3d ago

The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces

www.mediamatters.org The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces

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 popul...

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2d ago

The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces

www.mediamatters.org /google/right-dominates-online-media-ecosystem-seeping-sports-comedy-and-other-supposedly

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Just go to comments on literally any YouTube… so ~~fowl~~ foul
- Most of those comments are bots. Moderation on YouTube is atrocious.
- I try to duck out of any comment thread before it gets nasty. So about 2 comments in.
  Edit: Potential pun thread ruined by reddwarf
  
  I feel like the comments are almost always discussions I can't add to or really stupid people. I want to believe that right-leaning people have made the Internet a place where conservative children have free reign of the comments section, but I don't really know any other way. I hope that one day, the sites we peruse won't be so ~~hornbill~~ horrible.
- So the comment sections are packed with birds then eh? 😃
  But yeah, the language and attitudes in youtube comments are indeed quite...foul.
  Had to do it.... 😁

Now remove all of the fake users and bots, which make up over half of active users on social media platforms.

What comedy are the right making? Comedy takes skill to write and deliver and their idea of jokes is just punching down on people without any punchline. Something that anyone can do by just being an asshole.
- I hate to say it but I enjoy Kill Tony and it's one of the most popular weekly stand up podcasts currently. Tony himself is unabashedly right wing, and the show is/was funded, or produced, by Joe Rogan.

Keep in mind, these are almost certain to be the same people who complain about how political everything is these days. What they mean is that they don't want to see leftist/progressive memes, but they're fine shifting the Overton widow to the right.

And most of these "left" shows are basically DNC mouthpieces who hate anyone to the left of them (looking at you Cenk)...shows how hard it is to grow an audience without being backed by --and thus narrative driven by --corporate interests.
- I was gonna say... Labeling TYT as left these days is a bit of a stretch.
  
  Yeah that raised some eyebrows for me. They may not be out calling for the extermination of anyone who doesn't fit the mold but thats the only leftist view they support.

I think it's worrisome to see the graphic, but the graphic also is strangely limited and the numbers aren't clear whether they are combined totals across platforms.
Presumably traditional media that has an online presence is excluded on purpose, but it's not clear why having a traditional media presence should negate the total online-only viewership. E.g., Daily Show with 35m+ across different social platforms? Colbert with 15m+? John Oliver with 10m+? It makes it feel like this is ragebait.
- Across platforms — YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — right-leaning online shows accounted for roughly 82% of the total following of the online shows we assessed.
  Yeah, it kinda seems like they focused on places already known for having right leaning algorithms. I would be curious to see what, for instance, NPRs numbers are in comparison.

Comedy? Did they mean self-inflating shoulder clapping racist mysogynist guffawing?

It’s because they fucking own all of the infrastructure and social media services. Jesus it’s pretty fucking obvious

It is a crime that Thom Hartmann isn't more popular. The dude still regularly hosts Bernie Sanders and pretty much called everything that is happening today going back at the end of the Bush Administration. He might be the most prescient and informed guy on Earth. At the very least he pays attention to a lot of the moving parts within government and makes pretty good calls about what is going down.

I mean, let's be real here, most people on the left are either like us, on niche platforms that dont do influencers, or are on TikTok/Bluesky, and once again, having an actual influencer following is difficult on those platforms. The leftist influencers that do exist are either extremely controversial or like singing to the choir and have a very tribalist mindset that keeps people who may be willing to listen out.

All I get from this is that right-wingers are more likely to be so stupid that they rely on somebody else to tell them what to think.

I’ll believe Joe Rogan and comedians like Theo Von (who I grew up with, incidentally) have a big audience but who the fuck listens to all those other people? Podcasts aren’t like the AM radio of yore where people listened to Rush Limbaugh and then just passively listened to whomever was next. Most conservatives I know who are into talk radio listen to sports stuff like Bobby Hebert bitching about the Saints to calm down after a loss.
ESPN radio parodied it so maybe my experience is different. https://youtu.be/lb-FL5j3FTU
- It looks like a lot of these are people mostly on YouTube so they will be passively listening to whatever auto-play picks for them next.
  The main audience for these isn't the boomer conservative listening to talk radio on his way home from work. These are younger men listening to it in the background while they play video games. Hell they have asmongold on here and from what I can remember he was just a WoW streamer a couple years ago.
  
  I went to summer camp and high school with Theo Von Kurnatowski and he’s a good dude. I took Art III with him and he wrote poetry. He’s probably the same person in private now but all the incentives in the “talk radio” podcast industry are to be the next Joe Rogan.

I’d be interested in seeing one of these for the U.K.
- @SouthEndSunset @silence7 supposedly Joe Rogan is the most popular here, too. This article claims to have the top 25. I'd say there are a few more lefties higher up in here https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-top-25-podcasts-in-the-uk-for-q4-2024/

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