Saagar Enjeti tells a story from his time as the co-host of The Hill’s Rising, in which he described the seniority system for House of Representatives Committee assignments.
“I did a segment this is all I said: ‘Maxine Waters will be the chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee till the day she dies,’” he recounts. “So her fucking staff called the boss of The Hill and said I issued a death threat against Maxine Waters! I shit you not. They said I was threatening her life.”
He pauses. “They don’t call you. They call your boss’s boss. And here’s the thing, she’s the chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee. And Hill reporters need to be able to talk to her. They know exactly whom to threaten.”
This is how legacy media works. People who work in big institutions end up having to stay on a leash, avoiding even accidental offense, lest their co-workers lose access to important people.
“My natural inclination is to say, ‘Go fuck yourself,’” Saagar explains. He didn’t that time, but, adding that he’s talking not about Maxine Waters but her “chickenshit chief of staff,” he doesn’t have to hold back anymore, because he’s “not off the record anymore, bitch.”
After a groundbreaking and enormously successful run at The Hill, Krystal and Saagar have followed the iconic path of a certain former rock music podcast, going solo by launching a subscriber-supported show called Breaking Point that debuts next week.
The longtime friends-of-show are true pioneers in the modern media age. At a time when virtually every other political discussion show is aimed exclusively at one political demographic or another, their Rising program represented literally the only mainstream effort to speak to all of America.
Their core concept, which roughly speaking featured a conservative (Enjeti) and a liberal (Ball) discussing politics in a non-combative fashion, was shockingly successful. In addition to putting out a hit book, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising, Krystal and Saagar consistently cranked out huge numbers — in their last month at The Hill, they outpaced CNN programming in terms of viewers.
And yet, their insistence on retaining editorial independence resulted in parting on awkward terms with their former employers. We had a great talk with them both, not just about their new show, but about the irrationality of mainstream media business, and the weirdly petty ending with The Hill.
Krystal, for instance, described The Hill’s weird fatwa on all collaborators with her own podcast with Kyle Kulinski, Krystal, Kyle & Friends — including Kulinski himself.
Kulinski was a consistently strong guest for Rising, and helped the show especially in its early stages. “He always would deliver numbers,” Krystal said. “But once I started doing the podcast with Kyle, he was banned from appearing on Rising.” The Hill even placed a de facto ban on Katie, a regular Rising guest, appearing on Krystal, Kyle & Friends.
This is just the beginning of a long and candid discussion of the looniness of the modern media business with two of its more successful innovators. That, plus a colorful talk about Barack Obama’s late-night droning habits, flag-stealing Republicans, and the brilliance of scientists who are able to secure funding to shoot debatably cute micro-animals into piles of sand. All this and more, on this week’s free edition of Useful Idiots.
VERY EXCELLENT, poetic moments. Ave atque vale, James Lewis aka Charles Masson (1800-1853)
Classicist Edmund Richardson tells the astonishing story of a British deserter from the East India Company who embarked on a quest to find a lost city of Alexander the Great.
I'm not sure which is more appalling: Kirwin's sophistry in this matter, or that a semi-major university (Clemson) has given her a tenure-track position.
This month, Josh Kaufman and I talk to Claire Kirwin about whether things are objectively good or bad, or whether it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Professor Kirwin is a fan of peanut butter cup ice cream, and Josh and I are fans of mint chocolate chip. Is there an objective fact of the matter about whether either is good, or whether one is better than the other? Or are we all just expressing our preferences, i.e. doing nothing more than providing information about ourselves? Can goodness be ‘in’ ice cream, or is it just ‘in’ the person eating it? If we think peanut butter cup ice cream can be objectively good, is that somehow disrespectful to people who prefer something else? Does everyone have a moral right to have their ice cream preferences respected by others? The example may be somewhat frivolous, but it ties into lots of similar questions that many of us think of as more weighty, like whether classical music can be objectively great/terrible, or whether a given behavior can be morally objectively great/terrible.
Value realism is a catch-all expression for the belief that all of these things are objectively in the objects themselves. Peanut butter cup ice cream deliciousness is in the ice cream itself, not in the person experiencing it, and classical music greatness is in the music itself, not in the audience member listening to it at Carnegie Hall. Claire Kirwin espouses value realism across all of these cases, but we focus on ice cream in this episode because, uh, hopefully it’s a little less of a hot button thing than some other topics. We’d like to be able to talk about it without raising an undue amount of ire.
Kirwin’s two main ideas are as follows. First, you might wonder how the heck there could even be some sort of objective deliciousness in ice cream itself. Doesn’t everyone disagree about that? Her general line of response is that there can be experts in the flavor of ice cream, and if there can be experts in the flavor of ice cream, then there must be something about ice cream that they’re especially good at picking up. Maybe you’re a master chef, or maybe you’re a food critic, or maybe you’ve just eaten more ice cream than most people. Whatever. There are lots of different ways of being an expert. The point is that if you understand a lot about ice cream it can sensitize you to little details in its flavor that other people haven’t been trained to notice.
