The New Mainstream Media: How Lifestyle Podcasts are Becoming the Go-To Information Source for American Men

Cory Barker: Earlier this season, when we were discussing the history of broadcast news and the advent of streaming, we referenced the archetype of the staid news anchor in the vein of Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow. Today, we're going to be talking about a different brand of public figure influencers who have built massive followings through podcast platforms, particularly YouTube. These hosts have become trusted voices to those feeling frustrated with their place in 21st century America, many of whom share similar demographics, male, white, and young. This fan base parallels President Trump's core support base. In the 2024 election, more than half of men under 30 supported Trump, and roughly 8 in 10 Trump voters were white. The personality's most popular with this audience emphasize common themes like immigration, institutional medicine, war, or the economy, disparaged transgender individuals, and reinforce old fashioned gender roles. Although these influencers don't identify as political pundits, analysis of their content demonstrates frequent overlaps between their talking points and the vision of the US President Trump has promised to deliver.

Matt Jordan: In an effort to better understand the relationship between what's been dubbed the bro-sphere and the outcome of the 2024 election, Bloomberg analyzed more than 2000 videos totaling nearly 1,300 hours of footage from nine prominent YouTubers. The data was reported in an article titled “The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to you by YouTubers.” Two of the reporters who contributed to this work are here with us today. Davey Alba is a technology reporter who covers big tech for Bloomberg News after previously reporting on online disinformation for The New York Times. Leon Yin is an award-winning journalist at Bloomberg News. He builds, data sets and develops methods to investigate technology's impact on society. We're going to talk with Davey and Leon about what their reporting reveals about the role these influencers play in American politics, and the broader implications this has for our news ecosystem.

Cory Barker: Davey and Leon, welcome to News Over Noise.

Davey Alba: Thanks for having us.

Leon Yin: Thanks so much for having us.

Cory Barker: So, you and your team at Bloomberg analyzed 1,300 hours of podcasts that generally appeal to men and featured Trump guest spots. What were you all looking for, and what did you find?

Davey Alba: We started this project to try to understand what these podcasts were all about. We had heard of the influence of these podcasters and had sort of anecdotally heard about their enormous influence, but we wanted to set out to quantify some of the messages that were on these shows. So, we just started listening, and we came up with a way to systematically categorize different topics and also list out the guest networks of these podcasts. And what we found was that they're very tightly networked, they have quite a unified message. And importantly, many of these podcasts had this push to get men to the polls. Over a third of videos and shows that we listened to basically asked the listeners to vote in this election. These podcasts also were not shy about their allegiance to their preferred candidate, who was Donald Trump and who was a guest on all nine of these shows.

Cory Barker: So, you mentioned that many of the hosts explicitly told people or encouraged people to vote in the lead up to the election. Your reporting in general found that there was an increase in political discourse, chatting about politics and the election in the lead up to the election. What's your sense of how much these hosts are actually politically engaged in any way versus maybe trying to tap into popular discourse, or trends, or even algorithmic popular topics on YouTube?

Davey Alba: That's a really important point. And we tried to show this visually in our story as well. If you look at our graphics of the topics and the density of the topic of voting closer to the election, you can really see how the calls to vote ramped up ahead of the election. One thing that was really interesting about our investigation was that we really found that none of the broadcasters style themselves as political pundits. Many of them are—like to talk about sports, masculinity, internet culture, gambling, pranks. And closer to the election, the political topics got more and more mentioned. I think that we can't draw a causal line to this is—they figured out that the algorithms promoted political topics more, and so they started talking about political topics more. But our data shows that that's what they ended up doing, if that makes sense. And we also know that doing so was really effective, that their viewership really soared as they talked about political topics. And that was something that was a big factor in getting a disaffected group of voters to actually make it to the polls.

Leon Yin: I think one stark example is Lex Fridman. So, Lex Fridman typically has technologists and scientists on his show. And in the last two years, we saw more and more politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu went, the president of Argentina also went on his show. And we've heard anecdotally that some listeners have just started listening to him for updates and different perspectives on the Israeli-Gaza conflict as well. And so, a lot of this is just classic kind of creator strategy, where it's like you saturated one kind of topic or market and so you'll branch out into something else. And so, politics eventually showed up. And just a clarification too. I think 37% of videos are on elections and voting and half of those are on political participation. So, calls to vote, calls to register to vote. And another half for questioning elections integrity like the Big Lie that the election was stolen the last time around in that voting doesn't really—is always fraudulent. And we looked at, I think, five other political topics ranging from immigration, war, transgender identity, institutional medicine and found that about, I believe, 2/3s of videos, over 1 million views mentioned in at least one of these topics. And so that's like quite a frequent amount of discussion on politics.

