Alex Lovit: If you’re hearing my voice right now, you and I have something in common, we both listen to podcasts. During last year’s presidential election, it became clear that podcasts have become a highly contentious battleground for conversations in this country. Which is great for free speech, but unfortunately it’s also created fertile ground for spreading unchecked conspiracy theories, toxic ideologies, and misinformation. So how did we get here? And what does it mean for the future of political discourse?

You’re listening to The Context. It’s a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that’s so hard to do. I’m your host Alex Lovit. My guest today is Angelo Carusone. He’s the president of the nonprofit media watchdog organization Media Matters. Media Matters tracks and analyzes misinformation in US media and shares their findings in easy to read reports. Angelo is here to tell us how misinformation spreads through our current information landscape, and what we can do to keep ourselves and our loved ones from falling into a fake news trap.

Angelo Carusone, welcome to the podcast.

Angelo Carusone: Thanks for having me.

Alex Lovit: Media Matters was founded in 2004, which was not really that long ago. If your organization were a person, it’d be just old enough to drink. But the last couple decades have seen a lot of disruption to media. What has changed in the types of media Americans are consuming and how they’re consuming it over the last couple decades?

Angelo Carusone: When Media Matters was founded in 2004, talk radio was a mystery to many Americans. Even though it had a huge listener base, if they weren’t listening, they didn’t know about it. I think what’s really changed since then is that instead of people getting their lens through which they see the world, their story about the country and politics from talk radio, they’re now getting it from podcasts. So that’s both very, very different and very similar.

But I would say also, back then, cable news just had a significantly more influential role in the story, in narrative shaping, in driving the news cycle, and so did newspapers. Not so much the reporting, but in the drawing attention. What was on the front page of a newspaper, especially the top national newspapers, really had disproportionate influence over the conversation that day, the next day. That’s just not the case anymore. That is happening much more as a result of algorithms, frankly.

Alex Lovit: How has that changed how you guys do your work? Media Matters focuses on identifying and analyzing, encountering right-wing misinformation. Back in the day, that would have been Fox News, talk radio, now it’s everything. How do you guys keep up?

Angelo Carusone: The way we do our work really starts from monitoring and there’s multiple ways you can monitor. But the important thing is what are you doing in realtime? What are you live monitoring? And to your point, for the majority or the bulk of Media Matters history, that was an easy question to answer. Who mattered and when they mattered was very static, it was very stable. You always listen to Rush Limbaugh. You always listened to Glenn Beck. You always watched Fox News and a few other influential voices because their role never really changed.

What’s different now is that it’s so dynamic. And that’s because ultimately, the question of who matters and when they matter is no longer stable. That’s a newer twist on everything. There are times when Steve Bannon’s show really will give you the bleeding edge of what the right-wing narrative is going to be for the next day, or two days, or week. And then were periods of time where he is just a laggard. He’s not actually saying anything new and you don’t have to listen to it in realtime.

Similarly, the universe of what is considered relevant to news and politics is also radically different. We would not have listened to, say comedy programs, 15 years ago. Because they would not have been driving a story or driving a narrative, they just would have been a part of the conversation. Whereas now, we do find ourselves listening to podcasts that are predominantly focused on comedy because they are also deeply relevant to the politics. Maybe not every day, but during certain moments because of how important they can be to shaping the story that so many Americans ultimately walk away with.

Alex Lovit: Yeah. Well, let me ask about that change to trying to cover types of programs that aren’t necessarily politically focused. Whether you’re looking at Rush Limbaugh and Steve Bannon, those are both politically focused shows, you know you’re going to get political content.

Angelo Carusone: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: Joe Rogan, you don’t know. Maybe politics is going to come up, maybe it’s not. So you guys have done some studies of when politics does come up on those types of shows, shows with large audiences that aren’t necessarily focused on politics.

Angelo Carusone: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: How does politics come up in those shows, and what type of politics shows up there?