Her follow-up idea is quite interesting. She argues that when one person prefers mint chocolate chip ice cream and another prefers peanut butter cup ice cream, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the two people disagree. It could very well be that peanut butter cup ice cream is objectively good, and mint chocolate chip ice cream is also objectively good. It’s just that one person only has the expertise required to discern the tastiness of the one flavor, and the other person only has the expertise required to discern the tastiness of the other flavor. So saying that some flavor you have expertise in is objectively good is actually potentially remaining neutral about other flavors—at least the ones you feel like you don’t have a good grip on.
Join the three of us as we entertain a peaceful solution to the ice cream wars!
VERY EXCELLENT. Note however that it's only excerpts from the Maté-Kilimnik interview, and mostly a studious demolition of that part of the Russiagate hoax that focuses on Kilimnik.
In the last year, US government, intelligence, and Congressional bodies have accused former Paul Manafort aide Konstantin Kilimnik of being a "Russian intelligence officer" or "Russian influence agent" who passed secret Trump campaign polling data to Russia in 2016. The FBI has even issued a $250,000 reward for Kilimnik's arrest on a lowly witness tampering charge -- more than double the amount for six murderers on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
In exclusive audio excerpts, Konstantin Kilimnik talks to Aaron Maté about the explosive -- and evidence-free -- US government claims about him. Despite his supposed central role in the Trump-Russia saga, Kilimnik says that no US government investigator has ever contacted him. He believes it's his Russian passport, not any actual evidence, that put him in the US intelligence crosshairs.
To make the Russiagate narrative work, Kilimnik says, "they needed a f-----g Russian. I happen to be that f------g Russian."
Guest: Konstantin Kilimnik. Ukrainian-Russian political consultant and former aide to Paul Manafort. Wanted by the FBI on a $250,000 bounty for a witness tampering indictment in the Mueller investigation. Neither the FBI or Mueller probe ever contacted him.
Read more: https://mate.substack.com/p/accused-russian-spy-kilimnik-refutes
We’re joined by TrueAnon for a round table on Israel through two in-depth reading series. Can Americans have opinions on Israel and Palestine, despite it being outside our lived experiences? Is middle eastern peace calling out, siren-like, to Joe Biden? Find out inside.
Tickets to Chapo’s upcoming live show June 5th at the FRQNCY1 streaming festival here: https://frqncy.live/frqncy1
And hang out with Chris and Dan Boeckner watching some live music on Chapo’s twitch this saturday at twitch.tv/chapotraphouse
Jiacai Liu over at Keep Coding has an interesting post on the Emacs package system. The post is nominally about maintaining your Emacs configuration but is actually a quick overview on how the package system works.
The problems that he’s trying to solve is that of version control. Sometimes an update for a package will appear in Gnu ELPA or MELPA but will turn out to be broken. It’s pretty hard to recover from that so Jiacai uses the Git submodule system to help solve the problem.
In order to do that, he needs to manage the package configurations manually and that means understanding how the package system does it. Jiacai explains the autoload system and how the require command works.
If you’re a bit fuzzy on how package loading works, take a look at Jiacai’s post.
We had to speak with guest Aaron Maté of The Grayzone via Skype, because other platforms wouldn’t service his location — he was calling in from the capital city of our sanctioned enemy, Syria. What, you might ask, was Aaron Maté doing in Syria?
“I thought you guys weren’t supposed to talk about my real mission here,” he said, “which was to negotiate a co-host position for Useful Idiots for Bashar al-Assad.”
Put that in your conspiratorial pipe and smoke it, Oz Katerji! Our dream of making dictatorial podcast history lives! The last remaining stumbling block in negotiations — Assad is represented by William Morris, while Katie and I have different representation — is a trifle. This is gonna happen, haters.
Followers of Useful Idiots know that one of the original conceits of the show was that Katie and I would provide a forum for people shut out or shut down by the mainstream press. The very title, Useful Idiots, was a reference to the hot establishment insult of the time, deployed against those deemed unwitting “assets” of Vladimir Putin. Our very first guest, then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, was perhaps the most prominent American to be denounced as a “Useful Idiot.” Many other friends-of-show, from Glenn Greenwald to Chris Hedges, have worn the designation.
Perhaps no other figure in media, however, more perfectly represents the profile of the Useful Idiots guest than Aaron Maté. Known from his on-air work at Democracy Now! and from his writings at places like The Nation, the veteran journalist was one of the first to feel the effects of the point-and-shriek mania directed toward “Russiagate Denialists.” In the past years he’s probably done more than any one reporter to debunk Russiagate myths, and his most potent weapon has been doing the journalistic basics — reading public documents, and calling for comment.
In recent weeks, Aaron pulled off one of his biggest coups on that score, interviewing the current lynchpin of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, Konstantin Kilimnik. For those not familiar with the case, Kiliminik is a Russian citizen, living in Moscow, who was the focus of a recent Treasury Department statement accusing him of having “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” while working with the Trump campaign.
“Boom!” says Aaron, imitating Russiagaters. “Now we have our smoking gun.”
The humorous thing about this story is that, despite the supposed centrality of Kilimnik to the collusion theory, no American official ever interviewed him. Aaron did, and the contents of that interview raise a host of questions about the Trump-Russia collusion case. He describes that explosive interview in this episode.
Meanwhile, we go through the Four Food Groups, discuss the Democrats’ immigration policy and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conception of second-class citizenship, and wonder why there was never a rock band called Michelle Bachmann Turner Overdrive. All this, and more, on this week’s Useful Idiots.
Andy Zaltzman presents a look back at the week's headlines with guests Lucy Porter, Alice Fraser, Hugo Rifkind and Daliso Chaponda.
This week a certain select committee hearing and the inaugural FALSE or VERY FALSE round.
Written by Andy Zaltzman with additional material from Eleanor Morton, Rajiv Karia and Simon Alcock.
Producer: Richard Morris
Production Coordinator: Cherlynn Andrew-Wilfred
Sound Editor: Marc Willcox
A BBC Studios Production
EXCELLENT except for the usual CN conflation of poverty -> race -> racism, but ya learn to overllook this with CN just because they're (esp Johnson) so witty/insightful
In this public News Brief, we take a critical look at a recent wave of sensationalist "organized crime" "shoplifting epidemic" stories in national and Bay Area media and how they fit into a resurgent "Tough on Crime" narrative.
We are joined by Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, Director of Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.
not the great Grayling of yore :-( this is just recycled commonplace
In his new book, A.C Grayling tracks and summarises the advances that have been made in the fields of science, history and the mind but importantly he asks where is this new knowledge leading us?
Zogby interview (2nd segment, after OK banter) is excellent, Blumenthal interview truncated for patrons
Patreon only: Max Blumenthal on experiencing more antisemitism in Israel from Israeli Jews than anywhere else & the idiocy of Debra Messing. https://www.patreon.com/posts/51641714 Katie & Leslie talk pop culture, the death of Kentaro Miura, trolls, and Leslie's past cold weather naivety. Then, Arab-American Institute (https://twitter.com/AAIUSA) founder Jim Zogby (https://twitter.com/jjz1600) reflects on the state of affairs in Israel Palestine, the shift in the US political status quo, Netanyahu’s corruption trial, his wife's dirty laundry, how we got here & what’s next. Max Blumenthal also drops by to provide his take, as well as agree to be made aware of the dumpster fire that keeps on giving that is Debra Messing, which you can check out in full at Patreon.
Suzi talks to Pablo Abufom about the historic victory for progressives in the election held in Chile on May 15-16. This outcome would have been unimaginable just two years ago, after nearly fifty years of neoliberal governance, first under Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship until 1990, then the so-called center-left Concertación. We can thank the social protests of October 2019 for this epoch-making achievement, showing that mobilized popular forces could win against the long entrenched center and right. A key demand that emerged and united the protestors was for a new constitution to replace the fraudulently approved 1980 Pinochet Constitution which had cemented neoliberal, repressive rule against any attempt to create a more equitable society. That new constitution would not be written by members of the political class, but by delegates elected by the people, with gender parity and indigenous representation. Pablo Abufom was in the thick of the 2019 protest movement and spoke to us about it at the time. He returns to explain what has been won by the new left coalition Apruebo Dignidad in the elections, as well as the possible pitfalls that lay ahead.
starts good, but by halfway goes quite PC-snowflake
Contributor(s): Robert Newman, Professor Kieran Setiya, Dr Zoe Walker | We explore what’s philosophically interesting about comedy. Both have a lot in common: showing up the ordinary as odd, critiquing the status quo, hecklers… But can humour be a source of knowledge?
What does it tell us about how we interact with one another? What role does it play in our social and political life? And will we ruin the joke by explaining it?!
Meet our speakers and chair
Robert Newman (@mrrobnewman) is a comedian and author.
Kieran Setiya (@KieranSetiya) is Professor of Philosophy at MIT.
Zoe Walker is Lecturer in Philosophy at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Sarah Fine (@DrSJFine) is Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy at LSE and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London.
More about this event
The Forum for Philosophy (@forumphilosophy) hosts events exploring science, politics, and culture from a philosophical perspective.
Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEForum
Historian Marc Morris tackles some of the most common misconceptions about the Anglo-Saxon era
What do we get wrong about the Anglo-Saxon era? Marc Morris, author of The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, busts some of the most common misconceptions about the period, from the early fifth century through to the Norman Conquest.
THE SIMPSONS taught a generation to be skeptical of authority. And then, at some point, it stopped. We revisit one of the greatest television show with two of its greatest episodes - "Marge vs. the Monorail" and "Sideshow Bob Roberts" - before venturing into the Season 26 episode "The Musk Who Fell to Earth" with guest star (...sigh...) Elon Musk. PLUS: Netflix's Dirty Money, the shifting discourse on Israel-Palestine, and an airtight theory about what Kramer would be doing today.
In this public News Brief, we breakdown the most common anti-Palestinian tropes and why they're based on sophistry, ignorance, racism, or some combination of all three.
mostly good, except for pumping the loathesome Nikole Hannah-Jones
Emily Wilder, fired by AP after 16 days on the job. (photo: Angel Mendoza)
Emily Wilder had thought she’d hit it big. After interning at the Arizona Republic, she earned a newsroom assistant job at the Phoenix bureau of the Associated Press, starting May 3. It wouldn’t last long.
Several right-wing organizations, including the Federalist (5/19/21) and Washington Free Beacon (5/18/21) outlets, attacked the news service over Wilder’s previous affiliation with Students for Justice in Palestine, when she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. AP, which recently had its office in Gaza destroyed by Israeli missile fire, bowed to the pressure (Washington Post, 5/20/21).
The News Media Guild, the union representing AP staff, said it was investigating Wilder’s firing (Twitter, 5/20/21):
The company told the Guild that Wilder had violated the Social Media Policy that was negotiated with the union and by which all employees are required to comply. AP noted that the policy was specifically brought to her attention after her hiring, but did not specify which comments caused her termination. The Guild asked if the comments that caused her termination were posted before or after her hiring, and awaits a response.
This is a thin excuse from AP. Wilder told SFGate (5/20/21) that some of her past social media posts had been highlighted in a thread from the Stanford College Republicans, such as one calling Sheldon Adelson a “far-right, pro-Trump, naked mole rat–looking billionaire.” SFGate reported that “Wilder…said she would not have used such language today,” and that “not long after the thread started to gain steam on Twitter,” an AP editor told Wilder that “she would not get in trouble for her past activism and social media activity.” Wilder described her “firing as selective enforcement against those who have expressed criticisms of Israel.”
Wilder told FAIR in a phone interview that “to anyone with eyes and ears and brain,” the fact that her firing came after right-wing trolling “is no coincidence,” and that “it feels like it was a convenient opportunity to make me a scapegoat.” Wilder said that AP brass haven’t told her which of her posts were the reason for her firing, or what line she crossed. She noted that her views on Israel/Palestine were irrelevant to her work, which was entirely local. “I might have been one of the youngest employees at the AP,” she said, adding that her opinions as a “citizen, as a young Jewish woman, have nothing to do with the work that I’ve done.”
The first reaction of many supporters of Palestinian rights was that the firing was an example of just how eager and able right-wing organizations are to ruin the career of anyone who dares speak out about social justice in Israel/Palestine. Would someone who interned at AIPAC and/or shared memes from the IDF’s Twitteraccount be treated the same way? And it’s of course another example of hypocrisy: While the right talks a lot about fighting “cancel culture,” it is one of the biggest agitators for silencing speech it disagrees with (FAIR.org, 10/23/20), especially when it comes to Palestine.
This comes at the same time as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was denied a tenured position at the University of North Carolina school of journalism (Inside Higher Ed, 5/20/21), with the university’s board of trustees overruling the school’s hiring process. Given that much of the negative attention against Hannah-Jones comes from conservatives who focus on her role in the New York Times’ “1619 Project” (8/14/19), a feature that looked at US history through the lens of slavery, the event seems akin to what happened to Wilder—with the right essentially exercising veto power over hiring at prestigious institutions. These incidents aren’t outliers: Right-wing activists successfully forced the Times to fire an editor for “tweeting she had ‘chills’ at seeing Joe Biden’s plane land” (Guardian, 1/25/21), and the Guardian fired columnist Nathan Robinson for making a joke about US support for Israel (FAIR.org, 2/22/21).
But beyond the censorious power of the right, there’s something else in corporate journalism’s culture to blame here, and that is its obsession with “objectivity“—not just in coverage, but in the expectation that full-time journalists be completely neutral in the issues of the day.
Ideally, a news organization would not want its Jerusalem correspondent to have conflicts of interest while covering the Middle East conflict, although FAIR has found plenty of pro-Israel conflicts of interest at the New York Times (Extra!, 4/10, 5/12) and Washington Post (FAIR.org, 9/26/13). It isn’t uncommon for newsrooms to have rules about political correspondents not giving money to candidates (though these rules don’t necessarily apply to their corporate bosses—FAIR.org, 11/5/10).
The Washington Post recently told its staff about what behavior was acceptable off the clock. According to Washingtonian (5/3/21), the memo said, “Context matters: It would be fine to participate in a celebration at BLM Plaza but not a protest there, or attend a Pride gathering but not a demonstration at the Supreme Court.” The memo also said of DC statehood: “A shirt with the flag of the District of Columbia is fine. One supporting statehood would not be—that would be an expression of public advocacy on a matter we cover.”
In this case, AP hired a young woman who graduated from Stanford, perhaps the most prestigious American private university west of the Mississippi River. What kind of education should someone with worldly intentions receive in order to travel and report on the world? Someone who never debated in political science class? Someone who never had to have their views challenged? Someone who has never been motivated by passion to learn more and conduct research?
Pulitzer Prize–winner Nikole Hannah-Jones was denied a tenured position by the University of North Carolina board of trustees after right-wing attacks on her ideas.
Professional journalists have all sorts of backgrounds. New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers previously served in the Marine Corps, an experience that shaped how he has covered war and insurrection (New York Times, 6/23/20). It’s common for reporters to take a break by working in public relations, and then return to journalism. The point here is not that objectivity is wrong, but rather that it doesn’t truly exist. No one walks into a newsroom for a job without a worldview, or unsullied by affiliations with groups that might end up being newsworthy. Reporters should strive to get the facts right, talk to all sides, take a step back from a story and paint it fairly. But no one can be expected to be a robot even before their first day on the job.
Obviously, any news organization might have misgivings about having someone on staff with a past of promoting violent extremism—like a member of a white nationalist organization—or someone with a history of fringe conspiracism. There are disqualifying factors, but reasonable people should be able to recognize those exceptions. These days, college campuses pride themselves on their activist organizations, acknowledging that activism beyond the classroom is often part of education. As the Supreme Court noted in Regents v. Bakke, “The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth” through dialogue and debate. Employers like AP should want well-rounded recruits who have gone through that kind of dialogue.
But Wilder told FAIR that the vagueness of when such standards of objectivity apply meant these standards could be “asymmetrically imposed on certain journalists in a way that has censored and policed journalists before me.”
Wilder said she worried that her firing will dissuade “aspiring journalists who have opinions and have righteous outrage and want to channel that into storytelling,” and that AP damaged its mission and commitment to standards, because it “sacrificed someone with the least power to this kind of trolling and bullying from random bad-faith actors.”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to AP through this web form (or via Twitter:@AP). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.Feel free to leave a copy of your message to AP in the comments thread of this post.
EXCELLENT interview starting 28:03. Unfortunately, the proceeding {banter, 4 food groups} is (as has been the case for a few weeks now) quite skippable.
Steven Donziger helped win an $18 billion settlement on behalf of 30,000 Amazonian Indigenous people who were exposed to toxic waste from Chevron’s oil drilling in Ecuador. The company waged a legal campaign against him and when he refused to turn over his computer and cellphone, he was accused of contempt of court. Although not convicted, he has been under house arrest for over 650 days. Federal prosecutors declined to prosecute him so the judge, who is a member of the Right Wing Federalist Society, appointed a private law firm with ties to Chevron to do it.
Donziger talks to us... from his house, obviously, about the “parade of horrors,” what makes the case unprecedented, why he remains hopeful and what people can do https://www.donzigerdefense.com/.
Plus Joe Biden jokes about running over reporters, mispronounces a congress woman’s name and Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina candle turns into an inferno.
VERY EXCELLENT post on the corporate structure and dynamics of podcast production, distribution, and monetization (at least in Anglophone, esp US).
SiriusXM’s purchase of design podcast 99% Invisible means that the canary in the coalmine just died.
In the past couple of years, two high-profile acquisitions of podcast companies have produced a whirlwind of think pieces from the media press. Forbes (12/4/20) prophesied that Amazon’s 2020 purchase of podcast publisher Wondery put the industry “on a Path to a Crossroads.” And a Poynter headline (2/7/19) proclaimed Spotify’s 2019 purchase of celebrated commercial podcast network Gimlet Media “could change podcasting’s future.”
But that future has already arrived. In a largely ignored story last year, Liberty Media, a conglomerate that already owns SiriusXM radio and the audio streaming and podcast platform Pandora, secured the right to a 50% stake in radio and podcast producer iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel). It currently holds 40%.
That left the podcast industry dominated by a handful of players—with Liberty, Spotify and public radio (via NPR and PRX) in the drivers seat, and Amazon, Apple and the New York Times not far behind. The new podcast oligopoly has arrived, and monopoly is on the horizon.
