Rush Limbaugh Says Democrate Think Tank Says Emails Were Uploaded

Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon speaks with printing while leaving a federal courthouse building in Washington, D.C. on November. 15, 2021.(Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto)

On the morning of Jan. vi, 2021, Steve Bannon encouraged the audience of his podcast not to waver in their religion. "We're coming in right over target," President Donald Trump'due south sometime chief strategist intoned. "This is the point of set on nosotros always wanted…today is the day we can affirm the massive landslide on November 3."

In the aftermath of the ensuing assault on the Capitol, Bannon's podcast stands out for its prescient blend of violent rhetoric and blatant disinformation. In the run-upwards to January. 6, Bannon and his podcast guests extensively promoted the imitation belief that Trump had rightfully and overwhelmingly won the Nov election, merely to have it stolen from him past fraud. In doing so, Bannon was 1 of several prominent podcast hosts to champion the misleading electoral narratives known collectively as the "Big Lie." While digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter take received meaning scrutiny for their role in permitting the spread of those narratives, far less attention has been paid to podcasting. By virtue of both its intimacy and its scale, podcasting tin can serve equally a powerful vector for misinformation, still at that place has been insufficiently little analysis to date of the office the podcasting ecosystem played in the pb upwards to the Jan. 6 attack.

To meliorate understand that role, we compiled a dataset of the most pop political podcast serial in the United States in Nov 2020. More specifically, we examined the "Top 100" list for that month from Apple Podcasts, the most widely used podcast app in the U.s. at the time, then downloaded episodes for 20 of the 23 series in the Top 100 that nosotros identified equally primarily providing political commentary. We establish that:

• Between Aug. 20, 2020, when the then-candidate Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination, and the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, over 25% of all episodes in our dataset (393 of 1,490) endorsed misleading balloter narratives
• The rate at which pop podcasts endorsed misleading narratives rose dramatically subsequently the election, with more 50% of all episodes (344 of 666) between November 3 and January vi endorsing unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud or related claims
• Popular podcasters on the right, who were largely responsible for the proliferation of electoral misinformation during this flow, are more ideologically homogenous in their partisan leanings than popular podcasters on the left
• Episodes that endorsed fake or misleading electoral narratives had broad cantankerous-platform accomplish, with total audiences on Twitter and YouTube in the tens of millions

These findings propose that the nigh popular political podcasts in the United States played a critical and underappreciated role in spreading false electoral narratives prior to the January. 6 assail. At a time when merely one-tertiary of all Republicans say they will trust the result of the 2024 presidential election results regardless of who wins, the findings underscore the need for further research on the political podcasting space. Without a ameliorate understanding of how the Big Lie spread so widely in the weeks and months afterward last November's election, similarly fake narratives are likely to plague future elections likewise, with dire consequences for American democracy.

Shades of the Big Lie

The unsubstantiated claim that onetime President Trump won the 2020 presidential ballot represents a major and indelible threat to the integrity of U.Southward. democracy. By insisting without evidence that the election was plagued by fraud and that Trump was the rightful victor, supporters of the old president take bandage dubiousness non only on the legitimacy of the current occupant of the White Firm merely as well the democratic process writ large. With 36% of Americans doubting that Biden legitimately won the last election, the stage has been ready for the futurity elections to exist delegitimized before they even take place. As the legal scholar Richard L. Hasen has argued, "the autonomous emergency is already hither."

A central question is how exactly that emergency arose and what enabled the Big Prevarication to spread so widely. Although journalists, researchers, and academics have largely focused on the critical role played past digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there has been comparatively little focus on podcasts, despite the growing popularity of the medium. The reach and scale of the podcasting ecosystem has exploded in contempo years, with Spotify and Apple alone now boasting more than than 25 meg monthly podcast listeners each in the U.s.. Major political commentators accept taken note, with prominent figures from both the Obama and Trump administrations launching massively successful podcasts. Yet conservative commentators in particular accept flocked toward the medium. Just as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity exploited the infrastructure of talk radio from the tardily 1980s through the early on 2000s to establish themselves as major players in bourgeois politics, they and a newer generation of hosts are using podcasts to build big and influential audiences in a far more than decentralized medium.

In light of the wide accomplish podcasting now enjoys, agreement whether and how political podcasts contributed to the spread of the Big Lie is vital. To do this, we compiled a dataset of pop political podcast episodes from series featured in Apple's "Top 100" podcasts in November 2020.[1] Nosotros filtered this dataset for episodes released between the get-go major political party convention on Aug. 20, 2020, and the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Nosotros then searched transcripts of those episodes for a list of keywords associated with different claims of electoral fraud, including both generic terms like "stolen election" and "rigged ballot" too as references to specific conspiracy theories, such as "sharpies." Finally, nosotros reviewed each keyword friction match manually to ensure that a podcast host or guest was endorsing or promoting an unsubstantiated accusation or false balloter narrative, rather than just describing or reporting on one.[2] Our methodology means that it is unlikely our data includes false positives (i.eastward., instances where we coded a false or misleading claim when we should not have), but it may include false negatives (i.e., there may exist instances where we did non code a false or misleading claim when we should have, since a podcast host or guest may have fabricated a false claim that did not trigger a keyword match). Furthermore, due to data restrictions, some series had episodes that we were non able to download. This was an issue in particular with Rudy Giuliani'south Common Sense podcast, for which nosotros were merely able to access two episodes that aired subsequently the election. Since Giuliani repeatedly endorsed imitation claims in other fora, it is likely that our data for his podcast serial represents a significant undercount.

All told, nosotros found that misleading balloter narratives meant to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election were endorsed by a host or guest in fourteen of 20 series and 393 of i,490 episodes.[3] See the appendix below for a full table of episodes and counts.

The Big Prevarication in the mainstream

Based on our information, several key trends nigh how false and misleading electoral narratives spread inside mainstream political podcasting stand up out.

First, every bit Figure ane reveals, there was a massive and sustained post-election increment in episodes that endorsed unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and related narratives. Although Steve Bannon and others had consistently raised concerns about electoral integrity prior to Nov. three, the per centum of all episodes that actively endorsed or promoted them still remained relatively low in the pre-election period. By contrast, after November. 3 the number spiked dramatically, with just over l% of episodes in our sample of popular U.S. political podcasts endorsing false or misleading claims. Significantly, as Figure 2 illustrates, the reason for the loftier rate is not that each pop podcast series was endorsing false election claims in one out of every two episodes, but that the podcasts that endorsed imitation narratives most oftentimes—such as The Sean Hannity Evidence, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and Steve Bannon'southward War Room—were likewise those that produced the largest full number of mail-election episodes. The tendency is in keeping with Bannon'southward stated Trump-era media strategy of "flooding the zone" with inflammatory data, real or fabricated.

Figure ane

Figure 2

The post-election increase in misleading electoral claims proved remarkably durable. The Electoral College has a "condom harbor" borderline past which time states are required to resolve all election-related disputes, which final year was Dec. 8. In theory, concerns about electoral fraud should have declined dramatically afterward that deadline. Notwithstanding equally Effigy 1 shows, the charge per unit at which pop political podcast episodes endorsed misleading narratives declined just modestly afterward the "safe harbor" deadline passed, before ascension over again. In the calendar week prior to the Capitol assault, sixty% of pop U.Due south. political podcasts endorsed ballot fraud narratives. Past that point claims of widespread voter fraud had failed to be substantiated.

The function of podcasts in spreading election fraud narratives was particularly important later on Nov. iii, as influential outlets within the bourgeois media ecosystem declined to back Trump's claims that the ballot had been stolen. Whereas some hosts at Fob News cut away from Trump administration officials' briefings about election fraud and outlets owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch urged Trump to take defeat gracefully, right-fly podcasts provided an unfettered venue to spread the lie that the election had been stolen.

With few in the mainstream media willing to entertain Trump'south claims of election fraud, podcast hosts expended considerable endeavor attempting to brand them announced credible. Several podcasters pointed to the legal ramifications of signing fake affidavits or highlighted the credentials of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani (who "took downwards the mafia in New York City") and Sidney Powell (who "worked for Michael Flynn") to signal their credibility. Other podcasters blindly parroted even the almost farfetched narratives, including those that claimed Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez had played a role in rigging the ballot, alleged that rogue USB cards had added votes to the election tally in Pennsylvania, or blamed the distribution of sharpies for Biden'due south win in Arizona.

