What concerns me about Joe Rogan, and what this article helped solidify, is not necessarily his views, but the power he has as one person.
In my opinion he has taken some problematic view points, but others would agree with him more, and many would say he just plays devil's advocate and likes to talk hypotheticals and dig into interesting topics. I don't think any of this really matters.
The issue is that the views come from one guy, get amplified in some man-cave banter with a few guys paid by him, and then broadcast to an audience "larger than Belgium". This isn't normal. Media companies have layers of editors, they have at least some diversity, a woman will hopefully look at a story or script before it goes out, sometimes even a lawyer might tell them to tone it down a bit. Even celebrities with big followings on social media are likely to have more input on many of their postings than Rogan does on his broadcasts.
A bit of a filter is a good thing for everyone, whether it's trusted friends who can and do tell you when you're wrong, an editor at work, a legal team, whatever. It's also honest. I think Joe Rogan could use a filter.
You know, I don't even particularly like Joe Rogan or agree with him on many issues, but I'd say that your mentality here is just about everything wrong with big corporate media companies.
Every opinion that deviates slightly outside of the current zeitgeist has to be watered-down, censored, scoffed down upon, and diminished.
Everything has to be reviewed by bloodsucking lawyers rather than talking like a normal human being.
Somehow a lone white man is not allowed to express his opinion without a layer of ''diversity'' to somehow make it acceptable.
Joe has a following bigger than Belgium precisely because the rest of the media is such a bland and fake piece of shit for the reasons you mentioned. If you want to point the finger at anybody for the success of Joe Rogan, look in the mirror buddy.
> This isn't normal. Media companies have layers of editors, they have at least some diversity, a woman will hopefully look at a story or script before it goes out,
Jesus Christ, do you understand what you're saying here? A man can't speak and be heard without a woman going over it first?
I find this take really surprising. He has a huge reach, but you kinda need to go out of your way to watch him, and the people that do, do it exactly because of the lack of filter.
If I wanted to listen to something sanitized and approved by a legal team I would just watch CNN or Fox News.
You seem awfully concerned about someone who doesn't fit the usual media profiles. You may want to look at the rankings of more conventional shows. They've been dwindling for decades. People are really, really tired of that stuff. Trust in them is vanishingly low, below even Congress and lawyers. Diversity? He literally is diversity. You just spent a whole post talking about how he's different from the usual legacy media mouthpieces.
Also... how do you know he doesn't get plenty of input?
> This isn't normal.
Literally no popular media figure is remotely close to normal.
> What concerns me [...] the power he has as one person
What concerns me is that the traditional media are not able to make interesting podcasts that connect as well with most people.
Don't blame Joe Rogan for what he does, blame everybody else for not being able to do the same.
Joe Rogan has no power by himself, only by traditional media not wanting to let people talk freely on the radio anymore. No one runs unedited interviews anymore. Everything is massaged into the viewpoint that the journalist already has.
Joe Rogan is able to produce a podcast in which the topics covered and the tones used are not really dictated by advertisers. This is as good and independent as it gets. The podcast should be a prime example of what the web should be about: genuine content free from higher up control and censorship.
The problem seems to be that you don't like this kind of content and would much prefer "safer" things to be popular, but that's exactly how we get harmless TV shows and meaningless music ruining the fun for everyone.
There are always people like this and Joe is not the most problematic we’ve had to be honest.
Yes he’s never taken his show as a responsibility/burden to seek out some absolute truth to to guide men to an utopian future through his influence - but in those respects he would have likely failed had he fallen for that trap - the whole point of his show is this is who he is and he is not trying to make YOU do anything (maybe exercise ?). This is just something he does and he does his best not to think about it.
I don't want this great show to be influenced by what other people find problematic. Joe Rogan himself has an opinion regarding what is a problem and what is not. Since it is his show, he should run it the way he wants and presumably he will say something when he has a problem with it. This has always been the case.
We can't pretend like all media companies care about promoting balanced, thoughtful and inclusive commentary. That's just not reality.
There's a ton of money to be made pushing agendas and peddling hate. And then you run into the age-old question: who controls the filter? How do you regulate controversial content?
> A bit of a filter is a good thing for everyone, whether it's trusted friends who can and do tell you when you're wrong, an editor at work, a legal team, whatever. It's also honest. I think Joe Rogan could use a filter.
Cool, who do you suggest should do the filtering? We could create a ministry of censorship.
His audience disagrees that he needs a filter. The filtered content you are talking about is abundant, authentic content is scarce, that's why he pulls the audience size he pulls. His reach would be smaller if we took the filters off other sources.
Joe doesn’t need a filter. Maybe if he wanted to appeal to more people, he could use one. But he doesn’t really care about being controversial it seems. Let people make up their own minds I say, the same way you have.
I have seen "problematic" viewpoints on CNN and Fox News, both of which have audiences orders of magnitude larger than Rogan. Should we "filter" those also? Should we filter you too for advocating for filters on others?
You inherently infantilize the public when you assume they agree with, or are indoctrinated by, media they consume. Adults are capable of disagreeing with long form content they consume.
What is more damaging are the sound bytes and headlines that get amplified on short form social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, which offer conclusions and misinformation and not conversations.
Joe Rogan is a bit of an idiot, but his audience mostly knows that. They listen to him because there are nuggets of truth in his podcast that most MSM won't report.
Rogan is claiming 11M listeners per episode, CNN and Fox News ratings peak around 1M for their primetime shows. I'm not sure how to make a total viewership comparison, but it appears like they're in the approximately same scale.