Cory Barker: Those last two points I think really illustrate something fascinating about these creators, these podcast hosts. You got on one hand, they're urging people to vote. They're talking about a preferred candidate. They're bringing candidate, now President Trump onto the show. And then we've got another whole track of conversation here questioning the entire integrity of the election process, which I guess in some ways is not unlike Donald Trump himself. But for these podcast hosts, these creators, how do you feel like they reconcile these two ideas, or even this idea that they're on one hand, an apolitical, right? We just want to talk about sports. We just want to talk about funny internet memes or drugs and alcohol, those sort of things with being more explicitly talking about voting for a preferred candidate, why you need to be more politically engaged. How do they reconcile those two sides of their brand?

Leon Yin: I think a lot of the draw of these shows and what they discuss is about the social hierarchy and where men fit in the social hierarchy. And in their view, men are at the bottom, right? Others have been given advantages and privileges and are viewed as more important than men. And so, I think a lot of what they come from is kind of attacking their perceived origins of where this comes from. Oftentimes, it is the Democratic establishment, the Democratic Party, and that kind of centers their narrative. You probably have something to add to that, Davey.

Davey Alba: Yeah. I just—One thing that we had been discussing a lot when we were looking through these podcasts and listening to them hours on end was that they have very contradictory messages. And I think it is true that it's quite—they say, on the one hand, that you must go out and vote. It is absolutely crucial. The future of the country depends on it. And on the other, elections are fraudulent, especially the 2020 election when their preferred candidate did not win. I think that it's—I don't really have a good explanation for it. It is true that it's contradictory and a lot of the rhetoric on these podcasts were like that. I think that the thing that ties it together is that it's all sort of just like shop talk. It's sort of like bantering with your buddies and they're not really thinking about how logical or coherent these messages are. And it's only once you start to scrutinize what they say that it really emerges that there are contradictions.

Leon Yin: I just want to add one thing if I could. One narrative we often heard, which connected the trust and mistrust of elections together, is that elections are fraudulent. But the only way to make sure that we can save democracy is by voting so much that they can't deny that Trump is the obvious candidate. We also saw that there's commonly a co-occurrence of discussion between different political topics and voting. So, for example, the border is wide open, and Democrats are flying immigrants into swing states, providing them with money and benefits to ensure their vote for the Democratic Party. And if this continues, swing states will no longer exist. Democracy will cease to exist. Therefore, we need to show up and vote. And so, these kinds of—I don't know if I'd call them gymnastics, but these kinds of linking of these two topics is—with voting, any topic voting is quite frequent and something that we observed often as well.

Cory Barker: And one of the things that you all mentioned that I keep coming back to and we've heard this more broadly, but this idea that the hosts of these podcasts and to some extent, hosts of podcast in general, like a big selling point, is the authenticity, right? That it is often a relaxed environment, conversational. You're going back and forth with all the co-hosts and producers and it's just a conversation. Is that authenticity a way for these hosts to embed in particular political messages?

Is that why the contradictions sort of work for the audience, or the audience doesn't really think about it because it's just part of the free flowing conversation and people have multiple conflicting ideas in their heads, and that allows them to go on both sides of an issue or crisscross what they're talking about all under the umbrella of, hey, we're just having a conversation with our buddies here?

Davey Alba: Yeah. I think there's something to that. These broadcasters, even before the election, have been extremely popular. Obviously, Joe Rogan, the number one podcaster in the country, is one of the shows that we looked at as part of this project. And our sources who are academics, and people who have followed this world for a while, they have said that this is—the way that these broadcasters sell themselves is they are part of your day. As you're in your car driving to work or you're at the gym, they're already in your ear. They're so reliable. You can turn them on anytime you want and just get their take on whatever's going on in the world right now. And so that trust and that reliability is a really effective base from which to talk about other things. And what we saw in our investigation was that it was an effective jumping off point for talking about politics, and political topics, and topics that got people fired up to vote in this last election.

