We re Saying Pod Save America Again
I t has been chosen the new Daily Show, "cooler than cool", and "the left's respond to conservative talk radio", and has get a meridian destination for any Democrat thinking of running against Donald Trump in 2020.
Pod Save America is a podcast featuring Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor: former aides to Barack Obama who left the White House for Hollywood, whose show now reaches an boilerplate of one.5 million Americans per episode and sells out alive events beyond the U.s.a.. This month, information technology is coming to London.
"They're the 'it boys' of podcasting," said Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times who is now a Guardian contributor. "They have the young liberal demographic sewn up in the same way [then Daily Testify host] Jon Stewart did on cablevision in 2000. It's the show anybody wants to be on."
Recent guests have included Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, senators competing to capture liberal hearts ahead of potential presidential bids.
Of course, the show'due south hosts have White House credentials of their ain. Favreau was Obama's star speechwriter, Lovett his chief joke writer, Pfeiffer his White House communications managing director and Vietor his spokesman for the National Security Council, among other roles.
In the show, the 4 men have done more than than capitalise on the lasting aureola of their old boss: they have identified a hunger for emotional support in uncertain times. They attempt to soothe, inspire and amuse that function of America that is disenchanted with politics. Many of their listeners are millennials inbound the political fray for the beginning time, brought in past the appeal of Bernie Sanders and a desire to fight dorsum confronting Trump.
Vietor said: "I call back a lot of people see what's happening in the United states, they read Trump's tweets, they come across him needlessly antagonizing a nuclear arms dictator and they think, 'What the hell is going on? This is crazy.' And I think at that place's a cathartic outcome in getting together with a group of people who also feel that way.
"That's always been a large part of the testify. People tell us, 'You've helped me stay sane in what feels like an insane menstruation of fourth dimension.'"
London is the concluding stop on a European tour, following shows in Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. The quartet will be podcasting live in back-to-back shows at Cadogan Hall on Saturday: the 950-seat venue is sold out.
Is this a test of whether they tin can take their brand of lefty politics global? Vietor offered a simple explanation: "Nosotros thought information technology would be fun."
'The opposite of rightwing rage'
In the US, podcasting is more popular than e'er before. Listener figures have doubled from 2013 to 2017, co-ordinate to Edison Inquiry, and the audience is younger, more educated and wealthier than the American population every bit a whole. Regular listeners spend more than v hours a week on five different podcasts, rivalling the fourth dimension most Americans spend watching TV.
Ann Friedman, a announcer and podcast creator, said: "What podcasting is going through now is what happened when bigger media organisations got wise to blogging. In the past year in that location's not necessarily more listeners but there's definitely more money and definitely more attention being paid to information technology from established media companies."
After leaving the White Firm, the people backside Pod Save America wanted to brand a contribution to the anti-Trump resistance. And so Pod Save America was built-in, every bit the flagship offer of Crooked Media, the company started by Favreau, Lovett and Vietor final Jan.
On the left of Usa politics, vigorous debate continues over how to respond to the forces that got Trump elected. Many such arguments mirror discussions in the Labour party in the UK, every bit the left responds to populism, disenchantment with the market economic system and conflicting views over the role of identity politics.
Nikki Usher, who teaches a class on the time to come of media at the George Washington Academy, said Pod Relieve America was "unabashedly trying to create an alternative leftwing media ecosystem that takes all of the lessons that have failed and repackages them for the kind of audiences that treat Obama equally a hipster God versus the kind of wonky principled Democrats who sit around and debate policy".
Conservative radio is a behemoth in terms of business and political influence, and Fox News is America's well-nigh-watched cable news outlet. Attempts to replicate that kind of success on the left accept not fared well – from Al Gore's Electric current TV to the Air America radio network, which declared defalcation in 2010. Afterwards years of lackluster ratings, MSNBC, the left'south respond to Play tricks on cable, has pivoted back towards the center.
"I don't know what the reverse of rightwing rage is," Usher said, "but whatever that is I call back that'south what the Kleptomaniacal Media company is trying to take advantage of."
The founders of Pod Save America say they hope its sense of humour, insider-noesis and bulldoze for collective activeness will make information technology a mobilizing strength. They are advocates, not passive documenters of elections, for example helping promote Democratic candidates ahead of the political party'southward impressive performance in Virginia terminal November. But they also seek to inform with facts, a office traditionally reserved for printing.
Favreau recently spoke to Ezra Klein, some other young liberal media entrepreneur who left a high perch at the Washington Mail service to run the political website Vocalism. "I'm non going to pretend I'g a anemic analyst who can get out all my personal opinions behind," he said.
Instead he wants to galvanize people who concur with him. "People are aroused right now, but I retrieve liberals like to be inspired," Favreau added. "I nevertheless believe that."
Such piece of work will only increase ahead of Nov's midterm elections, when Democrats hope to retake the House and Senate.
'White men speaking nigh politics'
Pod Save America is fresh, even radical. But stepping back, it's still four white guys seeking to reshape the time to come of Democratic politics as the party is trying to diversify itself.
Inquiry has shown that in the emergence of the political blogosphere, an earlier techno-media innovation, top influencers were white males, typically with an Ivy League or avant-garde pedagogy. Today, the top influencers on political Twitter fit the aforementioned profile.
With "each new technological distribution", Conductor said, "the patterns of dominance continue despite what we might retrieve about the potential for new voices to smooth".
"I practise think in that location's still a perception that white men speaking about politics is politics and anybody else speaking nigh politics is identity politics," said Friedman, a co-host of the Phone call Your Girlfriend podcast who has been a guest on a Pod Save America spinoff and remains a fan of the testify.
"I heed to plenty of podcasts led past voices that are not white guys that are only non coded as general politics."
Growing pains are inevitable. The problem is structural and Vietor and his co-founders, who cutting their teeth working for and to elect the first blackness president, acknowledge as much. Every bit Crooked Media has expanded, they have diversified the backgrounds of their writers, guests and co-hosts.
Marker Feldstein, a veteran investigative journalist who is now a professor at the University of Maryland, encouraged the experimentation of ventures like Pod Salvage America.
"Allow a thousand flowers bloom," he said. "At that place's zilch so sacrosanct near all the media forms nosotros've had heretofore."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/09/pod-save-america-podcast-european-tour-jon-favreau-obama
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