Yet because podcasts are often cross-posted on other media, podcast downloads alone do not capture their full reach. Apple doesn’t disclose download numbers for its “Top 100” podcasts, but Ben Shapiro’s podcast claims to see 15 million downloads per month, while The Verdict with Ted Cruz reportedly had at least 20 million downloads in 2020. While it is difficult to determine the exact reach of podcasts, this new generation of hosts are using the medium to build sizeable audiences. The trend is in keeping with Bannon’s stated Trump-era media strategy of “ flooding the zone” with inflammatory information, real or fabricated. Significantly, as Figure 2 illustrates, the reason for the high rate is not that each popular podcast series was endorsing false election claims in one out of every two episodes, but that the podcasts that endorsed false narratives most frequently-such as The Sean Hannity Show, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and Steve Bannon’s War Room-were also those that produced the largest total number of post-election episodes. political podcasts endorsing false or misleading claims. 3 the number spiked dramatically, with just over 50% of episodes in our sample of popular U.S. 3, the percentage of all episodes that actively endorsed or promoted them nonetheless remained relatively low in the pre-election period. Although Steve Bannon and others had consistently raised concerns about electoral integrity prior to Nov. Since Giuliani repeatedly endorsed false claims in other fora, it is likely that our data for his podcast series represents a significant undercount.įirst, as Figure 1 reveals, there was a massive and sustained post-election increase in episodes that endorsed unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and related narratives. This was an issue in particular with Rudy Giuliani’s Common Sense podcast, for which we were only able to access two episodes that aired after the election. Furthermore, due to data restrictions, some series had episodes that we were not able to download. Our methodology means that it is unlikely our data includes false positives (i.e., instances where we coded a false or misleading claim when we should not have), but it may include false negatives (i.e., there may be instances where we did not code a false or misleading claim when we should have, since a podcast host or guest may have made a false claim that did not trigger a keyword match). We then searched transcripts of those episodes for a list of keywords associated with different claims of electoral fraud, including both generic terms like “stolen election” and “rigged election” as well as references to specific conspiracy theories, such as “ sharpies.” Finally, we reviewed each keyword match manually to ensure that a podcast host or guest was endorsing or promoting an unsubstantiated allegation or false electoral narrative, rather than merely describing or reporting on one. 20, 2020, and the storming of the Capitol on Jan. We filtered this dataset for episodes released between the first major party convention on Aug. To do this, we compiled a dataset of popular political podcast episodes from series featured in Apple’s “Top 100” podcasts in November 2020. In light of the wide reach podcasting now enjoys, understanding whether and how political podcasts contributed to the spread of the Big Lie is vital. Just as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity exploited the infrastructure of talk radio from the late 1980s through the early 2000s to establish themselves as major players in conservative politics, they and a newer generation of hosts are using podcasts to build large and influential audiences in a far more decentralized medium. Yet conservative commentators in particular have flocked toward the medium. Major political commentators have taken note, with prominent figures from both the Obama and Trump administrations launching massively successful podcasts. The reach and scale of the podcasting ecosystem has exploded in recent years, with Spotify and Apple alone now boasting more than 25 million monthly podcast listeners each in the United States. Although journalists, researchers, and academics have largely focused on the critical role played by digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there has been comparatively little focus on podcasts, despite the growing popularity of the medium. A key question is how exactly that emergency arose and what enabled the Big Lie to spread so widely.
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