He is the loudest, most disruptive voice in the room. Joe Rogan is an entertainer who has unintentionally become the source of news for millions of edge lords around the world. But in a strange turn of events this messiah gives the people what they want, while the media feeds an ever more compromised version of what they need.
You can call it jealousy, but I call it reaping what you sow. The incredible credibility decline of the mainstream media is directly linked to the rise of social media. Journalists who were trained to report on the world were suddenly competing against everyone.
Think about it this way: this blog is unmoderated and completely independent. I started it to try and undo the damage of traditional news sources optimising content for clicks and not accuracy. Objective news doesn’t sell advertising space.
Enter the former host of Fear Factor, comedian, and entertainer Joe Rogan. This guy builds his reputation on the comedy stage and the small screen and exposes himself to the craft of comedy and acting. These disciplines require anecdotal research to inform a stage performance that is meant to entertain large crowds.
Rogan is funny, charming, well-spoken and oddly handsome. He is also a skilled fighter, which makes him very appealing to the UFC crowd where he really finds his people and does an insane body transformation to be in lock step with the testosterone-fueled fight fans.
I used to be a prototypical Rogan fan. My CV includes Sports Illustrated, FHM and Men’s Health, so trust me when I say I know about appealing to bro/alpha male culture.
That also means I know about the performance of being a bro and, since having a son, I choose not to live it anymore. Now my journalistic exploits are focused on helping people understand the world they live in. Arming readers like you with the knowledge to cut through all the marketing that you’re fed.
And everything is marketing. The work I do that puts food on the table is to craft marketing messages that will appeal to the mainstream media and elevate my clients.
I use my decades of experience in media production to write stories that will impress the editors with the goal of them publishing those stories to you.
The sad thing is that I’m contributing to the decline of media credibility that lies at the heart of this crusade to get Joe Rogan cancelled.
He is the loudest, most disruptive voice in the room because he appeals to the individuals who feel marginalised right now. With all the BLM energy bouncing around and a groundswell of equality movements, how difficult must it be to exist as a heterosexual white man?
Mainstream media used to cater to your every desire, and it all changed almost overnight.
If I was honest, I jive to Rogan’s rhythm because I cut my teeth on those beats. But I do have a problem that Spotify used him to monopolise the formerly free to access podcast market.
JRE was always going to be a problematic cornerstone to a new media empire because the show’s host is in it to entertain, not inform. His conversations ebb and flow with like beer filled bar banter.
I’ve solved all the world’s problems over a pint with my mates, where we speak free of the filters of polite society. The difference is that the journalist side of me will do the fact checking work afterwards and find all the contradictions and false narratives.
JRE plays out relatively unedited with a host only concerned with keeping the gees.
What comes from those conversations is a stream of quotes that are delivered as fact because the show is packaged for entertainment and fed to an audience that has lost faith in a media industry that has, in their minds, turned on them.
News outlets with rapidly declining budgets need those ad dollars to function and here is a guy gobbling up all the valuable eyeballs with nothing but vibes.
I’d be pissed off too.
He should do better to arm himself with enough knowledge to push back on his guests when they make wildly inaccurate claims in the conversation. The mainstream media should be more creative in their content packaging.
You should, however, know that all of this is just entertainment theatre, and your attention is the currency.