As Effigy 3 shows, the podcasts that endorsed false and misleading electoral claims were not just more conservative, only also tended to be more ideologically homogeneous, at least as calculated past the accounts they follow on Twitter.[four] Whereas popular pundits on the left stretch across the ideological spectrum—note the broad gap between Jon Lovett of "Pod Relieve America" and the comedian Sarah Silverman—those on the right are much more tightly clustered. What this suggests is that the most popular liberal hosts stand for a wider prepare of ideological views than those on the right.

Effigy 3

What's likewise striking about Figure 3 is that many of the hosts draw from a newer cohort of media figures.[5] Aslope familiar faces like Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck, our dataset also included a newer generation of pundits, native to the digital historic period. Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Steven Crowder, for example, are amid the most popular hosts in our sample, and have remained on Apple's Top 100 list over the past year—a signal of their growing reach and appeal.

While it is difficult to determine the verbal reach of podcasts, this new generation of hosts are using the medium to build sizeable audiences. Apple doesn't disclose download numbers for its "Top 100" podcasts, simply Ben Shapiro's podcast claims to run into 15 1000000 downloads per month, while The Verdict with Ted Cruz reportedly had at to the lowest degree 20 meg downloads in 2020. Yet considering podcasts are often cross-posted on other media, podcast downloads alone do non capture their full reach. For series cross-posted on YouTube, episodes that promoted false election narratives collectively received 14 million views and over 700,000 likes. Given that this data is unavailable for all episodes, and many people do not mind to podcasts on YouTube, this level of engagement represents the lowest possible floor in terms of listener achieve. Some podcasts in the sample are also rebroadcast over terrestrial radio, calculation further complication to determining reach. Also, the Twitter followings of each podcast series and their hosts was also substantial. The podcasters who shared false ballot narratives in our dataset combined for over twoscore million Twitter followers in November 2020, with a median Twitter follower count of over 2 million.

Conclusion

Two weeks afterwards the election, Chris Christie, the old New Bailiwick of jersey governor and Trump adviser, appeared every bit a guest on Megyn Kelly's podcast. "You tin can't stand up there and say, 'at that place'southward been fraud, the election'southward been stolen, and I would have won easily,'" he explained, "unless you produce evidence." In the world of right-wing podcasts, Christie'due south admonition barbarous on deaf ears.

In the aftermath of the election, mainstream political podcasts repeatedly and consistently endorsed unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations and other false election narratives, even after the safety harbor deadline had passed. In the days before the Capitol riots, for example, anyone listening to the Mark Levin podcast heard claims that in Georgia "they have well over a hundred thousand examples of people who voted that were dead, who were also young to vote," while the Trump adviser Peter Navarro insisted to Sean Hannity that in that location was an "absolute flood of illegal ballots into Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, in amounts more than enough to tip the balance to Joe Biden. It was an illegal stolen election."

To their credit, several platforms have taken steps to curb the accomplish of podcasts spreading the Big Lie and other false electoral information. Shortly after the safe harbor deadline, for example, YouTube launched an effort to remove content alleging "widespread fraud or errors inverse the outcome of a historical U.Due south. Presidential ballot." The policy led the platform to take downward Steve Bannon's channel altogether on Jan. 8, after an episode in which Rudy Giuliani claimed the election had been stolen. Nonetheless, the podcasting space has all the same largely escaped scrutiny for its role in spreading false election narratives, much less the kind of robust public fence over how all-time to moderate online content that have pushed social media platforms toward greater transparency and more mature practices. In its absence, additional enquiry and debate regarding how best to curb misinformation in podcasts is urgently needed if nosotros are to avert another election bike marred by unsubstantiated claims of ballot fraud.

Valerie Wirtschafter is a senior information analyst in the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Chris Meserole is a young man in Strange Policy at the Brookings Establishment and director of research for the Brookings Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative.

