Absolutely anyone can create a podcast — it doesn’t matter what social background people come from or whether or not they have a journalism degree. As long as people have a microphone and a consistent uploading schedule, they have the chance to garner a lot of influence in the media landscape.

On paper, that sounds like a good idea — in practice, not so much. It’s a lot like capitalism in that sense. Capitalism gives the illusion of freedom but doesn’t account for marginalized groups that systemically hadn’t had the opportunity or the funds to gain mass wealth, meaning that the people who do end up hoarding wealth are a very small group of privileged people, often white men. Like capitalism, the people who gain mass influence and have more time to devote themselves to podcasting are usually white and rich men. 

I’m not saying that white men dominating these spaces is automatically a bad thing, but with less of a range of people that are able to cultivate a mass audience, harmful and untrue rhetoric that doesn’t have the opportunity to be challenged or critiqued is more likely to get out there and become accepted by podcast listeners as truth.

According to the Spotify charts, the top five podcasts in the United States are:

1) “Shawn Ryan Show” with Shawn Ryan

2) “The Joe Rogan Experience” with Joe Rogan

3) “The Mel Robbins Podcast” with Mel Robbins

4) “The Telepathy Tapes” with Ky Dickens

5) “The Rosary in a Year” with Fr. Mark-Mary Ames

All of these podcast hosts are white, and most are men with the exception of Robbins and Dickens. These podcasts are also all entertainment podcasts, not news. None of these claim to be trusted news sources outright, but to an uneducated audience, what these podcasters say is often misconstrued as truth. There are no regulations or journalistic limitations on what they’re allowed to say.

Number 10 on the Spotify charts is Tucker Carlson. Carlson may be the former host of the political talk show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that aired on cable TV through FOX News, but he has spread many conspiracy theories on his show. He was even fired from FOX for libel. A prominent one is the “great replacement theory:” a racist, fictional theory claiming that non-white people are being brought into the U.S. to replace white voters, according to NPR.

“Thanks to Tucker Carlson, this kind of dreck that you would normally only see on far-right forums and online spaces had a prime-time audience on cable news every night,” Melissa Ryan, a political consultant and founder of CARD Strategies, told NPR.

Because of Carlson’s ability to spread racist lies to a highly influential audience, I believe he has no journalistic credibility, and his words should not be taken as fact.

According to a 2023 Brookings study, nearly 70% of podcasters in the Brookings dataset shared an “unsubstantiated or false claim” in at least one out of their 20 episodes. These podcasts that shared misinformation often leaned conservative.

One of the most listened-to podcasts in the United States is “The Joe Rogan Experience.” While Rogan’s background is in comedy, he somehow feels he has the authority to speak on politics and current events. 

Adam Triplett, a retail worker in Wicker Park, is an avid podcast listener. As someone who loves podcasts, he acknowledges that some people, like Rogan, have too much influence over people when discussing politics and current events as these topics have nothing to do with comedy.

“He gets like 30 million listens per episode and that seems to be so much more than what news broadcasters get today,” Triplett said. “He has so much power in a way, and he’s not super responsible about it.”

According to Bloomberg, as of March, Rogan’s podcast following is exponentially higher than the others mentioned in the top five list. With 14.5 million followers, he has way more listeners than the New York Times podcast, which only has about 2.6 million followers.

His large influence would be fine if Rogan was just doing comedy, but because he uses his podcast to discuss political and social issues, his predominantly white, young male listeners are a lot more susceptible to misinformation through his podcast, as he is not a qualified expert or journalist trained to be fair or unbiased.

According to the BBC, Rogan has claimed on his podcast that vaccines can alter your genes and that the health risks of the Covid vaccine are greater than Covid itself. Both of these claims are not true.

Chris Bury, a DePaul professor who specializes in political reporting, wants people to realize that podcasters are entertainers, not journalists. 

“Everybody who listens to these podcasts has got to have in the back of their mind that these folks are out to make money,” Bury, also a former political correspondent for ABC News, said. “They are not out to educate you or inform you accurately.”

Misinformation has lethal consequences. People like Rogan and Carlson are fueling right-wing ideologies that were heavily encouraged during Donald Trump’s former presidency. One ideology that was heavily popularized was the “threat” of immigrants of color. Trump’s border wall speech was a massive generalization of all immigrants of color. He painted all of them as immoral rapists whose only interests are smuggling illegal drugs into the country. This is entirely untrue, because the U.S. currently has around 7.6 million undocumented workers who are mostly in low-paid service jobs. 

This dehumanization is harmful because Carlson and Rogan, who share the same beliefs, are perpetuating white supremacy. This dehumanization of people looking to build better lives for themselves directly leads to the destruction of human lives. When people are unable to be empathetic to the struggles people of color face, their exploitation is destigmatized.

Stephanie Posey, another regular podcast listener, said when she listens to podcasts she finds herself taking what podcasters say at face value.

“I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good or bad thing, but I’m not doing extra research,” Posey, a sophomore animation student at DePaul, said.

According to the Pew Research Center, “In 2023, 31% of those 12 and older said they have listened to a podcast in the last week, up from 26% in 2022.” Given the statistics of the most popular podcasts in the U.S., a lot of people are not listening to news podcasts, but are instead opting for right wing and pop culture podcasts.

“Consumers in this era of disinformation on podcasts and social media really have to do their homework,” Bury said. “They have to look at news sites that have a reputation for accuracy.” 

The next time you listen to a podcast, I encourage you to know and think critically about the person behind the microphone. I encourage you to question whether or not the information you’re getting can be trusted. Because while it may be “just an entertainment podcast,” the impact of entertainment can be dangerous and divisive, if not deadly.

Related Stories:

• Opinion: True crime podcasts: stop treating exploitation as entertainment
• From the left to the right, students find podcasts for every political view
• Thinking out loud: DePaul’s favorite political podcasts

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