In April, the final “canary in the coalmine” of industry consolidation keeled over dead: SiriusXMbought99% Invisible, the vaunted architecture and design podcast often held as a standard bearer of the noncommercial podcasting space.
This is a far cry from podcasting’s past, which featured an ecosystem of independent companies that separately produced, hosted, distributed, platformed and monetized content. The medium’s advertising market is 20% the size of radio, but it’s projected to top $1 billion in ad revenue this year and continue to grow. Large media corporations realized if they consolidated these services and combined them with targeted advertising, podcasting could become a veritable “money spout” for whoever captured a large swath of listeners.
The Spotify empire
Spotify may be best positioned to open that money spout. It’s arguably the most popular podcasting platform in the US, and the press sometimes compares the company to Netflix because of its sizable investments in content. Over the past two years, Spotify has purchased high-profile producers (often styled “networks”), acquiring Gimlet, The Ringer and Parcast, and signed exclusive licensing deals with Joe Rogan, DC Comics, Kim Kardashian West and Michelle Obama.
Spotify is arguably the most popular podcasting platform in the US.
Producers and platforms have often been the first to merge in the monopolistic “podcast wars,” and typically get media attention as the most visible pieces of the industry. But as a Verge headline (2/17/21) argues, “The Podcast Wars Will Come Down to Ad Tech, Not Exclusive Content,” and if that’s true, Spotify‘s purchase of Anchor FM and Megaphone (formerly Slate’s Panopoly) are much more important.
Megaphone is a podcast monetization company that makes money for producers by inserting ads into their content. Anchor is a podcast hosting company that stores the audio, distributes it to the various platforms, and gathers analytics about numbers and demographics of listeners.
Anchor’s “one-stop shop” technology allows publishers to record, host, distribute and even monetize their content. The ease with which it allows amateurs to start a podcast quickly made the company one of the most popular hosts on the market. Spotify has used its purchase of Anchor to lower the barrier to entry even more, adding 1 million new shows on the platform in 2020 (Verge, 12/2/20). That brings in more listeners and potential subscription revenue, and means more ad inventory the company can sell.
Anchor’s ad tech has struggled to make money for amateur publishers, but with the help of advertising-focused Megaphone, Spotify launched its “final infinity stone” last month: a full-on automated advertising suite (Input, 2/22/21). Combining a platform (Spotify) with hosting (Anchor) and new dynamic ad-insertion technology (Megaphone) means advertisers can collect audience data and serve “different ads to different listeners” in real time, wrote Ken Doctor in Nieman Lab (1/13/16). This “could mean a 400% jump in ad capacity” by placing ads on old content as well as new.
This is the coup de grâce of the podcast monopoly wars. More audience analytics means more ad revenue for publishers, which brings more publishers to the platform, which means more listeners, which means more audience analytics, ad infinitum.
“If Spotify can leverage cheap capital to lock a large audience into its ecosystem, podcasts would need to go there,” warned YouTube veteran Hank Green (Washington Post, 5/27/20).
If this model reminds you of another large company besides Netflix, you’re not off base. In the Washington Post (5/27/20), veteran YouTuber Hank Green wrote:
My guess—and I’m hardly alone—is that Spotify wants to become to podcasts what YouTube is for video: simply, the default platform for both listeners and creators. And that should worry people in both of those groups.
In the early- to mid-2000s, this monopolistic system allowed YouTube to foster a vibrant community of DIY creators through its “Partner Program,” which enabled many to make a living with dedicated audiences as small as 10,000 subscribers. But those creators soon faced the consequences of enmeshing their livelihoods with Google. which bought YouTube back in 2006.
In the ecosystem of YouTube, which Google owns, tens of thousands of small businesses depend on the whims of one of the largest companies in the world for both audience and revenue.
Implications for publishers and listeners
We’re seeing a glimpse of what that could look like for publishers on the new podcast uber-platforms. Publishers gain a lot from being owned by one of the new oligopolists, but it comes at a cost. PJ Vogt, a former host of the popular Gimlet podcast Reply All, pointed out on Twitter (11/4/20), “Since Spotify acquired Gimlet, we do not have any say in rejecting advertisers.”
Amazon Music attempted to require podcasts on its platform to “not include advertising or messages that disparage or are directed against Amazon,” before backing down in the face of backlash (Input, 8/12/20).
Ashley Carman in the Verge (11/11/20): “We all might end up having to use Spotify whether we like it or not.”
The biggest changes for listeners will come from targeted advertising. Its absence from podcasting reduced revenue for creators, but meant digital audio was one of the final provinces where people maintained some reasonable expectation of privacy. Megaphone, Anchor and their ilk spelled the end of that, and consolidation has taken it further by concentrating users’ personal information on fewer and fewer platforms. Wrote Ashley Carman for the Verge (11/11/20):
Spotify knows listeners’ names, billing information, where they live, their age, what music they like, the other shows they enjoy, who they’re friends with on Spotify, what devices they use and plenty of other data.
In 2020, Spotify filed a patent for technology that tracks its users’ personality traits, which it could employ to change the tone of voice of advertising on the platform (“upbeat” for extroverts and “soft-toned” for introverts, etc.). And this year, it filed a second patent to identify users’ “emotional state, gender, age or accent” by recording them. The inventors of the first patent wrote in a research paper that their future research “could begin to link streaming behavior with brain scanning, genetic and physiological data” (Music Business Worldwide, 10/7/20, 1/27/21).
Spotify started selling personalized playlists to brands in 2019 (Vox, 1/11/19), and we can expect something similar for podcasts coming down the pipeline. Pandora has also recently come out with a new analytics tool that “will tell podcast hosts where their listeners live and how long they listen,” according to the Verge (6/18/20).
Liberty and future contenders
Liberty Media and its podcasting holdings.
Spotify and Apple Podcasts compete for the most listeners on their platforms, but Liberty is the only true competitor with Spotify for an all-in-one platform, via its audio-streaming platform Pandora. In 2018, Liberty’s satellite radio company SiriusXMboughtPandora for an epic $3.5 billion. Later that year, Liberty bought podcast monetization company Adwizz, followed in 2020 by host Simplecast, and folded them into Pandora to create “a full-on podcast distribution and monetization system” (RAIN News, 6/17/20). Later in 2020, Sirius closed the loop by adding producing, and much, much more, when it bought the already-consolidated producer-platform-monetization company Stitcher from the E.W. Scripps media conglomerate.
Stitcher’s own earlier consolidations are a good case study on how the stage was set for the insta-monopolies formed in the late ’10s. In 2014, monetization company Mid Roll and podcast publisher Earwolfmerged into Midroll Media. In 2015, ScrippsboughtMidroll, followed in 2016 by then-podcast platform Stitcher. In 2018, Scripps merged all these parts together into a single company under the Stitcher brand.
Perhaps wary of Spotify‘s success, and the machinations of Apple and Amazon to create their own podcast walled gardens, Liberty is hedging its bet that Pandora will come out on top. The conglomerate secured the go-ahead from regulators to buy a 50% stake in iHeartMedia last year, and has since increased its share to 40%. A legacy commercial radio broadcaster better known by its former name Clear Channel, iHeart has focused on distributing content to as many platforms as possible rather than pushing users to its own. But it has also held its own in the consolidation wars when it comes to combining all the spokes of the industry.
In 2018, iHeart bought publisher Stuff Media and targeted ad company Jelli. In 2020, it acquired another monetization company called Voxnest, which itself already owned hosting company Spreaker. In February 2021, it tied these together with the purchase of the respected monetization and analytics company Triton Digital from Scripps (that company’s last major digital audio holding).
Medium and small podcasting companies have continued to merge over the past few years. Old-time podcast host LibSyn just acquired monetization company Glow. Music streaming platform LiveXLivebought mid-sized podcast producer PodcastOne in 2020. And monetization-hosting company Acast bought hosting company Pippa in 2019, and the dual platform-advertising company RadioPublic this year, making it a scrappy competitor for the throne. These and other still independent companies, like host-monitizer Art19, could serve to boost one of the lesser oligopolists to prominence with a well-timed purchase.
Spotify and Pandora’s industry dominance began with platforms buying producers. Last year, the New York Times bought the much-vaunted producer Serial Productions from This American Life, home to the “podcasting’s first breakout hit,” in the words of David Carr (New York Times, 11/23/14). Last year Applebought Scout FM, an application that creates podcast playlists, and just introduced paid subscriptions to its long-standing podcast app (triggering Spotify to do the same). We can be assured there is more to come.
Alternatives to commercial monopoly
Patreon was founded in 2013 with the goal of creating a donation-based subscription model that has proved popular among podcasters.
So what’s the alternative to commercial monopoly? Luminary is pursuing a pure subscription model, avoiding the problems targeted ads bring by eschewing them altogether. Acast has developed a hybrid approach to paywall content listeners can still access across multiple platforms. In 2013, Patreon launched with a vision for a donation-based subscription model that has become popular with podcasters.
Then, of course, there is public radio. From the outset, the three major public radio corporations in the US have been key players in podcast production, accounting for almost 30% of the total audience of the Podtracs top 20 publishers. Today National Public Radio (NPR) competes with iHeartMedia for the top spot, with the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) coming in fifth and American Public Media (APM) 19th.
While commercial podcasting is racing toward oligopoly, public media are holding the line on an alternative vision with a parallel universe of services that reflect the medium’s multi-platform roots. In some ways, this makes public radio odd bedfellows with iHeartMedia, which is pursuing a similar content-focused multi-platform ecosystem. It remains to be seen how Liberty’s purchase of the company may change that formulation.
