Oh, I think he understands. Constantly criticizing mainstream media for low standards while having far lower standards yourself is the kind of thing that you have to put significant ongoing effort into rationalizing.
Consumers of alt media can do it thoughtlessly. Producers? I'm not convinced.
How are we measuring that? Firstly, as a nitpick, the mainstream media these days is Russel Brand. He has an audience comparable to a group like CNN. Possibly slightly larger.
Secondly, the quality of the podcasters is generally better on net than the big media companies. They tend not to be gung-ho all-weather war supporters for example. People like Brand might get a lot of details wrong but have more coherent takes on big issues.
Thirdly, and related to secondly, the podcasters tend to take less money from big entrenched interests in the military-industrial complex or big pharma. They rely less on being spoon fed access to powerful people. It is easier to follow their incentives and style than work out what a media company is trying to push this week.
Journalism. Reaching out to involved parties for comment, boots on the ground, making retractions, reserving judgement, citing sources, seeking and contextualizing opposition and/or expertise, making an attempt to prefer observation over interpretation, pushing back on wild claims, etc etc etc.
I was acutely aware of partisan bias in MSM but I didn't appreciate just how much they actually did get right until the deluge of "MSM sux, here's what THEY don't want you to know" replaced it.
So you’re making assumptions of Brand’s content that you haven’t seen in years? What are you basing your assumptions on? What the journalists tell you? Seems like a pretty disingenuous take.
I would question your third point in the spirit of doubting narratives. This is the podcasters' narrative, but intuitively a podcaster has less scale and therefore is much cheaper to be incentivised towards specific narratives.
Oh, sure. It costs nothing to buy off a single podcaster. There are blatant shills all over the place.
Still better than cable news. CNN literally hired Clapper as a presenter - you couldn't pull a stunt like that the way most podcasts are structured. There'd have to many opportunities for people to press him on the Orwellean spy system that he helped set up. I don't recall any support for domestic mass surveillance among the US voting public.
Compare that to someone in the CIA buying off Joe Rogan - he might sell out some day, but if he got so bad he was offering softball interviews to the likes of Clapper then he's not going to be able to keep the same pull he does now. People have a distaste for that level of blatant propaganda.
Consumers of alt media can do it thoughtlessly. Producers? I'm not convinced.