This site has previously noted that, despite their protestations about protecting democracy, today’s left really hate our Freedom of Speech. Media Matter for America, a thoroughly left wing group, posted on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏, which is part of my Freedom of Speech! — a bubble diagram and link to their article “The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces“. Very unsurprisingly, Amy McGrath Henderson, the twice-failed Kentucky congressional candidate who once stated, in a fundraiser not in the Bluegrass State, “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” said of the graph, “This is way more important than we want to admit.”
The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces
A new Media Matters analysis found 9 out of the 10 top online shows assessed are right-leaning
Written by Kayla Gogarty | Friday, March 14, 2025 | 7:00 AM EDT
As Americans increasingly get their news from online shows and streamers, the influence of this media ecosystem becomes more prominent — and Media Matters has found that the most popular of this content is overwhelmingly right-leaning.
In a new study, Media Matters assessed the audience size of popular online shows — podcasts, streams, and other long-form audio and video content regularly posted online. To do so, we gathered data on the number of followers, subscribers, and views across streaming platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, Twitch, and Kick) and social media platforms that are used to amplify and promote these shows (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok). Apple Podcasts does not publicly provide follower counts on its platform, so it was not included in the audience data.
This analysis was based on 320 online shows with a right-leaning or left-leaning ideological bent. We found that right-leaning online shows dominate the ecosystem, with substantially larger audiences on both politics/news shows and supposedly nonpolitical shows that we determined often platformed ideological content or guests.
Think about that: Kayla Gogarty and Media Matters are complaining about the audience sizes of “right-leaning” podcasts are significantly greater than they are for “left-leaning” ones. But the audiences for these broadcasts/cablecasts/podcasts are the result of free individuals taking their individual choices, of people exercising their freedom of speech in the freedom to choose to what to listen or read or not to listen or read.
In August 2024 — just a few months before Election Day — Pew found that about 1 in 5 Americans said they regularly get news from influencers on social media. The weekly reach of large online shows is also reportedly better than that of many cable networks.
Again, if more people are listening to Joe Rogan than Rachel Maddow, that would be their free choice, would it not?
With Americans increasingly getting their news from these sources, they played a significant role in the 2024 election. By appearing on these shows ahead of the 2024 election, Trump reached an audience of 23.5 million American adults in an average week — compared to Harris’ 6.4 million — according to Edison Podcast Metrics.
That’s pretty much what Donald Trump did in 2016, albeit primarily with Twitter, and that’s why the previous (mis)management of Twitter banned him when he left office the first time. They claimed that it was due to the January 6th Capitol kerfuffle, but it would not have been done if President Trump hadn’t been very persuasive to millions of Americans.
If President Trump reached an audience of 23.5 million adults in an average week, while Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff reached just a hair more than a third of that, doesn’t that mean that fewer Americans wanted to listen to her?
Journalists have started to highlight the asymmetry of the online media ecosystem. Bloomberg watched and analyzed over 2,000 videos — nearly 1,300 hours of footage — from nine prominent YouTubers, including Adin Ross, Joe Rogan, Logan Paul, Theo Von, and Patrick Bet-David, and found that “above all, the broadcasters described American men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power,” though “none of the broadcasters style themselves as political pundits.”
The American left have been upset with the loss of their “gatekeeping” function, their ability to refuse to publish views they disliked, beginning with Rush Limbaugh’s hugely successful, syndicated radio show in 1988, and then expanding with the advent of online blogging. The biggest event occurred in 2004, when the bloggers at Powerline and Little Green Footballs spotted CBS News use of forged documents to try to sway the election to Senator John Kerry (D-MA). That was a time when high definition televisions were in their infancy, yet those bloggers were able to spot the differences between the proportional spacing in the documents shown on television from the standard spacing on supposedly typed documents from 1973, differences that somehow, some way, escaped the ‘experts’ CBS used to authenticate the docs. It’s almost as though they didn’t find what they didn’t want to find.
It was simply CBS piling on their bias on election night, when Dan Rather and Ed Bradley were visibly upset that the younger President Bush was defeating Mr Kerry, Mr Rather asking his minions several times if there was any scenario under which the Senator from Massachusetts could somehow pull out a victory as more states were being won by the President.
Now, thanks to that internet thingy that Al Gore invented, voices which could never be published or broadcast before now can get published or broadcast; whether they draw readers or an audience is up to their persuasiveness and talent, and perhaps a bit of luck as well.
And that today’s left cannot stand.