Cory Barker: I want to go back to something I should have asked at the beginning. Can you talk a little bit about your process? What shows you decided to review? How you reviewed them? Checking off themes along the way? How did you and your team do this?

Leon Yin: I think it started on election night when Dana White had shouted out several people who I'd never heard of. And it turns out that these men are part of a—I won't call him a network, but they are part of kind of a growing number of politically discussing podcasts and streamers. And here are the criteria we looked at. So, the style of the show, they're prominently long-form and unedited interviews, often lasting for hours at a time. The guests include President Trump over the past two years. There's at least one million subscribers on YouTube. And so, we cared about size, they had to be large. And the audience is primarily men, according to demographic data that we are able to get from sources. And so, we looked at the last two years of videos that they uploaded. And so that was—How much was that? About 2002 videos. And from those videos, we watched or looked at metadata to gather every guest that they had, or at least we tried, aspirationally, we tried to get. I think we did a pretty thorough job. And then we also want to know what they discussed. But 2,002 videos is a lot to review. And so, for a subset of 603 videos that had at least one million views, these are highly viewed videos, we downloaded the transcripts. We got them transcribed, and then we searched them for keywords based on political topics that we had seen were frequently discussed from watching hundreds of hours of this. And so, we reviewed every single passage that we flagged for its relevance to each of these political topics. And then we rewatch them, and rewatch them, and rewatch them to make sure we got it right and to get the best ones to show within our story.

Cory Barker: Was there anything that really surprised you through the process of reviewing and rereviewing these videos? Obviously, you sat down or started this project with a broader sort of idea to understand this ecosystem and their relationship to men, especially young men voting for Trump. But were there specific topics or approaches that you were surprised to see in these various shows?

Leon Yin: Something that was surprising is like how candidates can be endorsed. So, for example, Aidan Ross, who is a very popular streamer, he was one of the top streamers on Twitch for doing, like, antics, having cultural guests, like rappers and athletes on. He had Trump on a stream, and he endorsed him straight up. He said, I want you to look in this microphone and tell my young audience why they should vote and why they should vote for you. And also saying things like, this election, you got to vote. You got to vote for the right guy. It's him. And Trump even said, he said, wow, a lot of people have me and endorsed me, but they never straight up endorsed me like you did. And I'm not like a political scientist, so I don't know. But it does seem different, right? Like the way that these endorsements happen, like it's very candid. That was definitely surprising. But also, the frequency at which they discuss these topics was generally quite surprising. I think my most surprising thing that I—I think that we found is how often these hosts talk about the transgender identity. About 30% of the highly viewed videos mentioned this. And it mentions it both in a way that makes transgender identities seem kind of unnatural, kind of perverted. But mostly it's framed around children, right? These in bathrooms that are not specific to gender, like, oh, like a man pretending to be a woman can go in with your kid. You really want that? And also, a lot of rhetoric against gender affirming care for youth, and also about women's sports in which transgender people are perceived to be participating in an unfair way. And so all these different ways kind of paint transgender identity as an unnatural thing. And in fact, like we see many of these grievances turn to policies as many states now are passing laws against gender affirming care for minors. There's executive orders on transgender athletes participating in women's sports. And so, a lot of this, we might call it culture war topics, are evolving into policies.

Davey Alba: I think one of the things that surprised me was, and maybe this is just because of my training as a journalist that I found this surprising, was that a lot of the guests who came on to these shows had very little pushback from the hosts. They would just go off on their little speeches about whatever topic, and there was always just a stance of, oh, tell me more. There wasn't any challenging. And so given that these shows were very long form, you really could go on and on about a particular topic without any opposition.

Cory Barker: What do we think about the role of these podcasts becoming so popular in video form? I think about how so many of these shows do really, really well on YouTube, in fact, better on YouTube than they might on podcast apps of multiple kinds. And you see them chopped up in vertical video for social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and so on. Is your sense that the placement of these shows in video form contributing to the wider circulation of the shows in general and specifically some of these big episodes where Trump guests or they bring on other folks that are in Trump world?

Davey Alba: Yes. I think that is totally part of the way that these podcasts work. We have talked about it amongst the team that did this investigation. And one of the things that we zeroed in on was that a lot of these podcasts are based on spectacle. That's the world that they're used to. And even before all of this political talk, you saw people like Adin Ross giving Tucker Carlson a giant ZYN container.

