About the Guests:
Davey Alba is a New York-based technology reporter for Bloomberg News, covering Big Tech and its power in all its forms. Her work has spanned topics as diverse as online misinformation, facial recognition’s civil rights problems and sexual harassment in tech. Over more than a decade of reporting, she has won prizes from the Mirror Awards, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, the Deadline Club and the Online Journalism Awards. She previously worked at The New York Times and BuzzFeed News, where in 2019, her feature on how Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, used Facebook to fuel the drug war in the country, won a Livingston Award for excellence in international reporting. She grew up in Manila, Philippines, and moved to the United States in 2010, graduating from the Columbia Journalism School master of arts program in 2013, with a concentration in science journalism.
Leon Yin is an award-winning journalist at Bloomberg News. He builds datasets and develops methods to investigate technology's impact on society. He teaches data journalism workshops and writes a practical guide called Inspect Element. His work has been cited by legislators, the academy, and popular media. In 2023, the series Still Loading received a Philip Meyer Award recognizing the best uses of social science methods in journalism. Leon got his start in news at The Markup, and his start in research writing Fortran scripts at NASA.
Episode Transcript:
Cory Barker: Earlier this season, when we were discussing the history of broadcast news and the advent of streaming, we referenced the archetype of the staid news anchor in the vein of Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow. Today, we're going to be talking about a different brand of public figure influencers who have built massive followings through podcast platforms, particularly YouTube. These hosts have become trusted voices to those feeling frustrated with their place in 21st century America, many of whom share similar demographics, male, white, and young. This fan base parallels President Trump's core support base. In the 2024 election, more than half of men under 30 supported Trump, and roughly 8 in 10 Trump voters were white. The personality's most popular with this audience emphasize common themes like immigration, institutional medicine, war, or the economy, they disparaged transgender individuals and reinforce old fashioned gender roles. Although these influencers don't identify as political pundits, analysis of their content demonstrates frequent overlaps between their talking points and the vision of the US President Trump has promised to deliver.
Matt Jordan: In an effort to better understand the relationship between what's been dubbed the bro-sphere and the outcome of the 2024 election, Bloomberg analyzed more than 2000 videos totaling nearly 1,300 hours of footage from nine prominent YouTubers. The data was reported in an article titled “The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to you by YouTubers.” Two of the reporters who contributed to this work are here with us today. Davey Alba is a technology reporter who covers big tech for Bloomberg News after previously reporting on online disinformation for The New York Times. Leon Yin is an award-winning journalist at Bloomberg News. He builds, data sets and develops methods to investigate technology's impact on society. We're going to talk with Davey and Leon about what their reporting reveals about the role these influencers play in American politics, and the broader implications this has for our news ecosystem.
Cory Barker: Davey and Leon, welcome to News Over Noise.
Davey Alba: Thanks for having us.
Leon Yin: Thanks so much for having us.
Cory Barker: So, you and your team at Bloomberg analyzed 1,300 hours of podcasts that generally appeal to men and featured Trump guest spots. What were you all looking for, and what did you find?
Davey Alba: We started this project to try to understand what these podcasts were all about. We had heard of the influence of these podcasters and had sort of anecdotally heard about their enormous influence, but we wanted to set out to quantify some of the messages that were on these shows. So, we just started listening, and we came up with a way to systematically categorize different topics and also list out the guest networks of these podcasts. And what we found was that they're very tightly networked, they have quite a unified message. And importantly, many of these podcasts had this push to get men to the polls. Over a third of videos and shows that we listened to basically asked the listeners to vote in this election. These podcasts also were not shy about their allegiance to their preferred candidate, who was Donald Trump and who was a guest on all nine of these shows.
Cory Barker: So, you mentioned that many of the hosts explicitly told people or encouraged people to vote in the lead up to the election. Your reporting in general found that there was an increase in political discourse, chatting about politics and the election in the lead up to the election. What's your sense of how much these hosts are actually politically engaged in any way versus maybe trying to tap into popular discourse, or trends, or even algorithmic popular topics on YouTube?
