By Terence Smith
Of all the extraordinary numbers that came out of the comedy show/debacle that was the 2024 Presidential election, one obscure statistic caught my eye: 20 percent of Americans — one-in-five, get their news these days from digital news influencers, according to the Pew Research Center.
Think about that. One in five of us drinking the fire hose of unverified, misleading, frequently vicious, occasionally racist, accidentally comical, sometimes accurate reporting that proliferates online. Much of this appears on the social platform X. Very little of it holds up to scrutiny. But 20 percent of us get our news that way and did so during this election.
Add to that the hugely popular podcasts like Joe Rogan’s self-indulgent, near-endless ramblings and you can see that the media landscape today bears little or no resemblance to what it was a decade or two ago. Some 47-million Americans listened to all or part of Donald Trump’s three-hour star turn on the Joe Rogan show shortly before voting. Kamala Harris spent hundreds of millions on advertising during her 107-day campaign, and did some social media, but chose to skip Joe Rogan and others. Understandable, but self-defeating when it comes to attracting the votes of younger men.
So, ours is a world today where Elon Musk on X and others too numerous to mention provide the “facts.” Not The New York Times, not PBS, but influencers. The net result is that the burden of sorting truth from fiction falls upon the the viewer or listener. They become their own “gatekeepers,” responsible for sorting out facts from nonsense. Sometimes they get it right — common sense helps — but not always.
The consequences can be enormous, as the Pew Research Center and others have concluded.