Angelo Carusone: It comes up in two ways. We did this really big study earlier in the year and we’ll be releasing another one soon that has an expanded universe. One way it comes up is directly related to some type of tangible political action. Vote for this thing, don’t vote for this thing, get out there and support this particular civic action. The other way it comes up though is in reinforcing narratives that support one political cause or party or another. And it may not be a call-to-action, but rather just an appeal or reinforcement of a story.

When we were doing this analysis, one of the things that became really clear is that most people really didn’t appreciate or understand that many shows that are not identified as political, that most people wouldn’t think of as political, actually contain a lot of political content. So much so that you can even analyze them and score them as being either right-leaning or left-leaning.

The second thing though, and just the reminder that I make to people, is that many of these shows are not like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. In that Rush Limbaugh was always going to be Rush Limbaugh, he could never be anything else. He can never be left one day and right another day. Same for Fox. They can only be Fox News. That’s not the case for these podcasts. There are moments in time where they will be part of the right and part of this political ecosystem, and then moments in time when they won’t be. And that’s the piece that’s so significant about this, is that it is very fluid. And that’s what makes this particular ecosystem so different is the dynamism not just in relevancy, but in the substance of the program itself.

Alex Lovit: So could you say a little bit more about that report that came out earlier this year?

Angelo Carusone: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: And as you were saying, that’s chronicling 2024, early 2025.

Angelo Carusone: That’s right.

Alex Lovit: As you say, you can put these things on a spectrum between left and right.

Angelo Carusone: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: So looking at the biggest online shows, so things like podcasts, YouTube streams, Twitch streams, where do those tend to fall on a left-right spectrum?

Angelo Carusone: It is overwhelmingly right-wing. I always hesitate when I say that because people say, “Oh, God, you’re just saying that because you lean to the left, so you’re just criticizing.” No, no, we did an analysis. In fact, I think what’s so interesting about it is not to say, “Oh, all of these individuals who host these shows are part of the right.” But rather, the content, the stories that they’re telling are aligned with the right.

So here’s what we found. What we did is we looked at the top 500 online shows, these podcasts in particular, and then we narrowed it down to 320. And the way we narrowed it down is some of them just didn’t touch politics at all. You can’t even draw any connection to reinforcing a political narrative. So you take out about 180 of those shows, okay, they’re not political. What you’re left with is about 320 programs that can be identified as in some way political. And if you look at those 320 shows, and then you say, “Okay, well, now let’s compare the size.” The total audience size for all of those remaining influential 320 programs is about 585 million subscribers in total. 480 million subscribers are to shows that are coded as right-leaning, so that’s about 82% of the audience.

And then people will quibble with, “Okay, well, how did you get to that coding? How did you make those determinations?” In some ways, it’s very easy. So the way we did it is we looked at not just one or two shows, but rather several months leading up to the 2025 election, and then in the few months right after it. And we used a few metrics. One was did they identify as right-leaning? In some cases, they did. That’s an easy one. In other cases, we said, “All right, well, one of the biggest things happening in that time, especially in the storytelling world, was the election.” Did they engage in the electoral politics? And if so, were they encouraging or supporting their audience to vote one way or the other? That’s the second thing.

Then we looked at top stories at the time. So things around immigration, or issues of war and peace. And we lined that up with what Trump was saying, and then what the Harris people were saying. And saying, “Okay, are they telling a story that is more aligned with supporting Republicans or supporting Democrat? Is it more aligned with the right-wing narrative or the left-wing narrative?” And when you walk away from all of that, what you find is that that’s how they’re coded as right-leaning.

So for example, there are people like Theo Von, who is a deeply influential podcaster who’s a comedian. He just mostly does comic, public interest stuff, never really did politics. He became very political. And a lot of what he was doing was reinforcing stories that the Trump campaign was telling, but then also outwardly endorsing them and supporting Trump. If we had done that study three years ago, he would have not been in the study at all because he would have been coded as not political. He never touched politics.

