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They target an audience of young men, and they are increasingly helping to turn far-right grievances into policy.
In recent years, longform right-leaning podcasts have attracted vast, largely male audiences and advertising revenue, and have been credited with helping authoritarian candidates win elections and find support for repressive policies — most notably, the US election of Donald Trump in 2024.
Meanwhile, data journalists are tracking how right-leaning influencers are fueling an advertising boom in which businesses leverage the ideological slant of their shows to sell politically-coded products, in a lucrative ecosystem for the hosts, brands, and platforms. By contrast, they report that left-leaning podcasts have not pursued ideological marketing in the same way.
Overall, news influencers of all stripes have an outsized impact on public opinion in several regions of the world, as a recent Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report noted: “There is a set of markets including Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States (as well as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa) where news creators are having a very significant impact. In most of these markets people also say they pay more attention to creators and influencers than to mainstream news brands (or their journalists) when using social media.”
But, so far, right-wing podcasters in the United States have moved public opinion more than their peers in any other society. As Bloomberg pointed out, it is significant that popular podcaster Joe Rogan, a former comedian, was invited to watch the Trump inauguration from the prestigious Capitol rotunda, while well-known Republican governor Ron DeSantis was confined to overflow seating. Meanwhile, a recent Reuters analysis of podcasts and shows from 22 conservative influencers revealed remarkably consistent messaging between hosts with otherwise diverse backgrounds, and “have become a potent force in a widening campaign of retribution against perceived enemies of the Trump administration.”
Journalists have found this right-wing cohort’s influence difficult to track, partly due to the loss of effective network analysis tools such as Crowdtangle, their shows’ hours-long duration across multiple platforms, and the seemingly wild diversity of topics discussed. Factual discussions of black holes with real astronomers are sometimes followed by fanciful “facts” about UFOs from comedians, while conspiracy theories and “manosphere” grievances are often floated alongside praise for Western civilization and scorn for transgender identity. And many of these influence voters far beyond their own borders, while hosts “tout products that let people buy into the MAGA crowd,” according to a recent Bloomberg investigation.
In a session titled “Tips to Investigate Influencers and Livestreamers” at the recent NICAR data journalist summit, Bloomberg investigative data journalist Leon Yin shared techniques learned from his 2025 investigation into nine influencers who helped usher in the far-right Trump administration. Yin’s story showed how these podcasters “are mobilizing America’s men to lean right,” with common claims about the public being duped by established institutions, and common warnings about apocalyptic threats to personal liberty.
While many supposed that guests on these shows were dominated by right wing politicians, Bloomberg’s analysis of the podcasts revealed a surprising and common cocktail: lots of comedians, athletes, intellectuals, and military veterans, in consistent ratios that allow reporters to place individual podcasters into distinct influencer categories. However, Yin said the most pervasive topics throughout included transgender identity and sports participation, immigration, and supposed flaws in the election system.
“About four in ten… of the most frequently viewed videos mentioned voting or elections, with the intensity increasing as you got closer to the election,” he explained. “Surprisingly, there was a 50-50 split — half of these videos are used to endorse candidates or suggest people register, and about half are discrediting or disparaging of the democratic process. About three in ten videos mentioned transgender identity. Often sports are involved as a major subtopic, and this phrase ‘men playing in women’s sports’ was repeated all the time.”
Yin said tracking the virality of right wing podcasts is extremely difficult since Meta killed off the Crowdtangle analysis tool in 2024. As a result he urged reporters to consider an alternate approach for tracking this group’s influence: by mapping the guests on these shows, and analyzing what was said within their unfiltered, conversational content.
“When reporting on videos, you have to just know that Crowdtangle is never coming back,” Yin explained. “With that tool, you could put in a link, and see where it was shared elsewhere on social media. Nothing like that exists at present. There is no overview of how often or where things are shared. Instead, I look at the influencers and the megaphones, because that data continues to exist. Their broadcasts are readily available, and often archived.”
The key, he added, is to be organized, and to define your own categories, and explain your choices to your audience. For instance, for the Bloomberg investigation, Yin explained the selection criteria to audiences to show why he eventually analyzed 2,000 shows from those nine podcasts over a two-year period: they were all unedited interview-format podcasts with at least one million YouTube subscribers, which had also featured at least one interview with then-candidate Trump.
While there are numerous podcast platforms, Yin said YouTube was generally the best place to start.
“Why focus on YouTube? It’s the largest pod[cast] distributor in the world,” he noted. “It is the distribution hub, it is used to grow audiences, and it has an archive of all the videos uploaded, unless deleted for some reason.”
In addition, most YouTube podcasts conveniently archive all channel content under the “Videos” section of their channels (see below).
Yin said the following tools were key to his team’s podcast investigations:
- Podscribe — a paid-for podcast advertising analytics platform.
- Stacher.io — a graphical user interface tool that simplifies the video downloading process, and does not require command-line skills
- Reduct — a paid transcription service that allows the annotation of specific podcast clips, and which Yin said is helpful for content-heavy video investigations.
- Transcription tools such as those from Google NotebookLM and Whisper. Yin focused on the 600 videos with over one million views, and used keyword search of the transcripts, followed by manual verification. (GIJN has also profiled the Summarize.Tech timeline-based transcriber, which allows some free uploads.)
- And, above all: yt-dlp — a free, all-purpose command-line audio and video downloader tool.
Notably — with journalist concerns about potential legal challenges from platforms over copyright and policy conflicts — one common tip heard in the hallways at NICAR was for reporters to use the open source yt-dlp software while it still remains available.
Tristan Lee, co-founder of Decoherence Media and a leading far-right groups investigator, said: “Yt-dlp is a fantastic tool; it’s a free, open source package, and you can download videos from basically any website. And the real killer application here is that you can download every single video from, say, a given YouTube or TikTok account with a single command. This is so useful for archiving, because once things get spicy, it’s common for people to take down their spicy videos.”
However, for more targeted projects, Yin said newsrooms might consider the easier-to-use Stacher tool.
“It’s a user interface that’s helpful not only for downloading YouTube videos, but videos on many websites, and it runs on top of this command line tool yt-dlp,” he explained. “I used both of them, but I use Stacher as a one-off, and yt-dlp if I’m trying to programmatically collect stuff.”
Yin said audience comments that run below influencer videos also represented a rich source of data.
For scraping websites, Lee made a rare recommendation for a paid-for tool — SerpAPI, a proprietary scraper for Google services and other platforms. “In many cases, it is much faster and easier to pay a small amount of money, or use a free tier version of a paid tool that actually works, rather than making your own or finding a janky [open source] tool on GitHub,” Lee said. “I looked for good Google Reviews scrapers, and none worked, and I can recommend this one.”
Notably, the session also highlighted an advanced, free-access data journalism tutorials portal for digging into the influencer advertising ecosystem, gambling livestreamers, and other “opaque topics.” The tool, called inspectelement.org, was created by Yin with contributions by Piotr Sapiezynski and other collaborators.
One of the techniques described on the site explains how to find hidden data from “undocumented APIs” — what Yin describes as the “digital bureaucracy” behind servers. This approach emerged as a trending data-digging technique among speakers at NICAR, and was used by Lighthouse Reports, for instance, for its recent investigation into phone tracking software, as GIJN described in March. This data mining process generally involves some computer science skills, but Inspect Element’s excellent tutorial on undocumented APIs shows how to reverse-engineer these systems to find hidden information without the need for coding. Despite the advanced digital steps required for each technique, the site includes metaphorical explainers understandable for non-coders, as well as strong case studies and tips for building datasets.
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.
This article first appeared on Global Investigative Journalism Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
