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Partisan airwaves quantifying misinformation and toxicity in political podcasting Neil Fasching
- Format:
- Book
- Thesis/Dissertation
- Author/Creator:
- Fasching, Neil, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Communication.
- Web studies.
- Political science.
- 0459.
- 0646.
- 0615.
- Local Subjects:
- Communication.
- Web studies.
- Political science.
- 0459.
- 0646.
- 0615.
- Genre:
- Academic theses
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (236 pages)
- Contained In:
- Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12A
- Place of Publication:
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Political podcasts have emerged as important yet largely understudied channels for political discourse, with the potential to spread misinformation and toxic rhetoric to millions of listeners. This dissertation develops and validates novel computational methods for large-scale audio content analysis to evaluate 4,811 political podcast episodes from 2020, providing a quantitative assessment of misinformation and toxicity in the political podcast ecosystem. The analysis reveals high levels of misinformation, with approximately one-third of COVID-19 segments and two-fifths of election segments containing false or misleading claims. This misinformation showed profound ideological asymmetries, with right-wing podcasts exhibiting rates 17 to 21 times higher than left-wing podcasts. The Joe Rogan Experience also exhibited very high COVID-19 misinformation rates, exceeding even explicitly partisan shows, though its election misinformation remained closer to left-wing levels. While toxic speech remained relatively rare at less than 3% of content, it was concentrated in right-wing podcasts and The Joe Rogan Experience. These findings demonstrate that political podcasts may operate as outliers in the contemporary media ecosystem, platforming misinformation content at much higher rates. Building on Zaller (1992) and Prior (2007), I argue that these patterns are particularly consequential because entertainment podcasts circumvent the typical avoidance of political content by entertainment-seekers, exposing politically disengaged audiences to political messages without activating defensive processing, making these listeners especially vulnerable to the misinformation documented here
- Notes:
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: A.
- Advisors: Lelkes, Yphtach Committee members: Watts, Duncan J.; González-Bailón, Sandra
- Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026
- Vendor supplied data
- Local Notes:
- School code: 0175
- ISBN:
- 9798247973980
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license
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