Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssully | Hacker News Reader

You summed up my issue's with him perfectly. I used to have a lot of the same dumb conversations he has with his guests with my roommates in college. The difference was our conversations were limited to a couple of dumb college kids and anyone else in the dorm room at the time. He has one of the most popular podcasts in the world and has the clout to attract some really powerful/smart people, but also some real scumbags who get to leverage his platform unchallenged.

View on HN

Do you assume that the listener is incapable of challenging the guest? Just because Rogan doesn’t correct all of his guests absurdities doesn’t mean they go unchecked. After listening to the Alex Jones podcast, for example, I have come to my own conclusion that the guy is not worth paying attention to. I didn’t need the host to do that for me.

Dumb ideas need to be exposed as dumb by the hearer, not by some special class of elites who filter information for us.

Then why do you need a host at all? Why even have journalists? If as you say listeners and viewers are perfectly able to get the truth out of speech, wouldn't the best to only have direct unfiltered speach with nonody in between?

Not really. The host serves a purpose to proke and prod the guest to direct and dissuade the flow of conversation.

The host provides an available platform to an audience. If I was a guest on a Joe Rogan podcast, I can be certain that some non-trivial amount of people will hear me. If I make my own one-off podcast and upload it to soundcloud, youtube, thepodcasthost, whatever, It is close to assured that I will have a lesser audience, if not close to no audience.

Joe Rogan's platform brings listeners to a topic, not to any specific opinion.

There's clearly a decent number of people who listen to Jones all day on his own channel who don't make that realization so it's a fair assumption that there are people who won't come to the correct conclusion about Jones who hadn't been exposed to him before he went on Rogan's podcast.

It's not even strictly about filtering information it's about appropriately presenting the information, giving both sides of an argument equal time and legitimacy is how we've gotten such high levels of climate change denial in the US. News networks, afraid of being seen as taking a side by framing the denial side appropriately as the scientifically unsupported side, would just present two people each arguing their own sides with equal weight given to both the denial and the pro side which gives the appearance there's equal evidence supporting both points where really there split is pretty much all vs a few every specific studies that only support denial in a vacuum.

Are you suggesting that both sides of the climate change debate get equal time in the media?

Pretty much, used to be every climate change story would have the 3 person panel setup with the host, a climate change denier and a climate scientist with the question of "is climate change a real threat."

I regularly see climate change stories, on TV, print, and the internet, and I can't recall any time in the last several years where any time/space, let alone an equal amount, was provided for dissenting opinions. At best, they might include mention of a strawman example of an opposing argument.

Perhaps you and I are consuming different news sources - do you have any recent examples demonstrating this equal allocation to both sides?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com