Anti-Trump podcast MeidasTouch is rivaling Joe Rogan for views : NPR

Ben Meiselas is pacing in entrance of his dwelling within the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains in Los Angeles, speaking on the cellphone with one hand, a Starbucks espresso cup within the different.

He wraps his name. He has 588 unread textual content messages. However he is enthusiastic about one thing else: his frenetic YouTube schedule.

“We may have already had a video up at 4 a.m., 5:30 a.m., 7, and eight:30 is coming,” Meiselas stated.

As he enters his home, three Maltese terriers scuttle round. Meiselas walks to his workplace behind glass doorways. An elevated laptop computer sits on a desk, a digital camera is affixed to a tripod and vivid lights stand on both aspect. That is the place he does his each day dissections of President Trump’s actions and phrases. It is all off the cuff, a ability he honed throughout his earlier profession as a trial lawyer.

“The perfect opening statements I’ve ever given weren’t scripted. The perfect closing arguments weren’t scripted,” he stated.

He knocks out a 14-minute video riffing on the day’s information, principally Trump-bashing commentary. He sends it to his crew to edit. Then he grabs his cellphone to workshop a title in a bunch chat with MeidasTouch staffers. He settles on “Trump has DISASTER THURSDAY as WALLS CLOSE IN,” abiding by the all-caps fashion that has develop into a signature of movies by MeidasTouch, the prolific progressive media operation he runs along with his two brothers.

It isn’t misplaced on Meiselas that Trump, his major goal, made the identical all-caps textual content fashion well-known on social media.

“You need to combat fireplace with fireplace today,” stated Meislas with amusing.

‘I feel we want the alternative of Joe Rogan’

MeidasTouch stands out in a web-based streaming world dominated by conservatives and what’s develop into generally known as “the manosphere,” a group of on-line content material creators geared towards male audiences and led by Joe Rogan.

It is one of many few left-leaning video podcasts topping YouTube’s rankings, and it has even, at occasions, dethroned Rogan’s coveted No. 1 place on the platform’s podcast charts. That is prompted some to wonder if Meiselas will develop into the Rogan of the left, a query he has uninterested in however solutions anyway.

“Folks needed me to be that,” he stated. “I feel we want the alternative of Joe Rogan.”

Although Meiselas claims he is much less divisive than Rogan, the MeidasTouch method shouldn’t be geared toward bridging political variations. It is unapologetically partisan, like an amped-up MSNBC. However Meiselas rejects the comparability. He says he does not share any DNA with cable information, declaring that he does not maintain debates with the political opposition. That is by design. Individuals are sick of cable information political roundtables, he says.

“They nonetheless assume that individuals wish to see the break up display screen. Here is the left. Here is the proper. Watch them combat. Let’s go to a industrial break. Folks do not wish to see that, I feel, any extra,” Meiselas stated.

Tens of millions do nonetheless eat cable information every single day, but MeidasTouch is a formidable competitor.

Figures from YouTube Meiselas shared with NPR present that the MeidasTouch YouTube channel attracts round 300 million views every month, across the similar as Fox Information and MSNBC obtain on YouTube month-to-month.

Meiselas and his brothers, Brett (a former video editor for The Ellen DeGeneres Present) and Jordy (who beforehand labored in advertising and marketing), together with about 30 different contributors — together with former Trump lawyer turned critic Michael Cohen — pump out movies on YouTube about each 90 minutes and blanket different platforms, together with Instagram, TikTok and Substack, with their content material.

Different well-liked progressive media firms together with Pod Save America, Extra Good Union and the Younger Turks are additionally capitalizing on the second Trump presidency, however whether or not it is the Meiselas brothers’ affable personalities, the sheer quantity of content material, their knack for working the algorithms, or some undetermined mixture, MeidasTouch is the pacesetter of the pack.

Meiselas says viewers take pleasure in the way in which he zooms in on the customarily rambling asides of Trump’s speeches — what Trump has described as his “weave” — which Meiselas says a lot of the mainstream media ignores.

“They’d say, ‘Donald Trump is speaking about making issues inexpensive.’ And I might watch these speeches and be like, ‘Actually did you watch these speeches that I simply watched?’ That is not what he stated. Possibly that was thirty seconds. Why’d you do his work for him? You edited the speech to offer him the most effective 30-second soundbite,” he stated. “That was the craziest speech I’ve ever seen.”

From political advertisements to streaming powerhouse

Initially from Lengthy Island, Meiselas, 40, the eldest of the brothers, was in his authorized profession drawn to high-profile instances that thrust him into the highlight. He represented former NFL quarterback and racial injustice activist Colin Kaepernick, and he filed a class-action lawsuit for attendees of the ill-planned Fyre Pageant.

Throughout Trump’s first time period, within the midst of the pandemic, the brothers shaped a political motion committee and launched political advertisements mocking Trump that went viral on-line. Finally, they morphed the political operation right into a rapid-response anti-Trump information group, which is now being supercharged within the president’s second time period.

MeidasTouch is raking in hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in promoting income a yr — Meiselas would not say precisely how a lot — by tapping into an viewers of annoyed progressives, a few of whom really feel deserted by conventional media.

“The viewers is transferring in these instructions. And quite a lot of mainstream information organizations simply will not be outfitted to attraction to them on the sorts of phrases as these folks would possibly need,” stated Invoice Grueskin, a professor at Columbia College Faculty of Journalism and a former editor at The Wall Road Journal.

In Trump’s first time period, retailers together with The Washington Put up and MSNBC obtained what analysts known as a “Trump bump” for confronting the president and his insurance policies. This time round, on-line streamers are rising as the largest winners, Grueskin stated.

“There are simply a number of sources of shock every single day,” he stated. “And outrage is a really highly effective driver of subscriptions, of loyalty, of individuals’s time.”

On high of that, as a result of on-line streamers will not be sure to the journalism trade’s requirements of equity and neutrality, they will clarify and touch upon the information in edgier and extra livid methods than most mainstream retailers, stated Edward Wasserman, journalism professor on the Graduate Faculty of Journalism on the College of California, Berkeley.

“I do not assume the media are ready to do this. They’ll present the ammunition for that form of assault on Trump, however they cannot actually give it a voice the way in which these podcast folks can.”

Meiselas views his position within the information ecosystem in considerably lofty phrases — not simply as an up to date model of a political shock jock, however as an unbiased voice informing the general public concerning the happenings in Washington.

He argues audiences will nonetheless flock to his media outfit lengthy after Trump leaves workplace, even when the president is now the central driver of his enterprise.

“I do not assume that the thought of being up to date and consuming information and being educated is ever going to go away. Sadly, there’s at all times going to be threats to democracy, to peoples’ freedoms, to peoples’ rights,” Meiselas stated, sounding like the previous civil rights lawyer he’s. “There’s the day-to-day response of making an attempt to place out fires, however then there’s the generational constructing. We’re making an attempt to maintain this community constructing.”