Appendix Table

Testify proper noun	Total episodes	Episodes endorsing election fraud	Proportion
The Blitz Limbaugh Evidence	96	fifty	0.52
The Sean Hannity Show	97	48	0.49
Bannon's War Room	263	127	0.48
Louder with Crowder	40	16	0.40
The Glenn Beck Programme	119	47	0.39
Mark Levin Podcast	97	33	0.34
The Michael Knowles Bear witness	84	21	0.25
The Dan Bongino Evidence	110	26	0.24
The Ben Shapiro Prove	84	10	0.12
Rudy Giuliani's Mutual Sense	17	2	0.12
Verdict with Ted Cruz	17	2	0.12
The Charlie Kirk Evidence	71	vii	0.10
Existent Time with Bill Maher	12	one	0.08
The Megyn Kelly Show	47	three	0.06
Adam Carolla Testify	97	0	0.00
Lovett or Get out It	29	0	0.00
Pod Salvage America	48	0	0.00
The Candace Owens Evidence	9	0	0.00
The Daily Bear witness with Trevor Noah | Ears Edition	137	0	0.00
The Sarah Silverman Podcast	sixteen	0	0.00

[one] We identified popular political podcasts at the time by selecting the punditry-based podcasts from Apple's Top 100 list in mid-November 2020. Political podcasts series include those that either (1) mention politics, policy, or current events in their testify description; or (2) released a recent episode that covered political topics. The shows in our sample include: (1) The Adam Carolla Show; (2) Louder with Crowder; (3) Lovett or Go out It; (4) Pod Relieve America; (5) The Ben Shapiro Show; (six) The Candace Owens Show; (7) The Charlie Kirk Show; (8) The Dan Bongino Testify; (9) The Megyn Kelly Show; (x) The Michael Knowles Show; (11) Mark Levin Podcast; (12) The Glenn Beck Programme; (xiii) The Sean Hannity Show; (xiv) Verdict with Ted Cruz; (xv) Bannon's War Room; (16) Rudy Giuliani's Mutual Sense; (17) The Blitz Limbaugh Show; (18) Real Time with Bill Maher; (xix) The Daily Prove With Trevor Noah – Ears Edition; and (20) The Sarah Silverman Podcast. Due to data limitations, we are unable to compile episodes for three popular series during this period: (1) the Rachel Maddow Show; (2) the Lincoln Projection; and (3) Tim Pool Daily. Bannon's War Room RSS feed does non get dorsum to the fall of 2020, then these episodes are downloaded directly from his website. Most of Rudy Giuliani'southward Mutual Sense podcast episodes are no longer available online, and so our inferences for this series are extremely restricted.

[two]The dictionary of terms used in our search draws on popular lies, phrases or statistics commonly referenced during this menstruation. Election fraud related topics include: election fraud, software glitch, counting error, fraudulent biden elector, forensic electronic inspect, forensic inspect, voter integrity project, illegitimate president, election integrity, terminate the steal, end the steel, thrown out ballots, ditch forth a wisconsin road, illegally flipped, missing usb cards, election stuffing, election irregularities, hugo chavez, indra, 800000 votes in pennsylvania, out of state license plates, 430 in the morning, venezuelan software, dominion company, 68 error rate, election hoax, surprise ballot dump, dominion systems, smartmatic, 450000 ballots, 3062 instances of voter fraud, stolen election, sharpies, rule voting, arizona audit, voting machines, duplicate ballots, cyber ninjas, and rigged election. All episodes that referenced one of the terms in our dictionary were manually reviewed past two split coders. Any discrepancies were resolved by a third coder.

[three] This dataset represents a subset of a larger corpus of more than 30,000 podcast episodes from 69 prominent political podcasters that we accept transcribed using speech communication-to-text methods or, where applicative, the YouTube API to collect video captions.

[4] This strategy for identifying political ideology builds off Pablo Barberá's 2015 Political Analysis newspaper, which details a method to calculate the political ideology of Twitter users based on decisions most who they choose to follow. The underlying assumption is that Twitter users will ofttimes follow accounts that reflect their political interest, which can and so be used to develop a mensurate of their political credo. In lodge to ensure the precision of ideology estimates, we exclude users who follow fewer than five "elites" or more than 5,000 accounts. More than details on the methodology and implementation can be found here.

[5] Sean Hannity follows only vi people on Twitter and Candace Owens follows thirty people on Twitter. As a result, we are unable to calculate their "ideological score." Charlie Kirk and Ted Cruz follow over v,000 people on Twitter. Every bit a effect, relying on their following network may produce skewed results due to following practices that may non be reflective of interest in the account.

Facebook and Google provide financial support to the Brookings Establishment, a nonprofit organisation devoted to rigorous, independent, in-depth public policy research.

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Source: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/prominent-political-podcasters-played-key-role-in-spreading-the-big-lie/

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