The role of podcasts in Donald Trump’s victory cannot be overlooked

Opinion

Judging by the numbers from Trump’s podcast interviews, there is a risk that politicians could increasingly bypass the tough accountability in broadcast interviews in favour of softball sessions with sympathetic podcasters.

US president Donald Trump never fails to surprise and some of the media coverage of his activities equally never fails to surprise, from criticising Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for asking for missiles to threats to remove the broadcasting licence of CBS to the chaos in world markets caused by the inept introduction of tariffs.

And so it goes on in a divided country and a divided media.

To Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Trump is not going to back down on tariffs and is going to use the money to replace income tax, whereas PBS, which must be concerned about its funding, sees mainly disruption and damage.

Meanwhile, the abiding question remains: how did Trump win the 2024 election and how did he persuade more than 77m Americans to vote for him?

Poll errors

The reasons are many and various, but some are set out in a new book — of which I’m co-editor — called Pandering to Populism: Journalism and Politics in a Post-Truth Age.

Several big clues come from the work of pollsters and journalist Angela Antetomaso, who covered Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally by joining the crowd rather than using the press entrance.

Former YouGov president Peter Kellner unsurprisingly defends the role of the polls, with virtually all saying the race was too close to call. In the end, they got the vote wrong by an average of 1.4% — something that some journalists tend to forget is well within the margin of error.

But there is a detail that is revealing about significant sections of the US electorate.

According to Kellner, in the last three US presidential elections, the polls underestimated the Trump vote because they reached too many graduates, who tended to oppose Trump, and too few voters who only completed high school — a group who was more likely to support him.

Then there was the impact of disenchanted citizens who were disengaged from the political process.

Many of them avoided pollsters altogether and only came out to vote when they were able to choose leaders — such as Trump — who set out to punish mainstream politicians and the policies they so disliked.

Elsewhere, by joining in with the crowd filing in to the famous stadium in the heart of Democratic New York, Antetomaso was able to get a sense of a surprisingly broad coalition of supporters that Trump had assembled — old and young, black and hispanic, as well as what would be seen as his traditional white working-class support. It was a revealing insight from old-fashioned reporting.

The role of podcasts

It is the battle of the podcasts that may have been crucial, though, according to  Max Modell, a PhD candidate at Cardiff’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture.

Just as Trump led the way with Twitter in 2016, either he or his astute advisors spotted the importance of podcasts.

Trump did no less than 14 of them, attracting 124m views on YouTube on the likes of The Joe Rogan Experience, Logan Paul’s Impaulsive and The Ben Shapiro Show.

Those involved were comedians or celebrities rather than journalists. Trump, who pulled out of a 60 Minutes interview, got an easy, uncritical ride and, crucially, was able to reach a vital demographic: young males.

On Rogan’s show, Trump got 46m views, beating the previous record for broadcast political interviews.

By contrast, Kamala Harris did only five podcasts, mainly aimed at her likely supporters: young women and black men.

Significantly, a planned appearance on Rogan’s podcast never happened, at least in part because of conditions set by her team.

“Trump capitalised on Rogan’s platform and non-hostile interview style without resistance, and Harris was left talking on podcasts which did not extend beyond her existing political base,” Modell says.

Prime source of political communication

The 2024 election took podcasts from being on the political periphery and turned them into a prime source of political communication.

There is an enduring problem here for broadcast political interviews of the future. Candidates could increasingly, at least in the US, bypass the tough accountability in interviews in favour of softball sessions with sympathetic podcasters.

This could help reinforce the deep divisions in US society.

Modell suggests that, for the political broadcast not to slide into irrelevance, broadcasters will have to become less confrontational and adopt something of the more relaxed, informal style of podcasters.

The choice is unlikely to be so stark in the UK, where serious journalists will still ask tough questions on The News Agents and The Rest is Politics.

By the next general election, however, such podcasts could be increasingly vying with the BBC, ITV and Sky for some of the heavyweight political interviews.

If there is any doubt about the increasing competition between broadcasters and podcasters, it was dispelled recently by YouTube. Not only are podcasts being increasingly viewed on big-screen TVs, but the numbers are eye-watering.

In February, YouTube announced that it now had more than 1bn monthly active podcast viewers watching more than 400m hours of content a month in their living rooms.

There can be little doubt that traditional broadcasters are going to face increasing competition for eyeballs and could also face increasing battles to retain top talent.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.

Snoddy co-edited the new Pandering to Populism: Journalism and Politics in a Post Truth Age, published by Bite Sized Books on 8 May.