Other figures, like a streamer, one streamer in particular who’s influential is Asmongold. He plays video games and talks, that’s what his show is. His show is that. But he became increasingly political over the course of 2024. And heading into the summer, a lot of what he was focused on wasn’t just Israel-Palestine, but more broadly this issue of war and peace. And his ultimate position was that Democrats were warmongers and that Republicans at least weren’t going to drag people into war. And that was the story that he was telling his listeners. So if you’re watching him, you enjoyed the game. You enjoy the watching people play games. It’s just like watching somebody play golf or other sports. But as you’re watching, he’s talking, and increasingly became more political.

And so a lot of those shows aren’t just, “I’m a political show, so let me talk about politics for two years.” But instead, they’re actually programming where you’re getting a lot of really enjoyable content that is not political at all, but then weaved into it are these really hard, explicit calls to action or reinforcements of political narratives.

Just to put a bow on that stat, of the 320 shows that we coded at the time, a full third of them did not identify at all as political. They don’t code themselves as political, they don’t bill themselves as political when they sell their ads or they market themselves. A third. So a little more than 100 didn’t even say they touch politics. Yet of that third, 72% of them actually did politics and were coded as right-leaning. And I don’t think they’re doing it to be intentionally deceptive. I think the definition of news and politics has also greatly expanded in this environment where everything is mixed together. And I do think that’s one of the big differences between, say podcast programs and these online shows, and the more traditional talk radio programming.

Alex Lovit: So is this a danger to democracy? If a certain media format tends to lean right or left, you or I might have our own political opinions.

Angelo Carusone: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: But is this something that we should be worried about as lowercase D democrats, or as something that just capital D Democrats need to worry about?

Angelo Carusone: Capital D Democrats should worry about it because it effects organizing and building political power. That’s not what drives me. What drives me is the small D, the functioning of a civic society. And it’s unfortunate because it cuts both ways. Especially as the internet was getting more traction and social media was getting more traction, people would point to it as an example of the democratization, saying this is a good thing. And yeah, it can very well be a good thing, but there’s a dark side to it, too. And I think there’s many factors that can pull programming in one direction or another and it’s very easy to game or manipulate those considerations, [inaudible 00:12:52] if you have a headstart, which the right had.

But beyond that, it really just gets to what the algorithms do. And the more of an advantage you have in this space, the more it can pull the rest of the conversation in that direction simply through these recommendation tools. And that’s where I think the real threat to democracy comes in. The threat to small D democracy is not the existence of these shows. I don’t think that’s a threat. I think that’s a great part of democracy. I think that’s actually one of the things that is deep in American culture and history is that we’ve always had fringes and very active fringes. But what the threat to democracy is is we’ve never had powerful technology that was connecting otherwise disconnected audiences as fast as the online platforms are.

The second is that we haven’t had mechanisms where the incentives structures can pull programming in such a fast way to engage in, or reinforce, or validate narratives that may be entirely bogus, but are ultimately going to be responsive to an audience. So that, to me, is the real threat is both the connecting otherwise disconnected audiences, building power on the fringes, the narrative is simply too easy to be manipulated without any real professional safeguards on top of it.

I don’t want to romanticize all journalism, but journalism matters. And it matters because it’s a profession. There’s a mechanism by which they decide not only what is newsworthy and how to report it, but what should be on the front page of the news. And I get that things change and that’s okay, but the idea that somebody is saying this is why it is more important to put this on the front page than that front page 20 years ago, you can disagree with it, but at least there was a mechanism. And that’s not what’s driving the system right now, it’s a bit of a free for all. And in a free for all, might makes right and that’s not good for democracy. It’s actually the opposite of what should be guiding, and governing, and reinforcing a democracy.

Alex Lovit: Well, let me ask about that because I think this research pushes back on a few common understandings that I’ve had about how the media works.

Angelo Carusone: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: Including, so I’ve always thought the algorithm wants to keep us engaged so we get angry, and then it just keeps feeding us more and more extreme content, and that’s a little bit what you just said. But somebody like Joe Rogan isn’t exactly rage bait. So does the algorithm help explain why something like that becomes popular, or why something like that would lean right?

Angelo Carusone: Oh, boy, I’m so glad you asked this question. One of the things that I’m most proud of that we’ve done this year in terms of studies and analyses, it didn’t get as much traction as the study did, but I think it’s the one that’s more interesting because it answers your question.

What we did is we wanted to understand what happens to somebody’s social media feed not if they’re a Joe Rogan listener or they listened to one of these not political, but adjacent political shows. But what happens if they’re just a casual consumer of, say TikTok, and then one of these videos, a clip shows up in their feed and they interact with it? What happens? What happens to their worldview?

So we ran this study and it said, “I have now watched a Joe Rogan clip on TikTok. What happens?” Or with similar type of shows, we did an analysis with the top online programs. And what we found, to me the most interesting thing is that if you interact with it one time, the algorithm for TikTok says, “Oh, this person is very likely to be interested in a whole bunch of extreme things.” Not assuming you are. But what it does immediately after that, and for your next several hundred videos, is it serves you a buffet of wild ideas. Conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fearmongering, medical misinformation. So you start getting things about ivermectin curing cancers and all kinds of ailments. You start getting things about Christian nationalism, trad wife content, misogynistic content. And it’s universal, it happens every time. One engagement from one of these shows.

Not all of your feed becomes that. A lot of it just becomes the stuff you subscribe to, the typical recommendation stuff. But it starts to layer it in. And let’s say you are interested in some of these apocalyptic fearmongering so you watch that video on TikTok. Then you start getting it more, and more, and more. It starts to pull you down that rabbit hole. And that’s the part that’s so interesting and why this is the significance of these programs existing as a whole. It’s not a harm … Joe Rogan didn’t do anything wrong with these clips that they’re watching, neither did any of these other shows. But what the algorithm did is say, “We have a way of pulling people, letting them self-sort into these extremist types of ideas and we have the tools to do it.”

Now, many people are not going to wait to be interested in the hard misogyny or the fearmongering, or the conspiracy theories, but it doesn’t matter. Because if you serve them a buffet of nonsensical stuff, eventually something’s going to stick. And then before long, they get moved into a pigeonhole and they get served further and further down that feed.

And that is the answer to your question, is that what we’ve seen with these tools. And again, we’re talking disproportionate too about younger audiences. So people that are under the age of 25. And if noticed, they had the biggest shift in the last political cycle, more than any other demographic, and it’s not an accident. It’s not just that, “Oh, they’re listening to Joe Rogan and that’s why.” No. Yeah, that’s a part of it. But what happens is is that they hear the narrative one time, they hear an example one time, and then they are on another social media platform and it is now being reinforced in all kinds of other ways with secondary and tertiary content. And if you’re not a listener, you’re just one of these people that I pointed to in this study before, even if somebody re-posted or re-shares a Joe Rogan clip, by simply watching it you then get served a buffet which is very likely to move you down that path one way or another.

And that’s where the algorithms come in and there’s no real scrutiny of this, but that is the real threat ultimately of all of this space. The truth doesn’t get the same boost and that’s the real challenge that we’re confronted with. It’s not the role that these individuals play, but rather the role that they play in shaping a very complicated ecosystem that right now is unbound.

Alex Lovit: Well, let me ask about another thing that I think your report confounds my conventional understanding. And you mentioned TikTok there, and we kind of have an image that we all have tiny attention spans and we’re all just scrolling through TikTok feeds. But meanwhile, Joe Rogan has this huge audiences. He has way more subscribers than They New York Times. And the average show is something like 2.5 hours long.

Angelo Carusone: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: So how should we think about attention spans in this era?

Angelo Carusone: It’s a contradiction. Both things are kind of true at the same time in that it depends on the type of consuming that you’re doing. Sometimes if you’re just wasting time, the activity is to scroll and that’s how TikTok plays in. You’re essentially wasting time. Typically, when you’re listening to a podcast you’re doing something else. You’re not sitting static. And that’s not unusual, people listened to talk radio in the car. That’s why it had such huge listeners for so long. So they are looking for short burst content, but when they are consuming podcasts or these shows, they are doing it for very extended durations of time. And it is a contradiction.

