Over the past week, the world of streaming music has been roiled by the Joe Rogan controversy (see our coverage here, there are too many posts to list individually). Basically, Joe Rogan moved his incredibly popular YouTube commentary channel to Spotify back in May 2020 for an insane amount of money. This deal worked well for Rogan, who came away with a once-in-a-lifetime score, and for Spotify, which was trying to build out its podcast business unit. While Rogan isn’t necessarily conservative, neither is he the stupid variety of woke that insists you can only hear a pre-approved narrative for any event. His freewheeling discussions on COVID, something that our “public health” overlords would have been well advised to try rather than banning all debate, not only generated listeners, they poked some rather large holes in what we are allowed to believe about the virus that has essentially shaped our lives for the past two years.

The reaction of the right-think Nazis was pretty much that of the noted philosopher The Dude.

First, it was a slew of no-name academics and medical students hoping to be noticed by someone important demanding that Spotify cancel its contract with Rogan, see About Those ‘270 Doctors’ Calling to Censor Joe Rogan. As an aside, one really wonders if these morons understand how “contracts” work and what happens when you cancel one in violation of the contract. I’m guessing they don’t, but whatever. Then Neil Young joined in the fray (Neil Young Tells Spotify It’s Either Him or Joe Rogan). Full disclosure, I grew up on Buffalo Springfield, CSN, CSN&Y, and Neil Young. But by the time Lynyrd Skynyrd called him out in Sweet Home, Alabama, Young was already insufferably preachy and no longer any fun to listen to. The culture and Young’s fan base had moved beyond Vietnam War protests songs, but I’m not sure Young ever did.

Since Young complained, a handful of other over-the-hill “artists” well past their expiration date have tried to create some new enthusiasm for their work (quick…name four Joni Mitchell singles other than Big Yellow Taxi) without visible signs of success (Like Lemmings off a Cliff, Joni Mitchell Follows Neil Young, Peter Frampton to Demand Spotify Remove Her Music, Thanks, Joe Rogan, for Alerting America That Neil Young and Joni Mitchell Are Still Alive).

Needless to say, because the main objection to Rogan was alleged “misinformation,” you just knew that eventually, Brian Stelter, our beloved Tater, was going to have to weigh in on the subject.

Stelter began by reading a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek committing to having rules in place to push back on misinformation on the platform, but noted that it didn’t mention Rogan. He then played Rogan’s message in response to criticism and musicians pulling their music from Spotify, which included a promise to show more wide-ranging opinions in the future.

Which sounds great, but not all opinions are created equal,” Stelter said. “You think about major newsrooms like CNN that have health departments and desks and operations that work hard on verifying information on Covid-19. And then you have talk show stars like Joe Rogan who just wing it, who make it up as they go along.”

And because figures like Rogan are trusted by people that don’t trust real newsrooms, we have a tension, a problem, that’s much bigger than Spotify, much bigger than any single platform.

Irony is dead, and Tater just carried it away to Potter’s Field.

Let’s be serious. Only the lowest brow of news consumers listen to CNN. The ratings demonstrate that to be the case. In terms of accuracy, it wasn’t Joe Rogan that carried water for the FBI’s laughable Russia Hoax for four years. It was CNN and Tater. In fact, the “elite” CNN “investigative” unit, CNN Investigates, was demolished because of its wildly incompetent reporting. Likewise, it wasn’t Joe Rogan who praised fraudster Michael Avenatti as a presidential contender.

It isn’t Joe Rogan who employs sexual predators and allows the brother of a failed Democrat governor to run interference for him with softball, on-air interviews. It certainly wasn’t Joe Rogan who misrepresented testimony from a House Committee investigating the nonexistent ties between Donald Trump, Jr. and Wikileaks (HAHAHA! CNN Gets Burned on Fake Story About Donald Trump Jr. and Wikileaks Email–UPDATED). It certainly wasn’t Joe Rogan who was punked by someone feeding him an apparently fictitious account of the telephone call between Joey SoftServe and Ukraine’s president and then had to retract the story (#ReleaseTheTranscript Trends After CNN Starts Deleting Damaging Reports on Joe Biden’s Ukraine Call).

The bottom line is that people know if they get wrong information on Joe Rogan’s show, it was not because they were deliberately lied to. CNN can’t make the same claim.

I could do this for another four or five hours, but what’s the purpose. CNN is usually wrong, and frequently they are wrong in the most magnificent way possible. Their experts are dolts. They can barely take transcription for the Biden White House on their best day. CNN is not a news organization; it is a joke that other news organizations laugh at and use as an object lesson for the price of hiring blindingly incompetent partisans for virtually every position.

The fact that more people trust Joe Rogan than CNN is actually a good thing. It shows that critical thinking is alive and well in America. It shows that, as a nation, we aren’t willing to believe what the media power structure tells us without question. The day when more people believe Brian Stelter than any other random person on social media will be the day from which we can start the countdown to our national collapse.