Leon Yin: That was actually the Nelk boys.

Davey Alba: Oh, the Nelk Boys. Oh, my gosh. Thank you for fact checking me. And these moments of spectacle are really designed to go viral on social media platforms. And I think that the video format really lends itself to that. And just to drive home the point that this is part of their strategy. We often saw that these hosts clipped and shared out individual moments from the longer podcasts to just to try out how it would play I think on social media. Some of the more outrageous moments when someone says something off the wall. Those moments are really made for the world of virality.

Leon Yin: Yeah. I just add that the origins of many of the hosts in this network are—speak a lot of their strategy, right? So, they come from reality TV. They come from being YouTubers and live streamers who have always thrived in drama and in spectacles, as Davey mentioned. And so, it's no surprise that when they discuss politics and approach it, it's approached with the same kind of strategy of being like, What is the most epic thing we could do? And what will get people to clip, and recycle, and reshare what we do? And YouTube plays an important role as the host, where the live streams occur, and it's extremely accessible. 90% of young adults and teenagers use YouTube daily, I believe is the stat. I could get that stat wrong. So let me know if I got that wrong, Davey, on Pew.

Matt Jordan: One of the things that we see with YouTubers a lot is that, as influencers, a lot of their content is paid. And I'm wondering if you could speak to the extent to which there is still a brand, or a sponsor, or something that's behind that would be different than say the way that normally news is paid for.

Davey Alba: Yeah. I think just to quickly fact check Leon. It's 75% of American teens report that they visit YouTube daily, according to the Pew Research Center. I think that YouTube's accessibility is absolutely a part of this. YouTube is free for anyone to use. And we can see how much of an impact it has on distributing the messages of these podcasters when you take a look at, say, Joe Rogan, who for some time had an exclusive contract with Spotify and only distributed his content on Spotify. That contract ended and he went back on YouTube. And if you actually look at the number of views compared across different platforms, YouTube has by far the widest audience. For instance, Joe Rogan's show with Trump on as a guest, which Spotify itself has said is its most popular podcast bar none, just in the history of Spotify having podcasts on the platform. That was about 25 million views on Spotify and other platforms like Apple Podcasts, versus 50 million views on YouTube. So, the algorithms, the distribution capability, being able to reach the widest possible audience, that's all enabled by YouTube.

Leon Yin: And to answer the monetary question. So, revenue comes into play at least in three or four different ways, right? And so, the first is ads like from YouTube. Those are in-stream ads. That's when YouTube puts a video in. Many of these channels are actually not monetized in that way. So that's called monetization. There are also direct to advertiser relationships that many of these hosts have. And so, they'll read out an ad for like FanDuel or for Manscaped, very fitting. And also, they tried to convert their audience into live events, like, hey, I'm doing a comedy tour, come on, check it out. Or like we're doing like a show somewhere, like check it out. So that's another way that it's made. And then thirdly, there are the kind of platform dependent deals that actually are outside of YouTube. And so, Joe Rogan has his deal with Spotify, and Aidan Ross has his deal with Kick, which is a Twitch competitor. And so, they have revenue from those streams. And I think that a lot has been learned from the adpocalypse, if that's the term that your listeners are familiar with. It was about 2016, 2017, there were various controversies on YouTube, especially around PewDiePie, who is the largest creator at the time, saying, hate speech and anti-Semitic things. And then advertisers being like, hey, I don't want my ads showing up there if like the biggest guy is saying this, let's pull out. And so, a lot of creators lost a ton of revenue from there, and I think have since learned to diversify their revenue stream beyond just getting in-stream ads and monetization. And I think that a lot of that kind of economic freedom has allowed channels to take more risks and beyond YouTube's set rules, which also have changed in those years.

Matt Jordan: I'm struck by the kind of similarities in terms of the number of content producers who share a similar structure of feeling on YouTube to the way in which AM radio works, right? That we have these huge swaths of, essentially, whereas talk programming, where there's maybe some commentary on the topic of the day, something, some news relation to it, but that they share a structure of feeling with a lot of the other ecosystems. Could you say that there's something similar in terms of YouTuber or influence culture, and kind of a right wing talk radio format for news delivery?