A good example is the majority of people that listen to podcasts, Pew’s done a lot of research on this. The majority of people that listen to podcasts are doing long form podcasts or series about a single topic. Deep dive. And this is where the two connect. Because a lot of times, especially for audiences that are relevant to politics, what ends up happening is that you’re getting snippets of content and you’re starting to get a worldview or a narrative. And then, you ultimately find a show or a podcast that is dedicated to that story. And that is how they would move over to this long form content.

So that’s the way to think about it. Accept the contradiction and just recognize that they serve different functions at different times.

Alex Lovit: Let me ask about one last contradiction, as you said there. Which is we often hear that Americans’ trust in the media is very low. So a Gallup poll from last year, 69% of Americans said they had no trust or not very much trust in the mass media. Two-thirds of Americans say they don’t trust the media. But then, according to Pew, 87% of Americans who hear political content on podcasts say they trust it to be mostly accurate. Which is kind of insane to me, that you would distrust the thing that has rigorous fact checking and reporting standards. But what’s going on here? Why do people trust podcasts more than traditional media?

Angelo Carusone: Yeah. If you really break that down too, it reinforces in some ways our study. Because if you break that down, those that identify as Republican or conservative trust podcasts twice as much as those that are Democrats or lean left. And it makes sense because it’s their people in some ways, so they’re getting their worldview validated not challenged by the ecosystem that they’re a part of.

I think it’s a few things that are informing that, and that’s partly where not the danger is, but why it can be insidious. One is that it’s intimate. You’re listening to somebody, they’re in your ear. You’re doing activities, it seeps into your subconscious while you’re listening to it. It’s a personal relationship in a weird way. It doesn’t feel as arms-length as TV does. Or as ivory tower as, say newspapers do. It’s not lofty. A lot of podcasts, even though they seem very polished, they’re not. They’re talking. It’s just like we’re doing. They’re chatting.

Alex Lovit: This is, in fact, a podcast.

Angelo Carusone: Right, exactly. It’s intimate, it’s chat. So one is the relationship they have to the show.

The other is that a lot of times these programs, when we were talking about the larger podcast universe, so much of what the podcast is about has nothing to do with politics or things that would upset them. When people say they don’t trust the media, what do they mean? They mean really politics. Everyone trusts the news because they all talk about it. Most of these podcasts are … Where do they think they get their news from? The thing they’re talking about in these podcasts comes from a newspaper or a news outlet, they’re just putting a different wrapper on it.

But ultimately, some of it is the intimate. The other part is that most of the programming, you know what you’re getting because you already trust them. You want to go to Asmongold for video game tips. You like what he does, it’s interesting. It’s fun when he plays. He knows what he’s talking about, he’s authoritative. When he is doing video games, he’s authoritative. I do not particular care for Asmongold’s politics or his ideas. Asmongold is a capable and competent video game player. He’s authoritative. When he talks about that, I do not disagree. And when you get to see somebody in their best, it establishes a lot of trust. So when they make a recommendation about something else, you may not take it blindly, but you might listen to it.

And that’s the third thing, and this gets back to the insidious part is that they’re not ideological. They’re not partisan at least. They’re not saying, “I am a Republican so I’m going to toe the line.” They’re dynamic. They can be both things. They can be a contradiction. Joe Rogan would not necessarily have been coded right-wing a few years ago. He was a Bernie supporter! And that is really important for establishing trust with an audience and that’s where the real power in podcasting is, is that you’re building trust on one thing, and then converting it to fuel to shape somebody’s worldview about news, or current affairs, or politics. And it is very potent in a way that, say straight news, is not.

Alex Lovit: So help me understand why this would lean right. Why isn’t there a left-wing version of that?

Angelo Carusone: It didn’t have to. One is that the right-wing conservatives recognized it and they made investments. People like Candace Owens, who’s a prominent now conservative right-leaning podcaster and conspiracy theorist. She wasn’t always. She actually started out as a liberal. Candace Owens is a talented storyteller independent of her politics. She’s really good. She’s good at the craft. She started in college as a liberal, but there was no place for her to go.

You know how she got her start? Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk recognized the work that she was doing and because she didn’t have a place to grow on the left she started this BLEXIT movement, called Black exit from the Democratic Party just to get a little bit of attention, it gave her some growth. And Charlie Kirk basically took her under his wing, and gave her a show, and gave her a place to grow. And before long, she had an infrastructure and a vehicle to cultivate to her talents, all the incentive structures were there. There’s plenty of other creators that I could point to that had the same path. That are now prominent conservative talkers that started on the left. Or at least, originally. It’s just there was no place for them to go.

The second is that they understood the importance of engaging with the space, too. When Steve Bannon was running Breitbart all the way back in the early 2010s, when he described Breitbart as the home of the alt-right, people misunderstood that. Saying, “Oh, he wants it to just be White nationalist.” No, no. Alt-right at that time was a much more all-encompassing group. It was, yeah, far-right, White nationalist, extremist, but it also included conspiracy theorists, disaffected anti-government, but also anti-democratic and anti-politic type Liberals. They just didn’t really know where to fit. He was saying, “Come on in. Just come on in and let’s stir it up. You can come to my publication.”

And that was important because it wasn’t just him doing it, it then created an incentive structure for so many other political figures, and Trump being the best at that, to build an organized power on what used to be considered the fringes. Trump went there. He retweeted them. He helped elevate them. Some of these people now that have podcasts that have several hundred thousand or more subscribers, Qanon shows and parts of that conspiracy, they grew because Donald Trump retweeted them a couple times years ago. No Democratic politician does anything like that for the left. They don’t incubate talent or accelerate them in the way that Trump did.

So the first is the right invested in infrastructure. The second is that their leaders engaged with the space more comfortably. And then the third is the incentive structures. Ultimately, what happened last cycle is that you had an ecosystem where Republicans, and in particular Trump’s people, were saying that the left has just gone too far and they’re coming for White men next. They’re trying to shut you up. And that’s powerful stuff to pull people in. You pull them in with a false narrative, the algorithms do the rest.

So it’s not all that, “Oh, they just out-strategized everyone,” but they did things that bear fruit in years. And Democrats and civic institutions have not done that. And that is a big failure of not just the Democratic Party and their communications tools, but also in the civic institutions around it. There’s no reason why journalists and a lot of the big foundations had not been pumping money into storytellers and creators years ago, and that is a mistake that these institutions just made and the right filled that gap.

The last thing I’ll say here is when talk radio was born in the ’90s, or really came to get prominence and Fox News was born in the late ’90s, one of the things that they did was attack journalists as biased. They attacked the profession of journalism as liberal. And what happened in newsrooms is they reacted to that by trying to inoculate themselves against cries of bias by sometimes privileging, or over-privileging, or over-sampling right-wing misinformation or right-wing lies so that they could say, “Look, we’re trying to be fair. We are being fair. Look what we’re doing.” They privileged lies, needlessly so. But they did it to try to preserve the profession, but the right-wing knew better, they worked the refs.

And the same thing happened at the tech platforms that everybody misses. I always think back to this moment in 2016. And people focus on Comey a lot with Hillary and that’s understandable, I get that. But I look at that election through a different perspective. Which was there was a moment in May 2016 where the right-wing media and everyone was hammering away saying that Facebook had engaged in a concerted campaign to censor conservative content. And Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingram got this meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. And the next day, he went in, and seemingly the only time this has ever happened at the platform, changed the policy for how the trending topic section was done.

If you go back and look at that time, that was the first time that the reach of what people were describing then as fake news exceeded the reach of real news. It exploded exponentially immediately after that change happened. There was no evidence that Facebook was censoring content at the time. It was all based off of the right-wing working the refs. So that, to me, I think is the last part to your question, is that they have a strategy of working the refs in key places to advantage their own story or their own lies. And I think that’s what we’re seeing play out now in increasing ways.

Alex Lovit: So you’re saying a lot of this was an intentional strategy and there’s a number of tactics within that strategy by the right-wing.

Angelo Carusone: Yeah, that’s right.

Alex Lovit: Do you see anything happening now, either on the political left or just in more pro-democracy, let’s get the facts right kind of movement? Is there anything happening that’s pushing back on that now?

