What’s the Purpose of Boycotting Joe Rogan?
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Top of mind this week: the ongoing controversy surrounding the most popular podcast in America, The Joe Rogan Experience, currently hosted on the streaming platform Spotify. Last month, 270 public-health professionals criticized Joe Rogan, the comedian and MMA commentator, for what he and some of his guests have said about COVID-19, and urged Spotify to adopt a misinformation policy. (The streaming company later published what it called “our long-standing Platform Rules.”) More recently, two iconic Baby Boomer recording artists from Canada, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, told Spotify that they wanted their music removed from the platform.
Two bits of context are useful:
- Rogan’s audience is massive––an estimated 9 million people stream each episode the prime-time audiences of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, you wind up with perhaps 5 million average monthly viewers.
