Item Details

title

The Fringe Goes Mainstream: Negotiating Pseudoscience on The Joe Rogan Experience

author

Shear, Sam

abstract

Comedian and UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a mainstream figure in a culture of political podcasting on YouTube and Spotify. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rogan drew scrutiny for platforming pseudoscientists, undermining the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines, endorsing the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy, and advocating for alternative treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. In this thesis, I examine three podcast episodes to understand how evidence and expertise are negotiated rhetorically in alternative spaces in order to offer credence to pseudoscience, misinformation, and conspiracy. Using a framework grounded in the rhetoric of science, I argue that expertise and evidence are discursively contested concepts with political significance. I connect these negotiations with a broader turn toward populism in the United States. An info-centric, rationalistic paradigm that neglects the rhetorical dimension of expertise and evidence misunderstands the problem posed by misinformation as predominantly epistemological, not political. As a result, the info-centric research questions asked and remedies offered in response to the problem of misinformation are both inadequate and vulnerable to exploitation.

subject

Conspiracy

Joe Rogan

Misinformation

Populism

Pseudoscience

Rhetoric

contributor

Atchison, Jarrod (advisor)

Von Burg, Ron (committee member)

Llewellyn, John (committee member)

date

2024-05-23T08:36:34Z (accessioned)

2024 (issued)

degree

Communication (discipline)

embargo

2026-05-22 (terms)

2026-05-22 (liftdate)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/109467 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis