Most of what we’re arguing about in the Rogan versus. Neil Young dispute is where the Overton window should be set on questioning COVID vaccines, no?
Only most. There’s also a question in the mix about how much people with strong disagreements should be expected to tolerate having to share the same virtual or physical space with each other. If you found out that your least favorite celebrity is a regular customer of American Airlines, should that lead you to boycott American?
How about if American Airlines reached a $100 million endorsement deal with that celebrity, which is the proper analogy to Spotify’s arrangement with Rogan? Young’s music is still available on platforms that host vaccine misinformation but not ones whose exclusive podcast star has lately been hosting vaccine skeptics.
For most of us, I think, it would boil down to why we hate that celebrity. If it’s for no better reason than that we find them personally irritating, then no, we almost certainly wouldn’t boycott over it. Boycotts are a hassle. They should be undertaken to protest only truly outrageous behavior.
But what if we disliked that celebrity because he or she was a Holocaust denier? In that case, we might understandably decide, “No more American Airlines for me.”
That’s what I mean about the Overton window. Is Joe Rogan’s willingness to credulously interview anti-vaxxers more like the irritating-celebrity example or more like the Holocaust-denier example?
It’s not just Rogan versus Young at this point, incidentally. Joni Mitchell also called on Spotify to remove her music over the weekend in solidarity with Young. Nils Lofgren followed suit. (Young and Mitchell each had polio as children, making vaccine skepticism a personal issue for them.) By Sunday, fearful of a dam break among artists, Spotify was scrambling to do damage control. The company announced that it’ll add an advisory to content dealing with COVID along with a link to its COVID information hub. And it said it would make public its internal policies on COVID-themed content, which allegedly permit claims like “the vaccines kill people” but not “the vaccines were designed to kill people.”
Rogan also posted a video responding to the controversy. Take 10 minutes to watch this and you’ll see why people like and trust him.
The key bit:
“These podcasts are very strange because they’re just conversations,” Rogan says. “And oftentimes I have no idea what I’m going to talk about until I sit down and talk to people. And that’s why some of my ideas are not that prepared or fleshed out because I’m literally having them in real time, but I do my best and they’re just conversations, and I think that’s also the appeal of the show. It’s one of the things that makes it interesting. So I want to thank Spotify for being so supportive during this time, and I’m very sorry that this is happening to them and that they’re taking so much from it.”…
“I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view,” he says. “I don’t want to just show the contrary opinion to what the narrative is. I want to show all kinds of opinions so we can all figure out what’s going on and not just about COVID, about everything, about health, about fitness, wellness, the state of the world itself.”
Rogan’s novelty is that, uniquely among major media figures these days, he seems to approach his subjects with sincere intellectual curiosity. There’s no agenda. If he learns that a well-credentialed doctor is skeptical of the vaccines, he thinks, “He’d be interesting to talk to,” and he books him. And he’s congenial to his critics. Someone on Twitter last night pointed to the clip above and wondered how Tucker Carlson would have handled this issue. Likely answer: With defiance, pugnacity, and almost certainly some gratuitous insults about Young being a has-been. You get none of that from Rogan. On the contrary, he stresses how much of a fan he is. And he resolves to do better. There’s a generosity of spirit in how he approaches others.
That’s confounding to the average American media consumer in 2022. And it leaves the people who want him deplatformed seeming that much more mean-spirited by comparison. Why can’t a guy who’s curious about a topic have a conversation with someone about it in good faith, to the edification of millions of listeners?
But that gets us back to the Overton window. To borrow from another recent podcast controversy, imagine if Rogan had on several “experts” who insisted there’s no persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. There are no camps, there’s no oppression. Insofar as anyone is being housed at a “reeducation facility,” they’re there voluntarily, because they admire the teachings of Xi Jinping just that much.
And imagine if, instead of challenging those experts, Rogan’s general attitude during the interviews was congenial and credulous, as is his wont. “Huh, I didn’t know that.” “You make an interesting point.” He’s just doing his own research, right?
And then imagine that some artist decided they didn’t want to be part of a platform that would pay a guy $100 million to platform Xinjiang genocide deniers. Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine that since so few artists seem to care about the Xinjiang genocide. But we’re imagining things here, so imagine it. How much would we fault that artist for deeming Rogan’s content beyond the pale and wanting to disassociate from Spotify because of it?
This is what I mean about a struggle over where to set the Overton window on vaccine skepticism. Most would say that questioning the safety and efficacy of year-old pharmaceuticals isn’t comparable to questioning a historical event as well-documented as the Holocaust or the Xinjiang genocide. But if Rogan or some other podcast host who’s exclusive to Spotify did go down the road of Holocaust denial or inviting outspoken racists on because he was “interested in their perspective,” other artists boycotting the company would seem more reasonable to us. When you make the choice to interview someone — unless the point is to aggressively challenge them on dubious claims — you’re implicitly signaling that you think that perspective belongs inside the Overton window of respectable opinion worthy of consideration. We wouldn’t say that about Holocaust denial but many would say so, I think, of vaccine skepticism.
But many wouldn’t. And Rogan ended up on the fault line between the two groups, led there by heartfelt curiosity.
Anyway, for all the hype about the him-or-me ultimatum that Neil Young gave Spotify, I don’t think it was a true ultimatum. Young was under no illusions that the company would side with him against their $100 million man. I think he’s simply in the second group I mentioned, which believes the science is settled about the vaccines and that to continue to promote the opinions of people who discourage vaccine uptake is immoral when tragedies like this continue to happen. Young was willing to put real money on the line to make that point. We’ll see if Rogan’s conciliation woos him back.
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