Davey Alba: Yeah. I think that's something that we discussed on the team as well, that this isn't necessarily new, that AM radio show is from decades ago, the like Rush Limbaugh's of yore. This is sort of a new version of that. And similarities include it's casual listening. It's like while maybe you're in your truck driving from one State to another, you turn on the radio, and there's hours of programming about whatever topic of the day, whatever is going on, and that the hosts don't shy away from political topics. I do think that this is sort of a newer form of that. But what is unprecedented, in a way, is the distribution power of a platform like YouTube. It's just so entrenched already in the habits of young people and just the vast reach that YouTube has. And we've also talked about anecdotally how it's quite striking how maybe you have looked up a video on, I don't know, car trouble or something, and then—One of our coworkers was talking about this, how someone in their life had done this, and then suddenly gotten Joe Rogan recommendations in their video list. So, it's like if YouTube thinks that you'll be interested in this, if you identify as a man, maybe here's a bunch of content that has already been quite popular with this demographic. Why don't you listen to that? So, I think that power is what's new here, Leon. I don't know if you have anything to add to that.

Leon Yin: Yeah. I mean, I agree. I think that—I spent a lot of time with sociologists and they're always like, yeah, there's nothing new under the sun. And I agree with that. It's like the talk radio like core is there. But, as Davey mentioned, the distribution, the scale, and the kind of virality mindset of influencers, that combination has made kind of a new kind of concoction, if you will, from these existing parts. And I think it leads to a very potent way to promote political views.

Matt Jordan: You mentioned in the article a lot of the themes that these things share. For instance, a strategy for making victims among the producers of content, right? They know that their audience kind of men as victims is something they share in similar. I was wondering what other themes seem to overlap with these shows, that kind of male aggression is actually a good thing, or that you shouldn't feel bad about having these very kind of man-centered worldview. What other themes do these programs share?

Davey Alba: Yeah. So, when we started off the project, we just started by listening and trying to see what themes emerged. And we identified several themes that kept being repeated, including war, transgender identity, economics, voting. Gosh, I should pull up the list.

Leon Yin: Immigration.

Davey Alba: Immigration. Yeah. Vaccine skepticism. And these topics all seem to cohere around the idea of men sort of falling down the social hierarchy because of the Democratic agenda. There's a sense of this is not the way the world should work, and that there are powers beyond them that are making it so. So, I think that's sort of the thing that ties the topics together.

Leon Yin: Yeah. And we always talk about this kind of archetype of the fallen man, the challenger, the underdog. So oftentimes, we'll have people on who have been kind of publicly cast aside or canceled, right? And they say, well, this space is—Cancel culture doesn't exist here. You can say whatever you want. This person, this man right here, he's actually a legend, right? You're told that he shouldn't—he's a bad guy, but you know what? He's actually a really good guy. The people who are saying he's bad, they're the bad guys. They've done everything and way worse. And then who is the ultimate fallen man at this time? It's Donald Trump. He was at the top, and then seemingly disgraced. Who can represent these ideals and has the power to flip the social hierarchy back to where it should be? It's Donald Trump. And so, it's only natural that this kind of aligned and occurred the way it did.

Matt Jordan: One of the things that I just talking to students and talking to young people, I have a 17-year-old son who listens to a lot of these YouTubers, is the idea that they really get to know somebody, right? That the long-talk format of this is one of the things that is seemingly to me seems the most potent. And it also has this incredible power of normalizing whoever it is that you're talking to. Obviously, you guys mentioned that RFK JR is like one of the most pervasive across the spectrum of these things. But I'm wondering to the extent to which there are a lot of these people who have been canceled, white supremacists or Andrew Tate's of the world and whatnot, that these things function kind of as a normalization platform or a kind of a second career kind of starting kick off point for some of the folks that are on these programs.

Davey Alba: This is actually the point that I forgot earlier that I can go back to. What surprised me about these shows when we were listening to them? I was surprised how casually certain ideas were mentioned. For instance, I was listening to a Theo Von podcast, where he said that he had met David Duke, a white supremacist and the leader of the KKK, and he had said that he had met him and that he was actually a nice guy and that they had gone to the gym together. And it sort of spun my head around to just hear that, knowing all of the hateful rhetoric he has espoused and has sort of inspired others to get in on this ideology. And that sort of casually thrown in mention surprised me. But as we continued to listen to these shows, I think it's worth pointing out that what may seem like extreme views to other people is actually not extreme. It's quite mainstream. And that's why we made a point to call these podcasters the new mainstream media. These views are not on the radical sign of the spectrum. It's just views that people have heard over and over through time. And I'm not quite sure if I would say they've been normalized if they have been so popular with a certain group of people at this point. I think that what is quite surprising about this network of podcasters is the fact that this really sort of holds up a mirror to the public to show that these are the views that are extremely popular. You may not have realized it, but many, many Americans, millions of Americans think that this is the world, and this explains the world.

Leon Yin: Let's talk also about the part of the question about the format of in which they're long and unedited interviews. I mean, I think that as a journalist, like, we're often asked to do interviews. And it's like a minute long, right, Davey? They're like 30 seconds. And you're like, How can I get to the full volume of what we're trying to discuss in that format? And so, I I've kind of come around and be like, yeah, like podcasts are probably a better format to discuss things. But I think also it's about building authenticity and building trust, character building. You want to know who you're getting information from. And for many people Donald Trump, he's like, yeah, I'm going to do whatever it takes to get ears and eyeballs. And he loves attention, right? And so, the Democrats, some of them have tried to go on these shows, but they just can't they can't abide with the rules about you have to show up, you have to stay there for many hours, you have to answer unscripted questions. And I think that this kind of authenticity has really helped, in addition to blending discussion with culture topics to be like, hey, Who's your favorite UFC fighter right now? Or like, What's your favorite sneaker right now? Or like, What do you think about that new Lil Yachty song? So, all that kind of builds anchors to being like, oh, this person's relatable to me, right? They talk my language and so maybe I can understand what else they're talking about. And so, I think that that's kind of adds to that stickiness. And again, these are all things that creators are taught. This is—If there's YouTube school, I think there used to be YouTube University, which is an online thing that YouTube posted. This is something to teach you. They say, do collabs, be personable, talk about a lot of topics, right? And so, I think all of that lends itself to being a very effective strategy.

Matt Jordan: And is it mostly just to design to create a vibe? You always hear that verb used in relation to podcasts. We're just vibing or whatnot. Is that what that—As opposed to say we're going to give you information, we're going to give you stuff that you need to function in a democracy. Is it just saying we're going to chill and have some vibes?

Leon Yin: Absolutely. I mean, I think it's just like you're trying—they're trying—This kind of format lends itself to peeling away kind of professional, like veneer of who we are and to get to who's the so-called like core, the gooey center of who a guest is. And I think it's especially hard for journalists because we're taught—we can only say certain things when we're representing a thing. And I think the same is likely true for politicians. And so, it's a very difficult to vibe at that level if you're a certain professional or have certain values.

Davey Alba: Yeah. I mean, I think I would add that this feeds into the contradictory nature of these shows that we were talking about earlier. They present their guests as this is the only way you can hear the unvarnished take of these guests, including political figures and candidates. But at the same time, there isn't a lot of pushback, or fact checking, or information from the outside that these guests are confronted with. It's just this way of letting them go on and on about whatever happens to be on their mind, or why you should—why they're a strong political candidate or whatever. And journalists, for better or worse, are constrained by ethics and the sort of journalistic code of using facts to not let someone just go on unedited to challenge them with additional information and context. And that paradoxically works against journalists when in this kind of format. So, yeah, I think that lends itself to the contradictory nature of these shows. The guests are allowed to just go on and on, but at the same time, Are people getting good information out of these shows? You're not getting the context that maybe journalists would bring to the fore.

Leon Yin: In other words, professionally, we cannot vibe.

Cory Barker: Well, that's actually leads into what I was going to ask you. I mean, I think we've hit so many times that the authenticity, the vibing of these shows is what helps them do so well, and reach people, and maybe change people's minds as far as a particular election or voting at all. Outside research or surveys show that Gen Z and younger folks, what they want from their news, or their journalism is authenticity. That comes up even before, like, factual, right? So, you all both talked about how journalists are trapped by the ethics and the processes of journalism, but is there anything that journalism or individual journalists can learn from these types of shows to potentially cover the news or cover politics, specifically in a way that appeals to a younger audience who's more predisposed to consume content like this?

