Why 2024 became the ‘podcast election’

Will 2024 go down as the podcast election? Both the Donald Trump and Kamala Harris campaigns, particularly as the US presidential race has entered its final stretch, have certainly appeared on more online, alternative media outlets than we’ve seen in previous elections.

Most notably, last week Donald Trump appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, the biggest podcast in the US. Even a few years ago, Rogan’s show might have been one of the last places you’d expect to find an in-depth interview with a former president and current presidential candidate. Rogan’s episodes ramble on without any kind of clear structure, often for hours on end. But, despite being almost three hours long, Trump’s unedited chat with Rogan has racked up almost 40million views on YouTube, dominated social-media feeds and generated countless headlines.

Back in August, Trump also appeared on comedian Theo Von’s podcast, This Past Weekend. That episode currently has 14million views on YouTube. (According to Spotify’s rankings, Von’s show is the second biggest in the US.) While the most viral moment from the episode featured Von talking at length to Trump about his former cocaine habit, clearly Team Trump were pleased enough with the end result to send JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, on to the same show a few weeks later. (Vance also appeared on Rogan a few days ago.)

Harris has been doing the podcast rounds, too, albeit while seeking an entirely different audience. At the beginning of October, she appeared on Call Her Daddy, which has the largest female audience of any American podcast. Its focus is usually on sex and relationships. Harris has also been a guest on some other big shows, such as All The Smoke, an NBA-focussed podcast, and Club Shay Shay, hosted by former NFL player Shannon Sharpe. Those were (perhaps vain) attempts to court black male voters.

Much of the commentary on the ‘podcast election’ argues that appearing on a podcast is simply the most efficient way for the candidates to reach certain core audiences – particularly young adults. After all, according to a Pew survey last year, roughly a third of under-30s now listen to podcasts at least a few times a week. Most of these listeners report coming across discussions of current events, even if this is not their primary reason for listening to podcasts.

But there is more to the rising importance of podcasts in politics than just audience share. Crucially, as well as gravitating towards alternative media, ordinary people are also losing trust in, and even turning their backs on, the mainstream media – and for good reason.

Plummeting faith in the mainstream media is thoroughly deserved and has been a long time coming. Perhaps the nadir arrived during the 2020 election, with the debacle of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. From the second the story broke, the mainstream media reflexively repeated the establishment line that it was Russian disinformation. When the New York Post revealed the potential dodgy dealings of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, as well as allegations of corruption against Biden Sr himself, other big news outlets responded by either refusing to report the story or by dismissing it. The legacy media’s total lack of curiosity in this tremendous scandal was plain for all to see.

Eighteen months after the Post’s story broke, the New York Times finally acknowledged that the infamous abandoned laptop, the source of the scoop, was legitimate. As it turned out, the laptop would go on to form part of a criminal case against Hunter Biden in 2024. The truth came out eventually, despite the best efforts of supposed top-tier journalists.

While the media went out of their way to hush up the Democrats’ scandals, any story about Trump was treated as fair game, even when the facts weren’t there to stand it up. Ever since Trump first announced his intention to run for president in 2015, the corporate press has levelled countless lurid accusations against him. Supposedly, he is a Nazi who wants to plunge the US into an authoritarian dictatorship. He praised white supremacists. He might be a Russian asset. He paid prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed in Moscow. Of course, none of these claims turned out to be true. But they were all repeated as gospel and amplified by mainstream journalists. No wonder so many voters are hungry to hear what Trump has to say for himself on an unfiltered, alternative platform.

It should come as no surprise that Americans’ trust in the mass media has been steadily trending downwards for some time now. This month, it reached an all-time low. Just 31 per cent of Americans have a ‘great deal’ of trust in the accuracy of media reporting, compared with 68 per cent in 1971. This is particularly pronounced among Republicans. Just 12 per cent say they trust the media a great deal, compared with 54 per cent of Democrats. Trust is also lowest among the youngest Americans, those aged between 18 and 29 years old.

None of this is to say that Trump’s appearance on Rogan (or, indeed, Kamala’s appearance on Call Her Daddy) will necessarily be pivotal for the election. There’s always the danger of confusing internet buzz with real-life momentum on the ground.

Nevertheless, podcasts clearly aren’t the niche thing they were a few years ago, nor are alternative media. And they’ve been handed these new audiences, at least in part, by legacy media. Major American outlets spent the best part of a decade launching ridiculous smear campaigns against Donald Trump and demonising his voters as uneducated, bigoted hicks. If they want to regain the American public’s trust, they’ll have to earn it. They could start by reporting what is actually true, rather than what they would like to be true.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.