The good news about Young’s move to marginalize Rogan is that it won’t work. That’s magical thinking. Even in our times, when tolerance for speech that’s considered misinformation or offensive is reaching a new dipping point, censorious blow-ups like Young’s accomplish little. The markets for speech are too wide and too decentralized for any boycott to disturb. Rush Limbaugh easily survived an organized boycott against him in 2012 after he called a college student a “slut.” Tucker Carlson has sailed his ship of foolishness past a couple similar boycotts over the years to no lasting damage. Laura Ingraham, too, has outlasted the boycotters, as has Carlson and Ingraham’s network, the Fox News Channel, whose advertisers have been targeted by the boycotters.
You don’t have to be a fan of Rogan’s 12-year-old show (I’m not) or a Fox viewer (I mainly watch out of professional duty) to view the calls for boycott or de-platforming as attempts to suppress controversy and dissent in favor of samethink. By trying to mute Rogan, Young and his ilk seem to be saying that some ideas — even the stupid ones about vaccines and Covid that Rogan has endorsed — are so powerful that they will displace “good” public health ideas and that Rogan is guilty of inspiring Covid deaths. This, of course, is preposterous. About 85 percent of adult Americans have taken at least one dose of the vaccine, since it became available just a year ago. The idea that Rogan has blood on his hands because he entertains doubts about the vaccine is like blaming certain books in school libraries for convincing kids to have sex, change their gender, take drugs or be racist. Young and the book banners don’t share a lot — his battle is against one speaker — but the spirit of his campaign is uncomfortably close to the banners because both amount to restricting expression in favor of the ideas they prefer. There is no national medical emergency that requires a Neil Young power chord to shatter it.
The pathologies of bunk can be found in almost every popular medium in existence. If we’re going to purify the web by chasing off vaccine cranks, dissidents, deadenders and refuseniks — whatever you want to call them — shouldn’t we also purge daily newspapers of astrology columns, which espouse potentially harmful nonsense, too? How about interrupting flat-earth discussions, the alternative medicine crowd, the Myers-Briggs test, homeopathy and other manifestations of the scientific fringe? This is both bad news and good news. It’s bad news because you’d like to think a greater number of people in an educated society would abandon easily falsifiable ways of thinking over time. But it’s also good news because it demonstrates that, in general, our devotion to public discourse supersedes our nature to throttle thoughts we vehemently disagree with. Fundamentally, our culture recognizes that free and open debate, with all of its inconveniences, benefits when it allows the free exchange of heretical thoughts, even the nutty vaccine ones Rogan showcases.
The thing about bunk is that often it’s a demand-side phenomenon, not just a supply-side one. The standard human appetite for convenient, reductionist theories tends to soar during times of crisis as people seek easy explanations for the hard problems. Why anybody at this late date would still reject the vaccine is beyond me, but vaccine resistance would persist even if Rogan vanished. How much of the blame can be assigned to Rogan is unknowable, but given that the average age of his largely white and male audience is 24, and younger people tend to resist the ravages of Covid, it can’t be that significant. How many people base their health priorities entirely on a podcast that occasionally discusses Covid? Spotify’s promise to add content advisories to Rogan’s shows that discuss Covid-19 and Rogan’s vow to add medical disclaimers to his show and interview mainstream vaccine sources to counter the controversialists is a good sign, and something he should have done from the beginning.
The unsurprising thing about Young’s move on Rogan is that it will probably lift the fortunes of both men. Young has a new album out that the dispute will promote. Also, according to Billboard, Young will lose about $754,000 a year from sacrificing his Spotify streams but Apple has capitalized on the furor by placing a “Neil Lives Here” opening page on its app, so he’ll probably make up a good part of the difference there. Meanwhile, Sirius XM has announced the return of Young’s station on its dial. The publicity can’t help but drive new listeners to Rogan, too, and encourage casual listeners to return and hear what the man has to say for himself.
It doesn’t always work out this way, but sometimes, just sometimes, attacks on speech only enhance it.
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According to Ted Gioia, an artist would have to generate 23 billion streams to earn as much ($100 million) as Spotify is paying Rogan. Send your streams to [email protected]. My email alerts would like to be a podcast when it grows up. My Twitter feed was once a vlog, if you remember those. My RSS feed maintains its allegiance to AM radio.
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