This week, Yeonmi Park, a North Korean human rights activist, sounded the clarion call to defend media freedom, telling the world, to “Wake up, while the time remains to fight back” as she supports the voice of famous podcaster Joe Rogan, who is embroiled in a snowballing media controversy.
And Rogan, one of the most controversial, yet conversely the world’s most famous podcaster, will set the barometer to what lies ahead. Our new daily cup of Joe.
The outcome of this controversy is absolutely critical to media freedom’s path ahead as the democratic world, and corporations hammer out a new type of new social contract, which welds traditional and new media formats into an accountable framework that bolsters trust in information.
On February 7, Park (@YeonmiParkNK) tweeted: “First they came for the Right Wing Conservative commentators. Then they came for the sitting President. Then they came for the biggest podcaster @joerogan who was the least biased. Soon they are coming for All OF US who don’t comply. Wake up, while time remains to fight back.”
Park was referencing a famous poem, written in 1946, titled, First They Came, by Pastor Martin Niemöller, who was best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s, which touched on how he felt that Germans had been complicit through their silence in the Holocaust.
It all began last month when 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators signed an open letter calling on Spotify, a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider, to take action against misinformation on the platform, contained in two of Rogan’s interviews relating to Covid-19 and vaccines.
Spotify - with more than 406 million monthly active users, including 180 million paying subscribers, as of December 2021 - paid a reported $100m (R1.55 billion) in 2020 for an exclusive licensing deal with Rogan.
Shortly after the doctors call to action, rocker Neil Young delivered an ultimatum to Spotify demanding that it take action against Covid-19 misinformation on Rogan's podcast or remove his music from its service. Other musicians on the platform soon followed suit.
This placed Spotify’s chief executive, Daniel Ek, in the hot seat and put a band-aid on the discontent, promising to put a “content advisory” on “any podcast episode that included a discussion about Covid-19.
Ek grew hot under the collar after the “N” word was thrown into the mix. And to protect his company’s corporate reputation and profits, held talks with Rogan and began removing certain of Rogan’s more controversial podcast episodes.
In a letter to Spotify employees, Ek said he did "not believe that silencing Joe is the answer."
Ek said: “I want to remind everyone of our mission. We want to get to 50 million creators and a billion users. And to be a true platform and achieve this ambition, it’s really critical that creators are able to use their voice independently. And it’s also critical that we have diverse voices on our platform. We’re not in the business of dictating the discourse that these creators want to have on their shows.”
To put Spotify’s growth ambitions in perspective, Edison Research estimates that 28 percent of the US population aged 12 and above are weekly podcast listeners, a 17 percent increase from 2020. Advertising revenue is expected to hit $1 billion (R15.5bn) in 2021, doubling to $2bn in 2022.
And Ek was not wrong in defending the Rogan gold mine as Rumble, a video-sharing platform, tried to poach Rogan amid the controversy, offered him a $100m deal with media freedom.
But for now, Rogan is staying with Spotify, having publicly apologised for any factual mistakes he has made own his show and supporting Spotify’s handling of the controversy.
The Joe Rogan Experience controversy is a litmus test of how the world handles media disputes in the future. But muzzling media freedom is not the right path.
Podcaster Dr Jordan Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) defended Rogan,said in his tweet on Sunday, "Book burning. Or, more precisely: library burning. Orwell: "he who controls the past controls the future" stop this now @Spotify now now now“. Petersen was referring to George Orwell's 1949 novel, 1984. The novel describes a dystopian future, where all citizens are manipulated by a single political party.
It is a tricky juncture we in media are at as regulated traditional media butts heads with the changes that technological innovations have brought and an unregulated Wild West media landscape that needs a new sheriff in town.
Tech giants of the ilk of Google and Meta have had too much freedom.
Fake news and filtering of news via artificial intelligence and algorithms being the tip of the iceberg.
To stop this abuse, the US and UK are trying to rebuild trust in information and find a new tool kit to deal with hate speech, misinformation, skewed algorithms, racism, diversity, among other issues.
Media freedom is handled differently in the US compared to the UK.
In the US, podcasts are not regulated by The Federal Communications Commission because they're not broadcast on radio. However, there are Federal Trade Commission rules that podcasters and YouTubers must follow about informing their audience if you're being paid to review products or if you're getting products for review for free. That means anything goes — from four-letter words to sexually explicit content. Copyright law does apply to podcasting, though. Podcasters can copyright or license their work.
In Rogan’s case, the freedom extends to pour your guests whiskey to the gentle clink of ice cubes in the background, while lighting up a spliff and enticing your guests to legally take a drag, which in most traditional media newsrooms throughout the world would lead to you swiftly exiting the building.
Upping the US media regulation salvo is the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder report, which was released near the end of last year.
“As we close in on the end of a second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the seams are splitting, and the threats to communities and to livelihoods have moved from internet chat rooms to the ICU, ” it said, adding, “Public discourse is deeply polarized and acrimonious; we are distrustful of each other and of powerful institutions (sometimes, for good reason). Many have become groundlessly sceptical towards scientific research and reject substantiated facts.”
The report also blasts a growing number of “bad actors, and conflict entrepreneurs who exploit these weaknesses” have led to real harms, sometimes with fatal consequences.
However, what is very concerning is that the Commission calls upon the White House to establish a dedicated, apolitical team to develop a centralised national response strategy to effectively counter mis- and disinformation.
This as the rest of the world watched the US government’s complete lack of leadership and continual misinformation amidst Covid-19 with its death toll nearing one million.
Politicians and media freedom by nature are in Kinetic opposition.
Across the Atlantic, the new pecking order is similar.
Last month in a State of the World' special address by EU President von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum, he said: “Europe's approach is completely different. We believe that trust and confidence are more sustainable than control and coercion. It is the attractiveness of our liberal democracies that the autocrats fear – our economic success, our civil liberties, and the freedom of speech and ideas. We must step up to defend these most valuable treasures of our democracies.”
Well, that valuable treasure is being melted into a new currency or digital token.
The European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of speech. But new legal precedents are being set to protect EU’s citizens.
An appeals court in Paris, France, last month upheld a lower court ruling that US tech giant Twitter must fully disclose details about how it fights online hate speech.
Last May, the UK, which is not a member of the EU, said it was planning a new law that would fine social media companies up to 10 percent of turnover, or £18 million (R377m), and take criminal action against senior managers if they fail to quash online abuse such as racist speech.
This as European officials and Google's and Meta agreed last week that a clear legal framework was needed to step up cooperation against online hate and with the European Digital Services Act on the horizon, which will force tech giants to do more to tackle illegal content on their platforms, with fines of up to 6 percent of global turnover for non-compliance.
And, as the US and the UK get their soapboxes in order, and as Joe Rogan raises the media backlash, UK author Niel Gaimon shares a cautionary tale about the show Lucifer, runaway success on streaming giant Netflix.
Data from Nielsen’s 2021 Original Series Chart In the US found that in January, Lucifer was the most-streamed original series of 2021 in the US, having racked up 18.34 billion minutes of viewing time across the year.
Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) tweeted on March 16, 2021, “And an extra thanks to the @1milmoms for trying so hard to get #Lucifer banned. You people boycotting and speaking out against something is like a magical guarantee that it will blossom and grow. Hoping you'll be working your magic on Sandman soon enough.”
So, while Yeonmi Park and Jordan Peterson might worry about media freedom, it has never been quiet in a forge. It has become very noisy as a new media contract is hammered out on the anvil of discourse. And the pen is well known to be mightier than the sword.
Philippa Larkin is the Business Report Content Editor.
BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE