Darryl Betts
darryllrbetts.wordpress.com
Darryl is a businessman and a post-graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Auckland, with particular interests in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic, and AI. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a BA in Philosophy, Logic and Computation.
During a recent episode of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” show, guests Kate Rosenfield and Oliver Darcy comment on the accusations of spreading harmful misinformation which has been levelled against Joe Rogan’s hugely successful podcast [1]. Their comments provide a good example of the false narrative being generated by mainstream media organizations.
A detailed analysis of their comments reveals the vacuity of their claims, the absence of argument, and the psychological tricks they use to mislead their audience.
Rosenfield begins by saying this:
“People are fundamentally angry about not being able to stop his audience from wanting news that is bad for them.”
What people are Rosenfield referring to? All people? If not then which people? This degree of vagueness is by itself sufficient justification for us to not take her assertion seriously – by which I mean we cannot establish what is being claimed sufficiently clearly to assess whether the claim is true or false. She further claims that these people – whoever they are – are apparently angry. Why? Apparently, Rosenfield knows that they are angry, and she also knows that the reason they are angry is that they can’t stop Joe Rogan’s audience (another group of people that Rosenfield apparently knows) from wanting information that is bad for them.
The last part of that sentence is ambiguous – but for the sake of clarity, I will assume that she means that these people want news and that news happens to be bad for them (as opposed to them wanting news which they know to be bad for them). Crucially it isn’t clear what “bad for them” means.
Ironically there might be some nuggets of truth in Rosenfield’s wildly vague claim – it is probably true that certain people are angry that other people in America and around the world are able to hear what Joe Rogan’s guests have to say.
Next, she says:
“We are all haunted by the specter of this guy who is listening to Joe Rogan and internalizing this bad information and making bad choices as a result.”
She claims to be speaking for some unspecified group of people, and again she claims to know a lot about a lot of other people and the kind of choices they make and why. Again this is such a vague sentence that it cannot be taken seriously.
Rosenfield concludes with this:
“But, Rogan is like a weed that sprang up outside the mainstream media ecosystem, he thrived there and he has this huge audience, and that’s what’s really scary, that Spotify could kick him off tomorrow, and it wouldn’t make a dent. People would still listen to him, and crucially they still wouldn’t trust more mainstream media sources, and I think that’s what’s really really frightening to people.”
Once more she claims to know a lot about various groups of people and about the future, although at least she understands that censoring Joe Rogan won’t restore trust in mainstream media.
Next is Oliver Darcy, who says this:
“The key thing to keep in mind here is that people who are listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast don’t necessarily believe it to be bad information. There is an analogy to be drawn between Doritos and Joe Rogan’s podcast. People know that Doritos are not necessarily good for them… but there are a lot of people who listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast who believe that he is actually the truth teller – they believe the opposite – that Joe Rogan is good for an informational diet.”
The tactic here is to shift the conversation to one about good and bad eating choices. But analogies can fail to be good arguments for many reasons – and there is no attempt to justify the analogy- and certainly, there is no one else present who will challenge it. One way the analogy might fail is that the idea of food being good or bad for us doesn’t necessarily apply to information in ways that are sufficiently similar. But Darcy and Rosenfield aren’t concerned about argument quality – they can now spend the remainder of their time talking about Doritos and exploit the audience’s beliefs about good and bad eating habits.
Behind all of this though is another tactic that we see all too often in the mainstream media. The entire segment shown in the video is built on a single very important premise – that Joe Rogan’s entire podcast is “bad information” or information that is bad for the people who listen to it. Yet this key premise is never stated – they simply assume that there is such a thing as “bad information” and then assume that Joe Rogan’s podcast has met the criteria.
Why do they do this? Students of philosophy are taught to identify hidden premises in arguments. This is a crucial part of critical thinking since an argument will fail if a hidden premise on which the conclusion is dependent turns out to be false. It is possible that Rosenfield and Darcy don’t have this level of understanding of how arguments work. However, I think it is more likely that they disregard this premise intentionally because they do not want to call attention to it.
Instead, they want their audience to simply assume that the premise is true without thinking deeply about it. I call this the “moon gun” trick. I once watched a TV show in which the narrator pointed out a rock on the moon that had the appearance of a gun and then said something like “Who would have placed a gun on the moon?”. Of course, he skipped over the key question – which is whether or not it was actually a gun.
So calling attention to the crucial premise (that Joe Rogan’s podcast supplies “bad information”) would raise the question of whether or not that premise is true, but worse still it would reveal the premise to be so vague that it cannot even be judged to be true or false.
Episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast can be up to three hours long, and each one has a different guest or guests, and he has a wide variety of guests. Each episode may cover a range of topics, sometimes in considerable depth. Rogan spends a lot of time listening – he allows his guests to do most of the talking. The audience for each episode is sometimes in the millions.
So how can a single episode of the Joe Rogan podcast – let alone the entire series of episodes, be judged to be “bad information” or bad for the people who listen to it? Is a single false claim sufficient to make a 3-hour discussion bad? Or is a discussion “bad” if it contains more false claims than true claims? Or perhaps the existence of a certain type of claim, if it can be shown to be false, is sufficient to make the entire conversation “bad”? This is the classic who’s to say problem and it is one of the most important objections to restrictions on freedom of speech.
Even if we could decide on a definition for “bad” – the work required to determine whether just a single 3-hour episode qualified would likely be a significant undertaking. At the very least a person performing such an evaluation would need to listen to the entire conversation – and Rosenfield and Darcy don’t say anything which suggests they have done even this, let alone whatever additional research that might then be needed into whichever of the episode or episodes they have a problem with.
Of course, Rosenfield and Darcy aren’t interested in a precise definition for “bad” because that would reveal the difficulties involved in establishing a definition and then applying it, not to mention calling attention to the question which they would prefer people think has already been answered. They see no need to consider this question because they are already certain that their premise – vague though it is – is actually true. They are only interested in a discussion about what should be done to solve this “problem”.
There is also an elephant in the room, which is never mentioned by Rosenfield and Darcy, which is that Joe Rogan is merely the host. Not to take credit away from Joe Rogan for what he has achieved, but it is his guests that provide the majority of the content.
But Rosenfield and Darcy again don’t want to call attention to this fact. Because that would require them to try to explain why – for example – one of the worlds foremost experts on mRNA technology should not be allowed to speak about vaccines that utilize that technology [2], or why a highly qualified and highly experienced senior doctor who has been involved with treating Covid-19 patients for the past two years should not be able to discuss early treatment methods for Covid-19 [3].
Obviously, it is the guests that Joe Rogan has on – and certain guests in particular – which is the problem for Rosenfield and Darcy, but they skirt around this central point. This seems to be a common approach with others who are trying to silence Rogan’s podcast.
Rosenfield finishes with this statement in which she takes the opportunity to point out how superior she thinks she is to those who listen to Joe Rogan:
“They like something that we – who consider ourselves more enlightened – don’t think is good for them – we think that they are internalizing this misinformation – that they’re using it to make bad decisions. But if you took away Joe Rogan by de-platforming him, just as if you took away Doritos, would they seek out better information? Would they seek out a podcast like New York Times The Daily, or would they start reading the Wall Street Journal? I don’t know – I think that that is sort of the fundamental question here.”
Her arrogance is not surprising but it is startling to hear it spoken out loud – and of course, it is laughably misguided. There are no doubt many thousands of people in the Rogan audience who are more intelligent, better educated and better informed than Rosenfield and Darcy.
She at least almost gets one thing right at the very end. They conclude that censorship is not the answer – that providing more “better” information is the answer with the hope that it will get to “these people”. Unfortunately what is driving their conclusion though is not the classical free speech principle that the solution to bad speech is better speech, but their belief that attempts to censor Joe Rogan would fail due to his popularity (probably true), as well as their belief that they (the mainstream media) are providers of “better” information (probably false).
How much of this kind of narrative from people such as Rosenfield and Darcy is the result of a lack of critical thinking skills and how much is intentional? You might be inclined to say that it is entirely intentional – and I would agree that there seem to be powerful political forces behind this narrative, but I also wouldn’t underestimate the impact of an ideologically and academically compromised education system. If people such as Rosenfield and Darcy were not already intellectually compromised it would be more difficult to enlist them in a propaganda campaign.
[1] CNN Reliable Sources. 31st January 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/01/30/joe-rogans-podcast-stirs-big-problems-for-spotify.cnn/video/playlists/business-reliable-sources
[2] Joe Rogan episode #1757. Dr. Robert Malone. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3SCsueX2bZdbEzRtKOCEyT?si=BILyS1OGS6aRZMuA7yjU0w
[3] Joe Rogan episode #1747. Dr. Peter McCullough. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aZte37vtFTkYT7b0b04Qz?si=fw17WM5fS4iVQvsRCCZjvA