Angelo Carusone: A little bit. It’s slow, but it’s happening. We reran out study and expanded out the universe to a little more than double what we did the last time, so we had an even bigger picture of what the podcasting space looks like. One of the things that will bear out is that left-leaning or left-aligned shows are growing. They’re growing fast and there’s a lot of reasons for that. But because of what happened last cycle, you saw some institutional players say, “Oh, we need to invest in this space. We need to invest in our own storytellers.” There was a lot of silly conversation about, “We need a Joe Rogan of the left.” It’s like, no, that’s not the lesson here. You don’t need a Joe Rogan of the left because he’s not of the right. He leaned in that direction last cycle, but he can … It’s a dynamic space. That’s not what the lesson was.

The lesson was is that you need to cultivate storytellers and create pathways for that talent to grow, and that’s not going to happen through Democratic elected leaders. And you could look at a perfect example, in the first few days after the shutdown, Democrats, instead of relying on an ecosystem of storytellers, which is what we see the right-wing doing, they were doing their own livestreams, some of which barely broke 100 viewers.

But there are bright spots. One of the things that happened in early 2025 is that some institutions, some players invested in storytellers or creator networks to try to incubate talent. And by that, it’s not, “Oh, let’s get out there and build out people that are going to be partisan shills.” But rather, there’s a whole range of storytellers that are talking about things like hiking, and nature, and how the parks are being affected. And where we’ve seen a lot of this growth is people being able to connect the harms or the consequences of policies to both the actions of the administration, as well as connect it to audiences that may not be currently engaged in that.

It’s very similar to what happened last cycle, where you saw people that don’t politics start to build that connective tissue for their own audiences. And that’s important for any civic society, we’ve lost a lot of that, and that’s what these creators are doing. They didn’t do it fast enough or big enough and there’s lots of critiques there, but I think what the new study will show is that at least the little bits of investments that were made did bear some fruit, and that more should be done at a faster rate. Not just to help win elections, I think that’s important, but rather I think to create a healthier, more robust civic environment, and that’s desperately needed right now. And the only way to put those antibodies in the system is to have more of these storytellers out there.

Alex Lovit: So as you’re looking forward into the future, and it’s sort of a joke at this point that everyone says every election is the most important election of our lifetimes, but we really are at a pretty consequential moment for American democracy right now. So as you look forward to 2026, 2028, what are you looking for? What signs would you be looking for that would either be signs of hope or signs of concern?

Angelo Carusone: I think that we have to be aware that we are heading into a landscape that’s about to get a lot more tilted. Keep in mind that TikTok was basically identified as a national security threat if China owned it because of its potential power and influence. It is now being sold to allies of the Trump administration and it can very easily be distorted.

So for me, my tells are the following. We’ve seen so many of the individuals in the last cycle that were not political became political and became leaning to the right. Many of them are frustrated right now. They don’t like what they’re seeing come out of free speech with the administration, they don’t like the crackdowns, they don’t like some of the immigration stuff. It’s a little too authoritarian for them, that’s not what they thought they were voting for or what they were supporting. And regardless of the validity of that, the significance is for me one tell is how much do they continue to ultimately reinforce the line? It’s one thing to give a soft criticism, but do they actually say, “In this election, it’s time to do something different?” Or do they say, “Yeah, despite all of this, Trump is still the better choice?”

The second is how much more folding do we see from major media properties in the face of critiques? Obviously, Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel and they brought him back, but it required a public backlash. But YouTube, which needlessly settled with Donald Trump for $25 million for a lawsuit that seemingly is meritless, but capitulated. And it’s not just them, I think it’s the broader media. How much do they hold punches?

And then outside of that, I would look at is there some emergence on the left or a larger increase beyond just a few of these political shows, where we see activation in traditionally non-political programming? So for instance, one of the biggest trends on YouTube is these unboxing videos. People that literally just buy products and then they open them up. They get a lot of views, millions of views. It’s weird they haven’t talked about politics yet, I think so, because of the economy, because of tariffs. So for me, my third-biggest indicator would be do a bunch of these programs that are definitely affected or have their audiences affected by the world we live in, do they do anything related to politics? Do they activate?