Yes, please someone get him a woman, christ a lawyer, something, someone to review his podcast! We can't allow someone to simply speak their mind, think of what might happen if people got the hang of that!
The amount of authoritarianism in this comment is staggering
Of course, the exact some criticism could be made of anyone that famous. Obama for instance had no editors, I doubt Bernie Sander's has a woman or a lawyer pre-approve his opinions either...
One of the things I respect about Joe Rogan (I am not really a listener unless someone wants to discuss a particular show in my social circle) is how often he says (and seems to mean) "don't listen to me, wtf do I know" or words to that effect.
I respect someone who seems to honestly admit they do not know, and that it's ok to not be sure. And I respect anyone who encourages others to think for themselves (though that failed pretty drastically with Covid).
Compare that any politician who is 100% sure of X until X is only supported by 49% of people.
I am not sure why this was down voted, as sexism work both ways. Asking a woman to review a man's content is the same thing as asking a man to review a woman's content, and most people would not be fine with the second.
Absolutely, most people wouldn't be fine with the second, because most people have grown up in a society where men have held the overwhelming majority of positions of privilege and power. When we're talking about a woman taking looking at a man's work what we're really saying is "That work environment might be so dominated by men that there isn't even a single woman in the office who could provide a different perspective due to her lived experience". The counter "Well a man should look over this work" invests a world in which a workplace could be so dominated by women that they would lack even a single man to offer an opinion on a piece of work. The idea that a reporter at a news organization could have an entire management chain above them of exclusively men isn't far-fetched. The counter - a woman only chain of management would be incredibly rare.
It's important that we see the world as it is, rather than as some theoretical thing out that where we can just plug in different variables and go "Well now look!"
Why should we even go for opinion of opposite gender? What's next, ensure that all political groups offer an opinion? All socioeconomic classes? All age groups? I'd say opinion of average man and woman are much closer than other splits.
Errr... yes. We should basically be aiming to take into account a wide range of experiences and perspectives when forming our opinions, and by surrounding himself with a clique of bro-y young men Rogan provides a very narrow perspective on the world, and arguably a big part of the reason he's so popular is because he doesn't really challenge the perspectives of his audience.
We have a wide variety of media outlets to expose experience of different groups. That fulfils what you're looking for. You can find opinions of pretty much any group no matter what.
What your proposal would do, most groups wouldn't get a chance to translate their experiences. Biggest and/or loudest group would dominate the narrative. Everyone else would be tuned out to bigger or smaller degree.
Actually, we already had your solution. Back in TV-dominated era. Only vetted content would make it to the public. With marginal groups silenced. Well, those marginal groups just started tiny podcasts to tell their stories :)
What do you think would happen if you take those tiny podcasts and force them to act like big media of the old days? Can you silence some dude streaming from his kitchen?
I mean, that's pretty much what the media does. They claim they do more fact checking and take an unbias stance, but that's been disproven too many times.
I don't see anyone getting worked up that Dan Rather has "too much power as one person"
The filter is in your brain. If you need a team of editors to sift through and analyze thoughts before they reach your brain YOU are the problem and YOU CANNOT THINK properly.
How is a filter (a sort of censorship or constraint) more honest than nothing one? I can see it being more thruthful (and also less), but honest seems off.
It's hilarious for me personally to see the "I trust Joe Rogan more than I trust Joe Biden" slogans, because I've never listened to a single episode, and I only really know him from the 90s cult sitcom "News Radio" ;)
I will say that the Jimmy James Macho Business Donkey Wrestler reading is one of my fav things ever to be broadcast on American television!
> Media companies have layers of editors, they have at least some diversity, a woman will hopefully look at a story or script before it goes out, sometimes even a lawyer might tell them to tone it down a bit
Sometimes editors and a corporate machine behind the news isn’t the best thing.
Take, for example, Amy Robach. A CBS reporter who wanted to air the Jeffery Epstein story years before he was arrested for the second time. Then ABC tipping off CBS and the leaker being fired.
There’s also the Chris Cuomo basement scandal.
Or Brian Williams lying about his experience covering Iraq.
Or Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss being pushed out of their newspapers.
Or studies showing that the media covered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine far more than the US invasion of Iraq.
Or censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Also haven’t seen much about the contents of the diary in the mainstream press…
The media has failed time and time again on what I outlined above and much more. They have an agenda, be it left or right, that is larger than any one person and are largely beholden to advertisers and whatnot.
I applaud independent media. There are a lot of people doing really great work on substack. Jimmy Dore, for example, does amazing reporting and really shows the bias of the media.
People like Alex Berenson, Matt Taibi, Glenn Greenwald, etc are doing really great investigative reporting that I once respected mainstream outlets for.
Just because someone has a large audience doesn’t mean they should be censored. Talking to people about things for hours is invaluable and Rogan does a great job on his show.
In my opinion he has taken some problematic view points, but others would agree with him more, and many would say he just plays devil's advocate and likes to talk hypotheticals and dig into interesting topics. I don't think any of this really matters.
The issue is that the views come from one guy, get amplified in some man-cave banter with a few guys paid by him, and then broadcast to an audience "larger than Belgium". This isn't normal. Media companies have layers of editors, they have at least some diversity, a woman will hopefully look at a story or script before it goes out, sometimes even a lawyer might tell them to tone it down a bit. Even celebrities with big followings on social media are likely to have more input on many of their postings than Rogan does on his broadcasts.
A bit of a filter is a good thing for everyone, whether it's trusted friends who can and do tell you when you're wrong, an editor at work, a legal team, whatever. It's also honest. I think Joe Rogan could use a filter.