Davey Alba: Yeah. I mean, I think that we're starting to see a push from newsrooms to meet audiences where they are, including on these platforms. I think it's quite an uphill battle because of all the entrenched beliefs about the media ecosystem that already exist. But I think that there is an important point here that journalists can try to present the information that they gather on these platforms. And I think importantly, not to talk down to their audiences, not to present their stories and reporting as superior in a way to really try to relate to audiences and try to find commonalities. And that I think is something that the media industry writ large needs to work on quite a bit. But it is something that is extremely effective, as we've seen with this network and something that we as journalists can learn from.

Matt Jordan: One description I've heard of this universe, or this kind of media sphere is that it's a 360-degree wraparound, meaning making machine. So, whereas journalists are going to give you here's some context to something, here's some information, here's maybe a pull quote from the left, pull quote from the right, they're not going to tell you what it makes. Whereas in this sphere of things, everything is plugged into existing narratives, and it just cranks out, meaning that is tied to already existing narratives, or dispositions, or stereotypes, or whatnot. That's very difficult for journalists to compete with in terms of what audiences seem to crave, which is to go back to some uses and gratifications. This seems to be appealing to many who feel dispossessed and who want things plugged into that narrative, right? That they—No matter what the topic is, it seems like it's going to fit into that wrap around universe.

Leon Yin: I mean, I think that that's why a lot of these channels are so appealing is because they tell you, here's what's going on, here's my take, which is our take. This is the team's take. You've joined the team. This is what the team thinks about this. For journalists, it is just not as fun. We have to do so much more work than say—We basically can't say, here's our take on this. We have to say, here's what the data says, or here are what sources close to the matter are saying. And so, it's a very different—the place where our authority comes from is very different. Ours is slower typically. It requires more work.

Davey Alba: Yeah. I really like that shorthand explanation, 360-degree wraparound. I think that really is on point for describing this. I think that in another life, when I was a misinformation reporter, there was this idea of a conspiracy tent and that was used to describe something like QAnon, which was extremely popular during the pandemic. And the idea is no matter what happens in the world, you can just keep adding to this narrative that you can keep growing the world that you already believe in. And I think that's a lot of what's going on here too. I think that there are half-truths in this universe of podcasters and also straight up misinformation and falsehoods. But, yeah, the cohesive glue around all of it is the idea that men are a disaffected group and there are things you can do to sort of climb back to power, and that is the correct social order of things. And anything that gets in the way of that is worth resisting against. Yeah. So, it's interesting. I mean, we talk about what this means. When we were doing the story, we didn't want it to just be retroactive, like, here's what happened during the election. We wanted to spin it forward and show how this network has a really strong hold on a demographic group right now and that people are really primed to act on the messages that are distributed among these podcasters. So, I think we'll see as Trump is President and the months continue, just how much of a galvanizing effect this network has.

Matt Jordan: Was there any blip? I mean, over the summer, there was a story that a couple of these conservative influencers, Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, turned out that they were on the payroll of Russian television. And there was a brief scandal. And I wondered if that at all cascaded through this ecosystem, that there was a concern that people were just shills or propagandists for something. Or did that kind of come and go?

Davey Alba: Yes, I remember that. I think that what we know about these podcasters is that they grew up in the world of spectacle and that they're kind of continuing to enact that way of presenting information. I think that there are these possibilities of foreign interference, and we also saw that in the 2016 election with the IRA. But I think in the end, that's almost a sort of tangential to what's important here, which is that this network is extremely powerful, and effective, and gets people to act. And it's part of the conspiracy tenting that you can excuse away these stories of potential foreign ties to other governments. And it just becomes like a story about discrediting your heroes. And I think that that is what we tried to focus on. Obviously, it is very important to keep track of who is funding, how this network makes money, how information networks are funded, not just this one, but others, and the motivations of people who are pouring money into these efforts. But I think if you just take the network for what it is, that already speaks volumes.

Cory Barker: Davey, you talked about this a little bit ago, but What do you all project the role of this unofficial network of podcasts to be now that Trump is back in office and the dynamics have shifted a little bit? Are they going to be part of the conventional media pool in DC at all? How are these shows going to fit into a new dynamic from within this new administration?

