Despite several attempts, I just couldn’t make it past the one-hour point of Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump last weekend. The conversation was meandering and filled with falsehoods – and that was just from the host. And we get more than enough unfiltered Trump in our feeds at the moment without suffering three hours more.
Nevertheless, the show marks a big moment in the evolution of media and political communication. The stakes are so high in the US presidential election that it may seem trite to point it out, but this campaign has radically changed the ground rules. Podcasts, once a marginal force, have now taken centre stage.
Unless you have recently emerged from two decades in a Trappist monastery, you will not need to be told that The Joe Rogan Experience is the world’s most popular podcast, reaching tens of millions of mostly male listeners and viewers. Spotify paid hundreds of millions for exclusive rights. The YouTube version of the Trump episode has had more than 40 million views in less than a week.
That dwarfs the numbers achieved by most network and cable TV shows in the United States. Rogan also reaches a demographic that has mostly given up on – or never watched – old-fashioned linear TV. And, crucially for the Trump campaign, that audience is mostly composed of the sort of younger male voters on whom it is relying to deliver victory next week.
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A couple of days after the interview went up, it was confirmed that Kamala Harris would not be appearing on Rogan. Declining to travel to his studio in Austin, Texas, the vice-president wanted Rogan to come to her and for the conversation to be limited to an hour. Neither condition was acceptable to the podcaster.
Despite their protestations, it probably suited both sides that the interview didn’t happen. It follows a pattern of Trump appearing on a number of “bro” podcasts (supposedly selected by his 18-year-old son, Barron) with presenters such as Adin Ross, Theo Von and Logan Paul, while Harris targets black and female voters on shows such as Call Her Daddy, with Alex Cooper (the most popular podcast with women) and The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne Tha God.
The gender war that may well end up deciding this election is being played out for all to see in these choices. But it’s not just the stark market segmentation that represents a change from the old media regime. Marshall McLuhan’s 60-year-old adage that “the medium is the message” seems more apposite than ever.
You don’t have to be a Rogan stan to recognise that many of the elements that make his show popular are true of the podcast format as a whole. Podcasts are long – sometimes absurdly long – but that freedom from the often absurd grammar of linear media, with its six-minute gobbets of talk hemmed in by incessant ads, news bulletins, traffic reports and all the other detritus of the broadcast hour means that conversations can range wider and go deeper. At least, that’s the idea.
All of this goes against the grain of decades of received wisdom about how to serve the modern media consumer. For a generation or more the theory has been that shorter and faster is better than longer and slower. Younger viewers and listeners were presumed to have limited attention spans, so bite-sized was best. The rise of podcasts suggests that this may not be the case.
But it’s not all good. As the choices made by Trump and Harris indicate, podcasts also tend to intensify filter bubbles. Too many of them consist of people agreeing with each other about everything for the benefit of listeners who like to have their existing worldview confirmed.
And alongside all that baggy informality and authenticity also comes a lack of rigour: Rogan’s gape-mouthed acquiescence as Trump rolled out his familiar list of falsehoods was bad; his apparent failure to have done even the most basic research on any of the subjects discussed was worse. This is a show with bigger cash reserves than most of the world’s newspapers. You’d think they could hire a couple of researchers. Cynics might say politicians prefer podcasts because they get an easier ride. And cynics might sometimes be right.
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It’s worth noting that none of the podcasts mentioned above has politics as its main theme. And that actual politics podcasts, such as the one I present for The Irish Times, tend to be wary of having too many actual politicians on at all.
As Ireland prepares for its own, rather more sedate election campaign, it seems inevitable that political parties here will take their cue from what has been happening across the Atlantic. Brace yourself for Mary Lou McDonald on Blindboy and Simon Harris on My Therapist Ghosted Me. At least neither is likely to be three hours long.