Davey Alba: That's a really important point. And we tried to show this visually in our story as well. If you look at our graphics of the topics and the density of the topic of voting closer to the election, you can really see how the calls to vote ramped up ahead of the election. One thing that was really interesting about our investigation was that we really found that none of the broadcasters style themselves as political pundits. Many of them are—like to talk about sports, masculinity, internet culture, gambling, pranks. And closer to the election, the political topics got more and more mentioned. I think that we can't draw a causal line to this is—they figured out that the algorithms promoted political topics more, and so they started talking about political topics more. But our data shows that that's what they ended up doing, if that makes sense. And we also know that doing so was really effective, that their viewership really soared as they talked about political topics. And that was something that was a big factor in getting a disaffected group of voters to actually make it to the polls.
Leon Yin: I think one stark example is Lex Fridman. So, Lex Fridman typically has technologists and scientists on his show. And in the last two years, we saw more and more politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu went, the president of Argentina also went on his show. And we've heard anecdotally that some listeners have just started listening to him for updates and different perspectives on the Israeli-Gaza conflict as well. And so, a lot of this is just classic kind of creator strategy, where it's like you saturated one kind of topic or market and so you'll branch out into something else. And so, politics eventually showed up. And just a clarification too. I think 37% of videos are on elections and voting and half of those are on political participation. So, calls to vote, calls to register to vote. And another half for questioning elections integrity like the Big Lie that the election was stolen the last time around in that voting doesn't really—is always fraudulent. And we looked at, I think, five other political topics ranging from immigration, war, transgender identity, institutional medicine and found that about, I believe, 2/3s of videos, over 1 million views mentioned in at least one of these topics. And so that's like quite a frequent amount of discussion on politics.
Cory Barker: Those last two points I think really illustrate something fascinating about these creators, these podcast hosts. You got on one hand, they're urging people to vote. They're talking about a preferred candidate. They're bringing candidate, now President Trump onto the show. And then we've got another whole track of conversation here questioning the entire integrity of the election process, which I guess in some ways is not unlike Donald Trump himself. But for these podcast hosts, these creators, how do you feel like they reconcile these two ideas, or even this idea that they're on one hand, an apolitical, right? We just want to talk about sports. We just want to talk about funny internet memes or drugs and alcohol, those sort of things with being more explicitly talking about voting for a preferred candidate, why you need to be more politically engaged. How do they reconcile those two sides of their brand?
Leon Yin: I think a lot of the draw of these shows and what they discuss is about the social hierarchy and where men fit in the social hierarchy. And in their view, men are at the bottom, right? Others have been given advantages and privileges and are viewed as more important than men. And so, I think a lot of what they come from is kind of attacking their perceived origins of where this comes from. Oftentimes, it is the Democratic establishment, the Democratic Party, and that kind of centers their narrative. You probably have something to add to that, Davey.
Davey Alba: Yeah. I just—One thing that we had been discussing a lot when we were looking through these podcasts and listening to them hours on end was that they have very contradictory messages. And I think it is true that it's quite—they say, on the one hand, that you must go out and vote. It is absolutely crucial. The future of the country depends on it. And on the other, elections are fraudulent, especially the 2020 election when their preferred candidate did not win. I think that it's—I don't really have a good explanation for it. It is true that it's contradictory and a lot of the rhetoric on these podcasts were like that. I think that the thing that ties it together is that it's all sort of just like shop talk. It's sort of like bantering with your buddies and they're not really thinking about how logical or coherent these messages are. And it's only once you start to scrutinize what they say that it really emerges that there are contradictions.
