “The trains tell me all I need to know.”
I tried, tactfully, to move along and tell him “we’ll look into it.”
It’s the only time in 23 years at the Dothan Eagle that I felt frightened in the middle of an interview. When he realized his claim would not be spread across the front page the next day, the color of his eyes appeared to change from brown to black.
He became belligerent and started to rant when the faint sound of the downtown train could be heard outside.
He stopped and paused.
Apparently the train told him to move on to Plan B, fortunately. He quietly turned toward the door and walked out without another word.
Of course this was an extreme case. But, but people often called us, came in off the street, emailed us and wrote us letters to pitch stories. Hundreds of times, we passed.
Sometimes we just didn’t have the resources to pursue the story.
Many times, however, we decided the story was not worth pursuing.
It’s time podcasts decided some voices are not worth amplifying.
A Treasured Responsibility
Even when newspapers were in a golden era and space was generous, we still did not have enough room to print everything. We made decisions about what to print and what to not print multiple times per day. Whether it was a local story, or a wire story, we had to decide what you were going to read the next day and what you weren’t.
Of course, we did not always make the right decision. But my experience as a reporter and as an editor was that we made the best decisions we could in good faith. Some things were too outlandish, too vague, too fringe to invest our time and space.
We know that not every newspaper made good-faith decisions. We know some of them used their gatekeeper powers to keep certain types of news away from readers. This was an abuse of power. Many, however, did their best to use common sense and reason when determining the stories to pursue locally and include in the next day’s issue.
We took it seriously. And, even if we had unlimited space, we were not going to include everything. A headline screaming “Man says trains tell him police are trying to entrap” would sell out racks all over town. But it’s not in the best interest of that mentally-challenged man, or the community.
We tried our best to corroborate claims and be responsible about the information we put in front of the reader. We failed sometimes but we wrestled with these issues almost daily.
Today, many people are getting their “news” through podcasts, and few hosts appear interested in trying to differentiate between likely, plausible, highly unlikely and unworthy of platforming.
Finally, however, at least the question is being asked publicly.
Just because something CAN be said, should it be amplified?
The role of the new media
The short answer to this question is “no”, but I’m wondering if some of the most successful podcasters in the world will be willing to choose responsible over profitable.
Reports indicate Joe Rogan makes between $60 million and $100 million per year. His podcast is always at or near the top in downloads, with anywhere between three and 10 million downloads per episode.
He hosts comedians and UFC fighters regularly, but his most popular guests are the ones who say the most controversial things.
The same is true for former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who went his own way after issues with the network. Carlson has recently hosted guests who claim, generally, that Hitler wasn’t so bad and Churchill was just as responsible for World War II.
Without the least bit of pushback from the host.
Recently, British journalist and author Douglas Murray appeared on Rogan’s podcast April 9 along with comedian Dave Smith. The episode was supposed to be a debate between the two who hold opposing worldviews, but Murray took the opportunity to urge Rogan to be more choosy about who he platforms.
You have a platform that reaches millions of people. And I’m not saying you should censor anyone, but there’s a responsibility to not just throw out every wild idea and let it land. You’ve had people on here—Ian Carroll, Darryl Cooper, others—who say things that are not just speculative but counter-historical, antisemitic, or outright dangerous. And you let them go with this ‘I’m just asking questions’ vibe. But there’s a point at which ‘I’m just raising questions’ isn’t valid anymore. You’re not asking questions—you’re telling people something. You’re giving them a narrative that they then take as truth because it’s coming from your show.
Briefly, Darryl Cooper is the podcaster who couches Hitler in a more positive light and Churchill as more of a villain. He asserted on Rogan’s podcast that much of Hitler’s feelings about the Jews stemmed from his love for the German people, who he believed were suffering because of Jewish influence. He claimed on Carlson’s show that the Holocaust happened primarily because Germans didn’t plan the imprisonment well and didn’t prepare enough food.
Carroll asserted on Rogan’s podcast that the creation of the nation of Israel was more about manipulation from Jewish organized crime figures and less about an ideological movement of the Jewish people to have a country of their own.
Again, these two men have the right to say what they want. But is there a responsibility on the most successful podcaster of all time to either (A) be a little more choosy about the fringe guys he platforms or (B) challenge their narrative with just a bit of questioning?
Don’t be fooled. When these people come on other podcasts or create their own and say outlandish things while couched around the throwaway line of “I’m just asking questions”, that is not at all what they’re doing.
They are asserting things they want you to believe as gospel.
You may be saying to yourself “Don’t fringe narratives sometimes turn out to be true?”
Of course, and no one should be expecting Rogan (or us at the newspaper back in the day) to bat a thousand. I’m sure we made the wrong decisions on occasion when we sent people away who may have had valid claims the community needed to hear.
On balance, however, the inherent danger of platforming everything no matter how ridiculous far outweighs the value of platforming everything.
Why? Because way too many people take this information and go to dark places with it.
Ramifications
I’ve written about conspiracy podcaster Alex Jones before. Jones has asserted many things, but he is most known for asserting that the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults never happened, and that the parents of the murdered children were either playing a role or replaced by actors.
He wasn’t just “asking questions.” He was convinced it never happened and he wanted to convince you with passionate evangelical fervor.
The intellectual shallowness of this claim is absurd on its face. Had he walked into the Dothan Eagle office in 2012 and asked us to publish his claim, we would have kindly walked him out the door immediately.
But he talked about it on his podcast continuously, and he had gained a pretty robust following by then. Some of his listeners agreed. Some of those listeners then acted on that belief by harassing the children’s parents for months, causing them even more pain just days after the worst moment of their lives.
We chose not to publish the train talker guy because it was obvious the man was mentally ill. When sued for defamation, Jones claimed he suffered from a form of psychosis that made him believe something that wasn’t true.
So what’s the difference?
I know we have to be careful when we have this conversation. We can’t simply tamp down every narrative because it is an alternative to the norm.
We know now that the social media platform formerly known as Twitter purposely zapped or lessened the reach of posts that challenged the official Hunter Biden laptop position, as well as others after being pressured by the White House.
In fact, we have the Rogans and Carlsons of the world who platform everything because Twitter, Facebook and other platforms cut off alternate views for political reasons.
And, to be honest, it’s also because the world’s largest newspapers, populated by far left ideologues in the newsroom, threatened to mutiny if it published right-leaning material.
But we do need to exercise a bit of common sense. And I believe we are starting to see the results of this lack of responsibility in our post-newspaper world.
Studies indicate Gen Z has the toughest time determining headlines that are fake from headlines that are real. In fact, the more people get their news from social media (TikTok is a big culprit), the less likely they are to know what is real and what is false.
If we don’t handle things better on our end, truth is going to splinter into a million pieces and we will be a nation split up into that many subgroups, and we won’t be able to survive it.
Newspapers were never the best gatekeepers in the world, but it was better than being no gatekeeper at all.