But they fail as entertainment because they’re at odds with the strengths of the medium itself. Still, the incentives for politicians to record these shows - to ingratiate themselves with voters, to simply try something new, to give interns a flashy media project to put on their resumes - are obvious. In other words, everything an office-holding politician is not incentivized to do. To understand why, first consider what makes podcasts enjoyable: an easy group candor and spontaneity, or a deeply specific subject matter expertise, or a willingness to ask trenchant, provocative, uncomfortable questions.
#Right wing podcaster professional#
The experience was not entirely without moments of joy or curiosity - although the extent to which this might be ascribed to Stockholm syndrome would require a trained professional to determine - but overall it was characterized by a crushing, mind-melting boredom. By my calculation I listened to 583 minutes of podcasting in a single day, or nearly 10 hours of programming. Even the normally staid congressional news site Roll Call covered the phenomenon in 2020, saying - sorry - that “ Congress wants to get into your earholes.” Some of them are even quite successful: “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” co-hosted with the right-wing gadfly Michael Knowles, consistently ranks among Apple’s top news podcasts, as does the offering from his similarly loquacious former fellow senator, “The Al Franken Podcast.”īut are they any good? As POLITICO Magazine’s de facto podcast critic and somewhat of a guilty and reluctant addict of the medium myself, I set out to answer that question for you, dear reader, with a single-minded dedication: I spent an entire day, from the moment I opened my eyes to the moment at the end of the day when I stepped off the subway in my neighborhood and waved the white flag, consuming nothing but podcasts hosted by our democratically elected representatives.
As the medium has grown over the past decade, so has the desire among our current and former elected officials to get their news to you straight from the horse’s mouth, absent all the pesky perspective and context that journalists bring to the table.
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