Davey Alba: Well, we started off the article by noting that Joe Rogan was in the capitol rotunda as Trump was sworn in as president. And we ended the article with a quote from Trump on one of these shows saying that, in a show with the Nelk Boys, the host was saying, we'll do the next one in the White House and Trump agrees. He says, yep, we'll do it. And so, I think that the role of these podcasters in the Trump administration will be consensus building. I think that as Trump rolls out executive order after executive order, these shows build support for his agenda. And I think we will see how Trump takes them as members of the media that are not constrained by journalistic ethics. And how that will play out, I think we'll see. Many of these podcasters have already been credentialed to be in press briefings. And, yeah, the next few months will show the power of these hosts.

Matt Jordan: We know that news aversion in the media ecosystem today is largely driven by a distrust that many, many people don't believe that they trust journalists. And it used to be that the journalists constructed trust along the lines of television's Walter Cronkite, and Ed Brinkley, and people like that who built their brand around their staid kind of demeanor, their dispassionate objectivity. How do these YouTubers construct trust, or how do they build trust in their audience that is different from the way that we used to think of trust being kind of a constructed?

Davey Alba: I think the default position of these podcasters is they are against institutions; they're against anything that is the usual way or the accepted common wisdom way of doing things. And so, the media comes up often as one of these institutions that cannot be trusted because we've done the media for so long. I think what also comes into play here is that back in the age of Walter Cronkite, there were only a few television networks that really had this authority. You turned on the Evening News once you got home and had your dinner, and that was the way you learned about the world. And we are in a world now where media is so fragmented, and you can choose to get your information from social media platforms, from short-form videos, long-form videos, posts on Instagram. There's just—it's almost—As a consumer, you're overwhelmed with choices. And given the fact that the default stance of these podcasters is anything that is sort of against the mainstream, goes against institutions, they present these new forms and new platforms for media as the democratization of news, that they can be trusted because they're not bound by these staid, old, institutionalized ways of doing things. They're unshackled and authentic. But I think that comes with a downside because there aren't these strong processes of making sure that the information that is presented would hold up to journalistic standards of truth and ethics and that this may lend an air of credibility and authenticity to these hosts. But they—In the end, when you really hold up their messages to scrutiny, there's a lot that's lacking in context and just bringing in facts from the outside into their messages.

Matt Jordan: Davey and Leon, thank you so much for joining us. And we really appreciate you talking with us about this important growing part of our media ecosystem.

Davey Alba: Thanks so much for having us.

Leon Yin: Our pleasure, thanks.

Cory Barker: Matt, I feel like that was a really compelling conversation with Davey and Leon. What's your primary takeaway?

Matt Jordan: Well, as somebody who interacts with a lot of young dudes, I'm particularly interested in how they're managing their affect. Oftentimes, they relax by listening to YouTubers, right? That this becomes a way for them to deal with their news aversion by tuning into people that they know and love. And that strikes me as being really similar to the way that people describe listening to radio back in the day, right? That intimacy that they have with these people, that feeling of trust that they have with them. So even if they're not getting the kind of information that they might need, at least they're not getting the kind of anxiety that sometimes news can deliver.

Cory Barker: That's a really compelling point. And I feel like we tend to think of these podcasters as contributing to a potential issue with media literacy. I think the guest did a great job of talking about these podcasts being long form, not fact checked. The concern about what types of information people are getting when they're relaxing. But there is something, I guess, to be said for being able to consume some media without having the anxiety that you're going to be immediately bombarded with news with a capital N. But the challenge, of course, is that part of a wider media diet or news diet? If you're listening to these podcasts as part of a broader consumption of media and news, then maybe some of the concerns that are being raised about these shows could be minimized. But if this is the only thing you're listening to, then maybe the concerns that folks have about these types of shows becomes really justifiable.

Matt Jordan: Yeah. That's a really good point, Cory. And again, I think if we think about these as people who are, as they talked about, looking for that feeling of connection with people, especially if they don't feel very—a lot of people started listening to these during the pandemic when they felt disconnected. But there's a difference between being entertained, even if there's some information there, the infotained, I guess you could call it and being informed. And I think there still is a necessity to get beyond this and have that diverse media diet that we've often talked about in order to have the kind of information that we all need to function. That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guests were Davey Alba and Leon Yin, both reporters for Bloomberg. Learn more at newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.

Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.

Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.

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