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Joe Rogan, the radio personality with 11 million listeners per episode, has “the most popular podcast in America,” according to BRIGHT editors. Rogan, who is not a newscaster, does not pretend to be one. Then what is he? “He’s a comedian with a genuinely curious personality, and he brings interesting people onto his show and lets them talk at length about what they do.”
COVID Misinformation?
Rogan recently hosted an episode with Dr. Robert Malone and another with Dr. Peter McCullough. Each guest is an eminently qualified physician (see this Twitter thread). Both physicians have views divergent from the establishment COVID orthodoxy.
… regular listeners know that most of Rogan’s episodes aren’t about the controversy du jour. They’re about MMA fighting, fitness, psychedelics, UFOs, cooking, and the list goes on.
One of my favorite Rogan episodes is this one from 2018, where he interviews neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Walker about the science of sleep and dreams. Truly, one of the more hilarious angles of all this controversy is that Rogan’s most outspoken critics apparently don’t even listen to his show.
Neil Young’s Heart of Scold
Flower child Neil Young (of Crazy Horse fame) is yanking his music from Spotify over its platforming of Joe Rogan: As BRIGHT points out, surprisingly, “the market worked here.”
When Neil Young decided he couldn’t share Spotify with Joe Rogan, Spotify stood by Rogan. Each party in the dispute chose his own path, City Journal pointed out.
Rogan got to keep his independence, while Young can avoid the discomfort of sharing a platform with someone whose views he finds abhorrent. The censors didn’t win.
Do you question whether “censor” is an appropriate word to describe the pressure to dump Rogan? Well consider this, suggests BRiGHT: “the platform is the world’s largest streaming service, with a whopping 31 percent market share in the second quarter of 2021.”
When a private corporation controls such a large portion of an information ecosystem, its content decisions are more than mere acts of moderation; it is laying out the boundaries of the discourse itself. That’s precisely why Young believed that Rogan’s views shouldn’t have a platform.”
Watch Rogan respond to the criticism in his eminently sane and refreshing way here.
Wouldn’t the best remedy to all of this “COVID misinformation” talk be to have The Experts get their own episode on Rogan? For example, why not send Tony Fauci on Rogan’s show for three hours and let listeners decide how to “Follow the Science”?
