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

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.

  • unexposedhazard
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    19 hours ago

    They used subscriber count as a metric which is really stupid.

    Peterson for example shows up with 23M for his total social media presence. His YT channel has 8.64M subscribers but he has become completely irrelevant and his videos average around 200k views with some exceptions.

    View count is all that matters here if we are talking about political influence.

    • Jhuskindle@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Not only that but we know for a fact subscriber count can be bought. X uses hundreds of thousands of bot accounts to fuel whatever they are in the mood for. It doesn’t really mean much.

    • metaStatic@kbin.earth
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      19 hours ago

      Also Rogan more than likely has a fucking ton of idle left wing subs. Dudes show was fucking great before he moved to Texas.

      • GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        He sure does! And he’s left-leaning because he was born half-White half-Black during Apartheid. His autobiography is literally titled “Born a Crime”, and it talks about how utterly fucked and dystopian apartheid South Africa was. How he spent his life not only becoming a master of code-switching and comedy to survive, but fight back.

        He’s a badass. The man has my respect for life.

      • unexposedhazard
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        18 hours ago

        This chart includes Youtube, Spotify, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok