In a special video edition of The Journal, WSJ's Ryan Knutson sits down with Ben Shapiro of The Ben Shapiro Show and Preet Bharara of Stay Tuned with Preet in the Spotify mobile studio in Washington DC. We discuss how new media has shaped politics and how politics has shaped a new era of media. Further Listening: - Corporate America’s Embrace of Trump 2.0 - The End of Facebook’s Content Moderation Era Photo: Uncredited Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Welcome to a special edition of the Journal Podcast. We're in Washington, D.C. today on Inauguration Weekend, and we're here to talk about the rise of podcasting and the impact it had on the 2024 election. I'm your host, Ryan Knutson, and I'm joined today by two other podcast hosts, Ben Shapiro and Preet Bharara. Thanks so much for being here. Great to be here. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
So you guys both sit on opposite sides of the political aisle. Ben, you're one of the most well-known conservative voices out there. You were previously editor-at-large of Breitbart. You co-founded The Daily Wire. Now you have one of the top conservative podcasts with The Ben Shapiro Show. Preet, you are a former U.S. attorney appointed under President Obama.
You served as chief counsel for Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer. And on your podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet, you also make no secret about your politics. But I want to talk about the thing you have in common, which is that you're both podcasters in the podcast industry. So the 2024 election, as I'm sure you've heard, has been dubbed by some the podcast election.
Both candidates spent a lot of time going on podcasts. Trump appeared on at least 20, including the Ben Shapiro show, and Kamala Harris went on at least eight. So I want to put this question just to both of you. What role do you think this medium played in the 2024 election?
I mean, I can take this first. I think it played a huge role. I mean, it granted access to, for President Trump, places that he wouldn't have been able to reach before through legacy media without the same sort of filter. I think it was a big mistake for Kamala Harris not to take advantage of that a little bit more.
Obviously, it was very controversial when she decided that she was going to have a negotiation with Joe Rogan and Rogan wasn't going to have her on, then he was going to have her on, then he wasn't going to have her on. I think that President Trump actually broke through a lot of perceptions about him as a person because in
a long form podcast, you get the opportunity to sort of delve into what people are more. You get past the surface very often. And for President Trump, I think that was a really, really big thing. Plus, of course, the audience for podcasts is significantly younger than the audience for traditional media. So if you're talking about legacy media, legacy media is
If you're talking cable TV, it's probably 50 and up largely at this point. And if you're talking about the podcast industry, it's largely 40 and under.
And so I think that one of the big shifts in this election was how younger voters actually moved toward President Trump a marked number largely because they were exposed to him in a way that they hadn't been through kind of the short clips and the political framing.
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