President-elect Donald Trump’s historic political comeback this year was partly driven by the GOP’s unprecedented outreach on alternative media platforms.
A three-hour appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, a two-hour interview with Elon Musk on X, and a 60-minute conversation with influencer Theo Von was voters’ standard media fare from Trump during the 2024 election cycle. They all garnered more views than Trump’s appearances on cable news. Trump’s sitdowns with Rogan and Musk also captured far more engagement than the debate showdown between him and Vice President Kamala Harris, which garnered over 67 million views.
His strategy came as alternative media, which is oftentimes composed of long-form content, including podcasts, has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, with attention spans reportedly declining, how is it that many people find long-form media so compelling?
“It’s possible what we see in podcasters, particularly those having ‘fireside chat-like’ conversations in an environment where the people are just like us, sharing our values and acting in ways we would normally act, that we connect and therefore trust them and will learn from them,” Chris Lipp, a professor of communications at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business told Newsweek.
Mainstream media outlets conduct interviews that are typically constrained to just a few minutes, forcing people to dilute complex topics into quick soundbites. Media anchors are also under constraints to stay on certain, typically predetermined topics, limiting their freedom to conduct wide-ranging and thoughtful interviews.
In contrast, the long-form element grounding Rogan’s podcast and similar venues is so successful partly because they are free from interruptions and time constraints and allow viewers to gain a more intimate look into the interviewee’s life and outlook — their story, according to experts.
On Rogan’s show, for example, Trump talked about his love for wrestling and seeing the Lincoln bedroom at the White House for the first time. During an appearance with Von that racked up millions of views, voters saw Trump offer rare comments on his brother’s struggle with alcohol addiction. Subsequent clips of him learning about cocaine addiction from Von’s struggle with drugs went viral.
On @TheoVon, President Trump explains how his brother Fred’s alcohol addiction influenced him to never touch drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. pic.twitter.com/xyLD1m414R
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 20, 2024
“Mainstream media may carry the perception that our words are prepared, undermining our ability to convey personal power. Whereas in unedited live engagement, we have the opportunity to speak in a way perceived as authentic and therefore powerful,” said Lipp.
Experts say the psychology behind attention spans plays a key role in explaining why hourslong podcasts and similar alternative media forms can be successful, even as legacy media fight to hold viewers’ focus for a handful of seconds.
The fast-paced nature of the modern media cycle, which is designed to capture people’s attention for a few seconds before moving on to the next item, creates the “popcorn brain,” where people are constantly “seeking and receiving new stimuli,” said psychologist Dannielle Haig.
This type of media structure erodes concentration and attention spans, with Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist and the chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, saying traditional media platforms are now fighting to keep people on the screen for more than a minute. The average attention span on any screen decreased from “two and a half minutes on average” in 2004 to roughly 47 seconds in the past few years, said Mark.
“TV and film shot lengths have decreased over the years. They started out much longer. They now average about four seconds a shot length. That’s on average … . So we’ve become accustomed to seeing very fast shot lengths when we look at TV and film. Even commercials have shortened in length. Commercials used to be much longer. Now it’s not uncommon to see six-second commercials, even shorter than that,” she added.
While bite-sized interviews, programs, and shows encourage declining attention spans, leaving viewers constantly seeking new stimuli, long-form content can stimulate extended engagement.
This is partly because spending longer amounts of time on a topic or person allows people to follow a story, which viewers love.
“The biggest appeal of long-form content is storyline,” a 2022 survey found.
People spend “more time on longer stories than on shorter ones,” according to a 2016 study from the Pew Research Center.
Nielsen data covering media viewership during the 2024 election cycle back up the idea that people are more attracted to the long-form storyline form than the legacy news snippet-based structure.
As they watch appearances on the average Sunday morning shows, viewers typically see the opposite of a compelling storyline. Instead, anchors must rush through questions to cope with time constraints, making it nearly impossible to give viewers a glimpse of the human side of politicians or hear about their views on sensitive policy topics that could take hours to unravel.
Here’s a 4-minute clip of President Trump and Joe Rogan talking about UFC fighting like two buddies at a bar having a few beers.
You can’t fake this; President Trump is one of us.
The president of the people pic.twitter.com/pD6sVxwvj3— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) October 26, 2024
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The media analytics firm ratings for the major cable networks’ news broadcasts in September revealed Fox News received an average of 2.5 million viewers for its prime-time news broadcast, MSNBC 1.4 million, and CNN 853,000.
Meanwhile, Trump’s hourslong interview on The Joe Rogan Experience stacked up more views than all the prime-time news broadcasts for all the major cable and network TV stations combined, according to a Newsweek report.