Because that was a big tell in ’24 for the momentum for Trump. That so many of these non-political shows suddenly became engaged for one reason or another and started to tell their audience, “Hey, this matters to you.” I think that’s to me the biggest tell in all of this. Do you see a bunch of non-political programming begin to activate? I don’t need them to become hard partisans. But do they actually activate? And of all the things, that’s the one, if I could only look at one indicator, it would be that. And I don’t think there’s a more powerful illustration or indicator for what the midterms will look like and beyond than that segment of the online ecosystem.

Alex Lovit: Do you have any advice for people listening to this right now, how they should think about their own media consumption? Or is there anything people can do to impact this media ecosystem?

Angelo Carusone: It’s probably important, and I usually wouldn’t recommend people do it, but I do think it matters. To try and listen to one of these shows, especially if you’ve never heard of them before or never thought to. Maybe not the whole two hours, but you should listen. And the reason you should listen is because I promise you, you have somebody in your life that’s very close to you that does. These people have too many listeners, nobody is not touched by them. And they may get so much of their worldview largely shaped by these programs. You should do it once.

I think a lot of times, these feel very foreign and you should listen. Some of these people are genuinely enjoying to listen to and you might understand why they have so much of a rapport with their audience. Theo Von is funny, and he’s endearing, and he’s earnest. And if you’re a consumer of him every day, it’s really easy just to follow what he says. And so if you don’t have any idea who Theo Von is or how he talks to his audience, and then you’re trying to convince somebody who’s a die-hard fan, and you’re just trying to bombard them with facts or things that seem very aggressive, you’re never going to persuade them. You’re never going to get them to think differently if you don’t at least have a sense of what the lens through how they see the world is.

For a lot of individuals, it is going to be shaped disproportionately by one or more of these shows. So listen to a Theo Von. If you haven’t listened to a Rogan, listen to a Rogan. Or listen to a Shawn Ryan, who is a really influential voice on the right. These people have larger audiences than anything on cable news, including Fox. And if you listen once, you shouldn’t be persuaded by it, but you should understand the appeal and how they communicate so that you can see how it is that they’re talking about the world and how they’re explaining away so much of what’s happening right now.

Because they acknowledge that things are kind of bad on prices and the economy, but they say, “It’s all going to pay out, that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We just have to push through. There’s a little bit of pain, but then it’s going to be great.” And it sounds very legit, and I do think that sometimes it’s really easy to sit on the sidelines and wag our finger at it, but a lot of these people have 10, 15, 20 million listeners, subscribers because they are genuinely talented. And I’m the critic here, acknowledging this. So that’d be my first piece of advice.

And then my second piece of advice would be to not be quiet. There is an authoritarian consolidation happening right now. The less you talk, the less you engage, the more the dominant narrative ends up getting accelerated and boosted. So I think sometimes the natural response to a moment like this is to duck and cover, but it should be the opposite. There are a few things that do cut across all ideologies and political affiliations, one of them is free speech. It’s deep. Americans really love it. They love it. And we should be willing to engage and speak, one, so that it’s not easier for them to consolidate power. But two, so there’s something out there they can be connected to. We’re not playing small ball anymore. Elections are about micros, a few percentage points here or there. We’re in a macro environment, and the macro landscape is shaped by the media and the conversations around it.

Alex Lovit: Angelo Carusone, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Angelo Carusone: Thanks for having me.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Strait Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you liked the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They are not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The foundation’s support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.

Speaker 3: This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.

Michael Baranowski: In a time of social media hyped partisan scream fests, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that plenty of people on the other side aren’t stupid or evil. I’m Political Scientist Mike Baranowski and my podcast, The Politics Guys, is built on the belief that for democracy to work for everyone, we have to be willing to really listen to each other and have meaningful conversations about where and why we differ. I hope you’ll join me and my intellectually and ideologically diverse group of co-hosts as we work to understand our differences and seek common ground. You can find us at politicsguys.com or in your podcast app.