Damon Orion
Public affairs podcasts are an antidote to short-form news consumption and soundbite-oriented cable news broadcasts.
According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans used social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X as news sources in 2024 despite the reported proliferation of misinformation and voter manipulation on these online sites.
Meanwhile, another 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 63 percent of American teenagers got their news from TikTok. The study also stated that in four years, the percentage of adults who regularly turned to TikTok for news increased by five times.
“With its short-form video content, TikTok provides the ideal platform for both misinformation and disinformation to pass as credible, in part because content creators’ popularity may be misinterpreted as expertise, even where it doesn’t exist,” a 2023 blog from Capital Technology University’s website stated.
In a 2024 article that documented waning public interest in cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC, the libertarian magazine Reason noted that podcasts “have gone the opposite direction” from short-form information blasts on platforms like TikTok and YouTube by offering “lengthy, discursive interviews that let subjects speak uninterrupted for minutes at a time and conversations that flow more naturally—a near-impossibility in the tightly paced, commercial-bounded programming blocks of cable news programming.”
Podcasts are increasingly becoming popular among Americans, with “Comedy, entertainment, and politics… [being] at the top of the list of topics that podcast listeners say they regularly listen to,” according to a 2023 report by the Pew Research Center. The report further points out that those who turn to podcasts for news see them as more trusted sources than other platforms.
“You can’t get into a topic and cover it in five minutes,” notes Deborah “Arnie” Arnesen, the host of the public affairs podcast “The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen.” She observes that podcasts allow deeper dives in a single episode and enable reporters to devote multiple episodes to one issue.
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