PRX’s Radiotopia is a bold experiment in organizing and funding a podcast network that blends pieces from the commercial and public podcasting world. Each show in the “federation” shares advertising, distribution, cross-promotion, foundation support and donations, but remains editorially independent.
Radiotopia relies on PRX‘s in-house hosting, monetization and analytics platform Dovetail to dynamically place ads across all of its content. It’s a direct competitor to the likes of Megaphone, Anchor and Adwizz, and can boast of serving ads on Serial, the “fastest-growing podcast of all time” (Medium, 5/18/16).
In what the Verge (3/2/20) called public media’s “answer” to Spotify, NPR and some of its member stations acquired podcast platform PocketCasts in 2018, and the BBC joined the partnership this year. PRX and a number of commercial investors spun off their own platform in 2016, calledRadioPublic, though they have since sold it to Acast.
This growing open ecosystem to produce, distribute and monetize podcasts could be dubbed the “PRX model,” a new twist on the oft-celebrated and oft-maligned motley model that has funded public radio in the US for decades through listener donations, foundation support and “underwriting” (i.e., advertising). The dynamism of US public audio funding models is admirable, but they are not without baggage.
Donation-funded media incentivizes content directed towards middle- and upper-class audiences who can afford to donate. The continued reliance on foundations plays into the interests of the nonprofit/industrial complex. And the shift away from regulated radio has loosened public media’s already weak resolve to maintain clear boundaries between their content and advertisements. (In 2016, the head of podcast ad sales for NPR, Bryan Moffett, euphemistically expressed this as taking “advantage of the uniqueness” of podcasting.) Not to mention public media have not been above their own consolidation: Public Radio Internationalmerged with PRX in 2018.
Future landscape
Where does this leave us? On the one hand, the new emerging walled garden models of Spotify, Pandora and Amazon can create space for DIY audio producers to thrive, but it puts them at the mercy of monopolist overlords. On the other hand, the open source podcasting world championed by US public media continue to produce some of the most important audio storytelling today, but act as de facto gatekeepers.
One simple answer to this conundrum is true public funding of podcasting and media at large, as with John Nichols and Robert McChesney’s proposal for a $200 tax credit Americans could use to donate to media of their choice. But absent a large-scale movement for media democratization, this is nothing to hold our breath for.
US public radio could band together and expand on their vision with PocketCasts to create a complete competitor to the likes of Pandora and Spotify. But that would represent a full-on pivot from their current strategy, and US public radio as it stands, with its heavy dependence on corporate and foundation money, is far from a perfect steward of a potential public podcast monopoly.
Time will tell how the landscape continues to harden. We will not be waiting for long.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the purchaser of 99% Invisible. The podcast was bought by SiriusXM, not by iHeartMedia.
excellent, esp brief promo for Hasan 2018 6-min video (see link in post) on 'How Israel Helped Create Hamas'
On May 7, Israeli police raided the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem during the evening prayer. Hamas responded a few days later by launching rockets from Gaza into Israel. Israel retaliated with its own strikes, and the violence escalated. Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian-American journalist based in the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She joins Ryan Grim to discuss this latest flareup in the Israel-Palestine conflict and what US media are missing.
VERY EXCELLENT. recorded 18 May (per Salhab). Best explanation I've heard yet explaining events preceding May 2021 Israeli assault on Gaza.
This week, Grace talks to Palestinian activist Akram Salhab on his experience living and organising in Palestine, what’s going on in Sheikh Jarrah, and the heroic efforts of Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation – as well as what socialists around the world can do to support them.
We encourage our listeners to donate to charities supporting Palestinians on the ground. You can donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians here.
You can also support our work on the show by becoming a Patron. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.
VERY EXCELLENT, though the episode title is deceptive. This is an intellectual and political biography of James. As such it necessary mentions 'The Black Jacobins' and James' position on the Haitian Revolution, but only very briefly in the broader sweep of his life (1901-1989).
Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn.
Jamie MacDonald is a Glaswegian stand-up comedian who found himself rapidly going blind in his teens. This series shows how Jamie used humour to turn denial into acceptance. He managed to find the spotlight as the darkness descended and has turned some pretty dark experiences into hilarious stories and anecdotes.
Produced by Julia Sutherland at Dabster Productions.
consistently excellent despite ~150 min runtime. Note participants below include Max Blumenthal (and occasionally Ben Norton, mostly engineering). Recorded 14 May 2021 (audio from Grayzone livestream linked above).
Israel is bombing Gaza, while extremists ethnically cleanse Palestinians. We are joined by Ali Abunimah and Rania Khalek, as well as Aaron Maté and Anya Parampil, to discuss the colonial violence - and indigenous resistance.
