Im just not a massive fan of calling for people, films, tv shows, podcasts etc to be banned. Think it’s just a hallmark of the era we live in, people are very quick to call for stuff or people to be banned or deplatformed. I blame social media and overprotective parenting. I realise Rogan has a big platform and a wide audience, but for me it says more about the individual who seeks their vaccine or covid advice from a UFC commentator, it’s on them if they take his opinions on health matters seriously. He’s a brilliant interviewer and I tune in to his podcasts for that reason but I switch off mentally when he starts talking about anything medical as he’s clearly just getting everything from google. I take his opinion seriously when it comes to UFC as he knows his stuff but even some of his fellow comics have taken him to task on his show when it comes do covid, Bill Burr basically said “I’m not gonna sit here and listen to you with no medical degree with an American flag behind you acting like you know what you’re talking about when it comes to medicine”. They were talking about wearing masks just for context.
I can (at least partly) get not liking calls for stuff to be banned. I can definitely respect others wanting that like drawn differently to what I prefer. It's a really difficult problem.
Not sure about social media and overprotective parenting. Was the same the reason for reactions to the life of Brian for example?
I agree about social media, but not sure if we see the mechanisms similarly. Social media, the attention driven economy magnifies and pays for content that is easy to produce. Debunking a false claim can take hours, making it takes seconds.
We live at a time when someone entirely without editorial oversight can reach millions. There's a lot of stuff being produced that would never reach air/print some decades back. And if it had been, the calls for it to be banned would have been immediate and massive.
If a reputable journalistic institution that publishes misinformation there's an editor, there's a process. Someone like Rogan, yeah, you can complain to him, but will he listen? Will he do anything? If you have the influence to get on his show you get to express yourself, but does he change his approach even then?
The calls for someone to be deplatformed is (imo) at least partly a result of there not being many other avenues to have any impactful complaints expressed.
Just to be clear, this spread of disinformation with little to no editorial oversight isn't a new phenomenon, but the volume and reach of it has expanded exponentially.
Personally I think it's a massive problem. And one that increases the magnitude of many other problems. If there's a way to engage and create change on this that hasn't been tried other than calls for deplatforming I haven't heard of them.
Meanwhile real people, and loads of them, are hurt in real significant ways or even die in part because of this disinformation. It causes more polarisation, and division. Sure it would be good if most people were better at getting their information from trustworthy sources. To me the spread of disinformation only makes this too worse. People are actively being encouraged not to listen to more reputable sources. The answer cannot be that people should be smarter about these things, because we're nowhere near making that happen.
(Last paragraph not about Rogan directly, but more in general and in part back to twitter).
On Rogan. He makes a lot of money from his show. He gets to spread the ideas he wants to spread wide and far. Doesn't he have some responsibility to fact check his guests and himself?
He's very good at the letting people make their points and conversation part of interviewing. He's not very good at fact checking, he's not very good at knowing enough about the issue at hand to present at least some balance. He's not very good at asking critical questions (unless he personally disagrees). For me he's not a brilliant interviewer. He's really good at having conversations though.
Listening to him you get a very good idea about what the guest thinks. That's good. But unless you already know enough about the subject to know when the guest is wrong you'll often be none the wiser if the guest spreads false information. So listening to him may give you more truth, may give you the opposite. That's not good interviewing for me.
If I listen to an interview and the subject says something that's wrong or controversial presented as fact I want to get that information. Without having to know it myself from before. To me that's a vital part of interviewing.
