The public fury—and more specifically, famous musicians' fury—over podcast host Joe Rogan's relentless pandemic misinformation has reached a pitch where both Rogan and streaming service Spotify felt compelled to answer this weekend, and whether you find value in either response probably depends on your own remaining patience. In a ten-minute Instagram video, Rogan gave a mostly-vague promise to do better, promising to "do my best to make sure I've researched these topics," and "try harder to get people with differing opinions."
Coming from someone who has promoted the phony miracle properties of ivermectin (doesn't work) and who is receiving criticism precisely for hosting people with "differing opinions" on basic pandemic facts, both of those specific pledges sound more ominous than comforting. It was Rogan's own "research" chops that led him to believe deworming medicine was an effective treatment against a virus—a popular Facebook theory that has seemingly been immune to all actual research proving the contrary; we do not need "differing opinions" on whether getting vaccinated will cause you to become magnetic, wreaking havoc on your library of old VHS tapes, but competent opinions that do not treat superstition and fact as competing gladiators set loose on each other for the sake of spectacle.
It's Rogan's defense of his continual screw-ups that's perhaps most off-putting, though. "I've never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people, and have interesting conversations."
Well, sure. That's how it goes. And that, kids, is why CNN pays a phalanx of conservative hoax promoters, professional propagandists, and those that pushed America to the brink of a coup to appear in front of the cameras most days of the week. People who have proved willing to lie outright to the public produce far more "interesting" conversations than those who shroud their partisanship in a bit of basic human decency.
There is a very wise, very ancient proverb that I will butcher mercilessly in order to fit my needs here: With great money comes great responsibility. It is the reason that, in general, the nation can muddle through somehow if your internet uncle bullies the rest of the family with Trump-humping pandemic hoaxes, but things begin to go south quickly when a man who is paid a truckload of money has the same substanceless but "interesting" conversations in front of a few million people.
What's important is to be interesting, to be sure. But what's also important is to admit when you've said something that turns out not to be true—and make a sincere effort to fix the damage.
A $100 million contract is not a license to kill, and Rogan's press to be interesting through stream-of-consciousness chats that you, as the listener, are privileged to hide in a corner and listen to have on several occasions run afoul of the Tucker Carlson threshold:
Does broadcasting your for-profit version of "interesting" result in other people's deaths? If yes, (and to be clear, the answer here is yes), then you should probably shut up for a while. Not as a matter of censorship but, again, of basic decency.
Pandemic misinformation's most lasting damage is not that those that promote it might face public criticism or that an enormous for-profit corporation might face contractual headaches. Pandemic misinformation's most lasting damage is that it causes people to die. It causes people to act in unsafe ways, believing themselves to be safer than they really are because, after all, an entertainer they like suggested that they would be. Some of the people who do the unsafe thing will then die. It will be no skin off the entertainer's nose, and no skin off the noses of any of his guests, and God knows the accounting department will not give a damn about it or even hear about it, but some of the people who follow the interesting but wrong advice… Will. Die.
That is the part that Joe Rogan, professional talker, still seems oblivious to. Rogan says he is "not trying to be controversial," but nobody is charging him with being edgy. They are pointing out that suggesting a false cure to COVID-19 infected fans or broadcasting "interesting" conversations that feature false information or grossly overinflated supposed vaccination dangers will cause some subset of listeners to die.
Just as Donald Trump's momentary infatuation with one early pandemic faux-cure resulted in a couple self-treating with aquarium chemicals, Rogan's meandering conversations through the shallow parts of the pandemic's fever swamps are validating fake cures and fake paranoias that cause his audience to misjudge pandemic risks in life-threatening ways.
That is the part that all concerned should be most focused on, rather than damage to personal reputations or to Spotify's music offerings. At some point, it would be nice to hear that both Rogan and his sponsoring company are put out about the possibility of killing people, rather than issuing statements apologizing for being seen as "controversial."
Spotify's own policies seem crafted, as most large-company media policies are, with a focus on plausible deniability rather than ye olde basic decency. The most explicit of hoaxes are banned, and everything else remains fair game.
Spotify's Sunday-published response to the controversy largely ignores the causing people to die part, and instead frames the issue around censorship rather than pandemic death counts.
Now that both Rogan and his sponsors are both acknowledging that misinformation about a deadly pandemic might be bad, whether it is interesting or not, there is a dead-certain way to judge whether anyone involved truly gives a damn about the potentially causing people to die parts of it. Apologies and policies and all the rest don't enter into it—those are actions that focus solely on self-preservation. They are inherently self-serving.
What is the one thing to do if you learn you have accidentally spread false information that runs a very real risk of killing people who believe it? You fix it. You don't apologize for it and promise to do better: You fix it.
If Rogan wants to patch up his interesting show so that it will feature fewer incidents of host and guests spouting false and deadly misinformation, there is more than enough money involved to do it. Spotify should not need to put "content warnings" on Rogan's show: He can do it himself. If misinformation is spouted, return the next day—or the next hour—with an on-air explanation of how you botched things and what the truth is.
As a cheap example: "It turns out that doctors have been studying ivermectin's effects and it doesn't do a damn thing to help COVID-19 patients" is easy to say, there are plenty of guests who will be interesting while explaining it, and it may prevent some American, somewhere, from going to a farm supply store to fetch a tube of livestock dewormer to suck on.
Just do that. Every time. Perhaps booking guests who are making names for themselves with "controversial" falsehoods make for "interesting" interviews, but perhaps even the barest amount of vetting beforehand would identify which were already known for making false claims and which had a shred of credibility to their name.
We are not children here. We all know perfectly well that the tradeoff Rogan and Spotify are bargaining for is one that trades the most gain for the least work, and if slapping a content warning on misinformation is sufficient to continue exchanging "interesting" hoaxes for a slow stream of pandemic deaths, a la Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson, without too much legal jeopardy, then that is all that will happen.
But in terms of not causing listeners to die, there is only one fix and all the rest is sideshow while we wait to see if that one fix will happen.
If a guest promotes false information, say so.
If Rogan himself promotes false information, correct it.
There is a world of guests willing to be "interesting" in ways that do not endanger human lives; perhaps the show might focus on them, instead?
There is a reason why we generally look to medical professionals to tell us how to not die of certain diseases, rather than Guy We Found On Internet; have we learned, yet, what the reason is?
This is the problem with any show that seeks an audience while blowing off responsibility. It is inherently crooked; Joe Rogan might think he is entertaining his viewers, but he is instead using them as playthings. His goal is to act out scenarios in front of them; whether any of it results in injury is something that would haunt a decent person at night but would glance off most others, and the larger the paycheck the more effectively those consequences can be warded off. Still doesn't make it right, though.
We don't need apologies, we don't need explanations, we don't need legal statements or blame-shifting content warnings. Joe Rogan's show has continually spread misinformation that has helped to promote pandemic death for the sake of being interesting and collecting a large paycheck.
Either that continues or it doesn't, and nobody involved can go back to pretending it's not their fault. Fix it, every single day—or don't.