“The Joe Rogan Experience” is Spotify’s most popular podcast. The comedian’s podcast routinely outperforms most cable news shows, earning millions of views and downloads per episode. Rogan’s reach is largely why so many on the political left beg Spotify to censor his show.
The Post Millennial reports that on Tuesday, in a segment with MSNBC, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told Mika Brzezinski that tech companies need to prevent people from accessing misinformation about COVID-19.
Brzezinski asked, “What do you think are the best ways to push back on misinformation about COVID that continues to be aggressively pushed, whether it be Joe Rogan’s podcast or all over Facebook?”
“We can have the best science available,” replied Murthy, “we can have the best public health expertise available. It won’t help people if they don’t have access to accurate information.”
The surgeon general continued, “People have the right to make their own decisions, but they also have the right to have accurate information to make that decision with.”
He went on to explain that social media companies have an “important role to play,” as these are the “predominant places where we’re seeing misinformation spread.”
His segment concluded as he pleaded for corporate intervention to stop the spread of counternarrative information.
“This not just about what the government can do,” the surgeon general stated, “this is about companies and individuals recognizing that the only way we get past misinformation is if we are careful about what we say and use the power that we have to limit the spread of misinformation.”
In early January, 270 doctors — the majority of whom are not medical professionals — called for Spotify to censor Joe Rogan’s podcast. The academics published a public letter demanding that Spotify enforce a “misinformation policy.”
In recent months, CNN has also taken Rogan to task over his views on COVID-19 and the preventive medication ivermectin. When Rogan came down with the novel coronavirus after performing in Florida, CNN doctored footage of the comedian to make him appear gravely ill.
When CNN anchor Don Lemon accused Rogan of taking a veterinary form of ivermectin, Rogan responded by calling Lemon a “dumb motherf*****.”
“The Joe Rogan Experience,” on average, reaches 11 million people per episode. CNN Primetime averages less than one million. The regime and its acolytes in the media call for Rogan’s censorship because they are losing to him. They resent the fact that the guy who hosted “Fear Factor” is thought of as a more reliable news source than their legacy networks.