Leon Yin: I just want to add one thing if I could. One narrative we often heard, which connected the trust and mistrust of elections together, is that elections are fraudulent. But the only way to make sure that we can save democracy is by voting so much that they can't deny that Trump is the obvious candidate. We also saw that there's commonly a co-occurrence of discussion between different political topics and voting. So, for example, the border is wide open, and Democrats are flying immigrants into swing states, providing them with money and benefits to ensure their vote for the Democratic Party. And if this continues, swing states will no longer exist. Democracy will cease to exist. Therefore, we need to show up and vote. And so, these kinds of—I don't know if I'd call them gymnastics, but these kinds of linking of these two topics is—with voting, any topic voting is quite frequent and something that we observed often as well.
Cory Barker: And one of the things that you all mentioned that I keep coming back to and we've heard this more broadly, but this idea that the hosts of these podcasts and to some extent, hosts of podcast in general, like a big selling point, is the authenticity, right? That it is often a relaxed environment, conversational. You're going back and forth with all the co-hosts and producers and it's just a conversation. Is that authenticity a way for these hosts to embed in particular political messages?
Is that why the contradictions sort of work for the audience, or the audience doesn't really think about it because it's just part of the free flowing conversation and people have multiple conflicting ideas in their heads, and that allows them to go on both sides of an issue or crisscross what they're talking about all under the umbrella of, hey, we're just having a conversation with our buddies here?
Davey Alba: Yeah. I think there's something to that. These broadcasters, even before the election, have been extremely popular. Obviously, Joe Rogan, the number one podcaster in the country, is one of the shows that we looked at as part of this project. And our sources who are academics, and people who have followed this world for a while, they have said that this is—the way that these broadcasters sell themselves is they are part of your day. As you're in your car driving to work or you're at the gym, they're already in your ear. They're so reliable. You can turn them on anytime you want and just get their take on whatever's going on in the world right now. And so that trust and that reliability is a really effective base from which to talk about other things. And what we saw in our investigation was that it was an effective jumping off point for talking about politics, and political topics, and topics that got people fired up to vote in this last election.
Cory Barker: I want to go back to something I should have asked at the beginning. Can you talk a little bit about your process? What shows you decided to review? How you reviewed them? Checking off themes along the way? How did you and your team do this?
Leon Yin: I think it started on election night when Dana White had shouted out several people who I'd never heard of. And it turns out that these men are part of a—I won't call him a network, but they are part of kind of a growing number of politically discussing podcasts and streamers. And here are the criteria we looked at. So, the style of the show, they're prominently long-form and unedited interviews, often lasting for hours at a time. The guests include President Trump over the past two years. There's at least one million subscribers on YouTube. And so, we cared about size, they had to be large. And the audience is primarily men, according to demographic data that we are able to get from sources. And so, we looked at the last two years of videos that they uploaded. And so that was—How much was that? About 2002 videos. And from those videos, we watched or looked at metadata to gather every guest that they had, or at least we tried, aspirationally, we tried to get. I think we did a pretty thorough job. And then we also want to know what they discussed. But 2,002 videos is a lot to review. And so, for a subset of 603 videos that had at least one million views, these are highly viewed videos, we downloaded the transcripts. We got them transcribed, and then we searched them for keywords based on political topics that we had seen were frequently discussed from watching hundreds of hours of this. And so, we reviewed every single passage that we flagged for its relevance to each of these political topics. And then we rewatch them, and rewatch them, and rewatch them to make sure we got it right and to get the best ones to show within our story.
Cory Barker: If you're just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I’m Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: And I’m Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: We’re talking with Bloomberg journalists Davey Alba and Leon Yin about how prominent podcasters have become the go-to information source for young American men.
Matt Jordan: You mentioned in the article a lot of the themes that these things share. For instance, a strategy for making victims among the producers of content, right? They know that their audience kind of men as victims is something they share in similar. I was wondering what other themes seem to overlap with these shows, that kind of male aggression is actually a good thing, or that you shouldn't feel bad about having these very kind of man-centered worldview. What other themes do these programs share?
Davey Alba: When we started off the project, we just started by listening and trying to see what themes emerged. And we identified several themes that kept being repeated, including war, transgender identity, economics, voting. Gosh, I should pull up the list—
Leon Yin: Immigration.
Davey Alba: —Immigration. Yeah. Vaccine skepticism. And these topics all seem to cohere around the idea of men sort of falling down the social hierarchy because of the Democratic agenda. There's a sense of this is not the way the world should work, and that there are powers beyond them that are making it so. So, I think that's sort of the thing that ties the topics together.
Leon Yin: Yeah. And we always talk about this kind of archetype of the fallen man, the challenger, the underdog. So oftentimes, we'll have people on who have been kind of publicly cast aside or canceled, right? And they say, well, this space is—Cancel culture doesn't exist here. You can say whatever you want. This person, this man right here, he's actually a legend, right? You're told that he shouldn't—he's a bad guy, but you know what? He's actually a really good guy. The people who are saying he's bad, they're the bad guys. They've done everything and way worse. And then who is the ultimate fallen man at this time? It's Donald Trump. He was at the top, and then seemingly disgraced. Who can represent these ideals and has the power to flip the social hierarchy back to where it should be? It's Donald Trump. And so, it's only natural that this kind of aligned and occurred the way it did.
Matt Jordan: One of the things that I just talking to students and talking to young people, I have a 17-year-old son who listens to a lot of these YouTubers, is the idea that they really get to know somebody, right? That the long-talk format of this is one of the things that is seemingly to me seems the most potent. And is it mostly just to design to create a vibe? You always hear that verb used in relation to podcasts. We're just vibing or whatnot. Is that what that—As opposed to say we're going to give you information, we're going to give you stuff that you need to function in a democracy. Is it just saying we're going to chill and have some vibes?
Leon Yin: Absolutely. I mean, I think it's just like you're trying—they're trying—This kind of format lends itself to peeling away kind of professional, like veneer of who we are and to get to who's the so-called like core, the gooey center of who a guest is. And I think it's especially hard for journalists because we're taught—we can only say certain things when we're representing a thing. And I think the same is likely true for politicians. And so, it's a very difficult to vibe at that level if you're a certain professional or have certain values.
Davey Alba: Yeah. I mean, I think I would add that this feeds into the contradictory nature of these shows that we were talking about earlier. They present their guests as this is the only way you can hear the unvarnished take of these guests, including political figures and candidates. But at the same time, there isn't a lot of pushback, or fact checking, or information from the outside that these guests are confronted with. It's just this way of letting them go on and on about whatever happens to be on their mind, or why you should—why they're a strong political candidate or whatever. And journalists, for better or worse, are constrained by ethics and the sort of journalistic code of using facts to not let someone just go on unedited to challenge them with additional information and context. And that paradoxically works against journalists when in this kind of format. So, yeah, I think that lends itself to the contradictory nature of these shows. The guests are allowed to just go on and on, but you're not getting the context that maybe journalists would bring to the fore.
Leon Yin: In other words, professionally, we cannot vibe.
Cory Barker: Well, that's actually leads into what I was going to ask you. I mean, I think we've hit so many times that the authenticity, the vibing of these shows is what helps them do so well, and reach people, and maybe change people's minds as far as a particular election or voting at all. Outside research or surveys show that Gen Z and younger folks, what they want from their news, or their journalism is authenticity. That comes up even before, like, factual, right? So, you all both talked about how journalists are trapped by the ethics and the processes of journalism, but is there anything that journalism or individual journalists can learn from these types of shows to potentially cover the news or cover politics, specifically in a way that appeals to a younger audience who's more predisposed to consume content like this?
