Friday, September 1, 2017

Report: Left-Wing Talk Is Here, But Not On The Radio

Fueled by a feverish distaste for Donald Trump and a distrust of mainstream media, a wave of liberal podcasts helmed by anti-Trump hosts are reaching millions of politically active liberals increasingly seeking them out for both news and direction.

At least 1,000 political podcasts — most appearing to have a liberal or anti-Trump bent — have launched since the 2016 election, according to statistics provided to VICE News by the podcast hosting and analytics company Raw Voice. That’s a 35 percent increase in nine months. During the same period following the 2008 and 2012 elections, the spike in political podcasts was only 9 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

Shows like Chapo Trap House, Girl Friday, Pod Save America, Trumpcast, Unpresidented, Love Over Hate, The Tarfu Report, Delete Your Account, and many others are mobilizing small, energetic audiences, some of which voluntarily pay subscription fees to support their shows, even though they could listen for free.

Unlike the news podcasts of NPR and the New York Times, these take an ideological slant, unapologetically trying to facilitate political action against both Trump and the Democratic establishment.

The rise of these liberal podcasts has coincided with a so-called podcast renaissance.  Monthly podcast listeners in the U.S. have doubled since 2013 to an estimated 67 million, with 42 million listening weekly, according to a recent survey by Edison Research.

Those listeners are more likely to be college-educated, younger, and live in urban areas — a prime audience for Democrats. The exact audience for each episode and each podcast is not publicly available and is only self-reported, which has made some advertisers wary. More exact numbers will likely be coming in the future as Apple, which has the most popular podcast player in its built-in iOS app, announced this past June that they would begin providing analytics tools for podcasters.

Read More Now

No comments:

Post a Comment