TheQuartering [2/7/2022]
Podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan is back in the media’s crosshairs. A few days ago, rock legend Neil Young issued an ultimatum to Spotify: The music platform could carry his music or they could carry The Joe Rogan Experience podcast but not both. The streaming company ended up siding with Rogan, a man they invested $100 million in back in 2020. But Young’s ultimatum led other music celebrities to follow suit, and legacy media outlets renewed their condemnation of Rogan’s podcast for “spreading misinformation.”
Mainstream media pundits claim that Rogan has spread falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine by having prominent vaccine skeptics such as Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough on his podcast. They conveniently ignore the fact that Rogan has platformed a range of perspectives on the COVID vaccine; for example, he had vaccine enthusiast Sanjay Gupta on as well.
Indeed, the move to smear Rogan for peddling “misinformation” is less about the truth than it is about a deeply unpopular mainstream media elite refusing to acknowledge its own failures, and how it lost its credibility with the American people.
As is typically the case during elite outrage cycles about Rogan, the leading voices calling for him to be censored and amplifying dishonest smears about him come from the same prominent institutions that have lied to the American public about a host of issues including Iraq, Russiagate, the likely origins of COVID-19, and a barrage of other stories with direct consequences for policymakers.
These massive errors of fact and judgment are why media trust among the American public has dropped to the lowest on record. It’s why people are switching to independent voices like Rogan who they view as a more reliable source of information.
And yet, you will never hear legacy media partisans asking why America trusts a podcaster whose interest in politics is more casual than, say, his fascination with mixed martial arts or psychedelic drugs. And the reason this question will never be asked is because the answer is too dangerous for media elites to contemplate, namely, Americans are right. The mainstream media in America should not be trusted.