Davey Alba: Yeah. I mean, I think that we're starting to see a push from newsrooms to meet audiences where they are, including on these platforms. I think it's quite an uphill battle because of all the entrenched beliefs about the media ecosystem that already exist. But I think that there is an important point here that journalists can try to present the information that they gather on these platforms. And I think importantly, not to talk down to their audiences, not to present their stories and reporting as superior in a way to really try to relate to audiences and try to find commonalities. And that I think is something that the media industry writ large needs to work on quite a bit. But it is something that is extremely effective, as we've seen with this network and something that we as journalists can learn from.
Matt Jordan: One description I've heard of this universe, or this kind of media sphere is that it's a 360-degree wraparound, meaning making machine. So, whereas journalists are going to give you here's some context to something, here's some information, here's maybe a pull quote from the left, pull quote from the right, they're not going to tell you what it makes. Whereas in this sphere of things, everything is plugged into existing narratives, and it just cranks out, meaning that is tied to already existing narratives, or dispositions, or stereotypes, or whatnot. That's very difficult for journalists to compete with in terms of what audiences seem to crave, which is to go back to some uses and gratifications. This seems to be appealing to many who feel dispossessed and who want things plugged into that narrative, right? That they—No matter what the topic is, it seems like it's going to fit into that wrap around universe.
Leon Yin: I mean, I think that that's why a lot of these channels are so appealing is because they tell you, here's what's going on, here's my take, which is our take. This is the team's take. You've joined the team. This is what the team thinks about this. For journalists, it is just not as fun. We have to do so much more work than say—We basically can't say, here's our take on this. We have to say, here's what the data says, or here are what sources close to the matter are saying. And so, it's a very different—the place where our authority comes from is very different. Ours is slower typically. It requires more work.
Davey Alba: Yeah. I really like that shorthand explanation, 360-degree wraparound. I think that really is on point for describing this. I think that in another life, when I was a misinformation reporter, there was this idea of a conspiracy tent and that was used to describe something like QAnon, which was extremely popular during the pandemic. And the idea is no matter what happens in the world, you can just keep adding to this narrative that you can keep growing the world that you already believe in. And I think that's a lot of what's going on here too. I think that there are half-truths in this universe of podcasters and also straight up misinformation and falsehoods. But, yeah, the cohesive glue around all of it is the idea that men are a disaffected group and there are things you can do to sort of climb back to power, and that is the correct social order of things. And anything that gets in the way of that is worth resisting against. Yeah. So, it's interesting. I mean, we talk about what this means. When we were doing the story, we didn't want it to just be retroactive, like, here's what happened during the election. We wanted to spin it forward and show how this network has a really strong hold on a demographic group right now and that people are really primed to act on the messages that are distributed among these podcasters.
Cory Barker: What do you all project the role of this unofficial network of podcasts to be now that Trump is back in office and the dynamics have shifted a little bit? Are they going to be part of the conventional media pool in DC at all? How are these shows going to fit into a new dynamic from within this new administration?
Davey Alba: Well, we started off the article by noting that Joe Rogan was in the capitol rotunda as Trump was sworn in as president. And we ended the article with a quote from Trump on one of these shows saying that, in a show with the Nelk Boys, the host was saying, we'll do the next one in the White House and Trump agrees. He says, yep, we'll do it. And so, I think that the role of these podcasters in the Trump administration will be consensus building. I think that as Trump rolls out executive order after executive order, these shows build support for his agenda. And I think we will see how Trump takes them as members of the media that are not constrained by journalistic ethics. And how that will play out, I think we'll see. Many of these podcasters have already been credentialed to be in press briefings. And, yeah, the next few months will show the power of these hosts.
Matt Jordan: Davey and Leon, thank you so much for joining us. And we really appreciate you talking with us about this important growing part of our media ecosystem.
Davey Alba: Thanks so much for having us.
Leon Yin: Our pleasure, thanks.
Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guests were Davey Alba and Leon Yin, both reporters for Bloomberg. To learn more and to hear an extended version of this interview with additional content, download the podcast at wherever you subscribe to podcasts or at news-over-noise -dot-org. I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
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Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
