Prepare for the unprecedented: I am about to admit I was wrong.
For years, I have celebrated the rise of new media and its impact on our ability to seek truth, challenge false narratives peddled by legacy institutions, and transform the way we conduct our public debate. The rationale behind my thought process seemed solid. After all, “the medium is the message.”
The reason I thought our conversations about politics, culture, and entertainment had become so fake was the rapidly shrinking soundbite and a media elite more interested in winning than learning. Journalism, academia, and politics merged into a monoculture, whose consensus rested primarily on the vigorous inhalation of gases emanating from their own backsides, into which they had firmly inserted their heads.
“I don’t know anyone who voted for Trump” was their mantra. Far from being a confession of ignorance and a lack of perspective, this phrase was uttered with pride at dinner parties to signal membership of the elite class. The response from this contingent to the sequential dismantling of their core assumptions about the way the world works was an attempt to use credentialism to make reality go away: “Experts think vaccinating newborns against Covid is essential. Now pipe down, mask up, and follow The Science™!”
In decades past, absent the ability to make their voices heard, the proles would have had to grumble away about Big Pharma in obscurity as people (mostly hippie lefties) had been doing for ages. But, thanks to the technological revolution—which reduced the cost of running a major broadcasting channel from millions of dollars to the price of a smartphone—the era of gatekeeping was well and truly over.
The discredited mainstream media continued to peddle lie after lie in an attempt to keep its political opponents from governing and being reelected, but it then faced a powerful counterweight. Elon Musk ended the regime of censorship and enforcement bias in the digital public square of Twitter, declaring “You are the media now” as major podcasts and YouTube shows secured audiences most mainstream media outlets can now only dream of. By the time of last year’s presidential election in the U.S. the rise of new media had become undeniable, with many rightly calling it the “podcast election.”
Curious, open-minded, inquisitive podcasters, unrestrained by the need to comply with corporate media message discipline and social media censorship, were finally able to speak freely, seek the truth, and debate controversial ideas in good faith in front of grateful audiences of millions. So far, so wonderful. After all, what could go wrong with “democratizing information”?
Well, as it turns out, quite a lot.
Just as the assumptions of the elite class were proved wrong by the actions of their fellow citizens during the era of Trump, Brexit, and Covid-19, the assumptions some of us held about the future of the media are now crumbling before our very eyes.
With politics becoming the primary form of entertainment in Western society, more of us now get our news and opinions from entertainers rather than serious commentators and, just as importantly, we often struggle to tell the difference between the two. Having transitioned from a career in comedy to my current role as a writer, interviewer, and political commentator, I can hardly complain about the meshing of culture, politics, and entertainment. And I am not complaining; I am merely pointing out that the incentive structures and thought patterns we typically associate with the entertainment business are not the same as those we expect to see in journalism or academia.
This difference was perfectly illustrated in the recent debate between journalist and author Douglas Murray and comedian and podcaster Dave Smith on The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s biggest podcast.