Jon Stewart loves Neil Young‘s music. But when asked on this week’s The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast what he thought about the flap resulting from the legendary rocker removing his music from Spotify in protest of what he said was COVID-19 misinformation being spread on the streamer’s Joe Rogan Experience pod, the former late-night host said he thinks it’s well intentioned, but off base and, frankly, a lot of “overblown rhetoric” and a “mistake.”
“First of all, I love Neil Young and I love Neil Young’s music,” said Stewart. “But the idea that it was worth $4 billion in value to Spotify caught me off guard.” What the comedian appeared to be referring to were reports that Spotify lost that amount in valuation after Young demanded his music be taken down because of the harm he thinks Rogan is doing by hosting vaccine and lockdown skeptics on the show, on which he has also touted disproven and medically dubious coronavirus cures. Billboard reported that the dramatic dip in Spotify’s valuation was likely not due to Rogan or Young, but a function of investor fears over the growth opportunities in streaming companies.
“Don’t leave. Don’t abandon. Don’t censor … Engage,” Stewart said as a blanket statement about the flap, which has included pledges from Young’s former bandmates — Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and David Crosby — to take their collective and solo songs off Spotify. There were also similar requests from Joni Mitchell, India.Arie, Failure, Nils Lorgren and others.
“I’m not saying it’s always going to work out fruitfully,” Stewart added. “But I am always of the mindset that engagement, and especially with someone like a Joe Rogan, who is not, in my mind, an ideologue in any way.” As an example, Stewart pointed to a Rogan episode from January in which Australian broadcaster Josh Szeps pushed back hard on the host’s claim that a rare heart issue — myocarditis — has been linked to some children who’ve gotten the vaccine, and is more deadly than getting COVID. Szeps fact-checked the host in real time, and Rogan later tweeted that Szeps had made him “look dumb” during the chat by pointing out the incorrect information Rogan was stating as fact.
“If you are an ideologue or if you are a dishonest person that is the moment,” Stewart said, giving Rogan credit for admitting he was wrong. “And that to me says, ‘Oh, that’s a person that you can engage with.’ And so I think all the overblown rhetoric about him … you’re a musician, like how much misinformation is spread by — like [vaccine and lockdown skeptic] Eric Clapton is on platforms that you’re on and he’s a f—in’ psycho. So do you remove yourself from every platform?”
Rogan took a week off in the midst of the controversy over Young’s move, promising that before returning on Friday (Feb. 4), that he would look for more experts with “differing opinions.”
His point, he said, is we all exist on a planet filled with “egregious misinformation that’s purposeful and hateful,” but that the moderation of those voices is a credit to the platforms they appear on. In the midst of the backlash, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek revealed updated platform rules and a new approach to dealing with COVID-19 information on the service, including adding a dedicated content advisory to podcast episodes that contain discussion about the virus.
“But this overreaction to Rogan, I think, is a mistake,” said Stewart. He cautioned that Rogan’s rambling, sometimes four-hour conversations that are sometimes spiked with misinformation and the platforming of people whose ideas many consider to be incorrect, “but to single that out as something so egregious as to have to be … I think there are dishonest, bad actors in the world. And identifying those is so much more important to me.”
To hammer home his point, Stewart said that even if you take your music off Spotify, what about networks that run their shows on the same providers that carry such “willful purveyor[s] of misinformation” as Fox News? Should they pull all their programming off Comcast or TimeWarner? “I’ve been in his position on a much smaller scale,” Stewart said of similar dilemmas he’s faced when confronted about not pushing back hard enough on someone controversial he’d given a platform to in the past.
His most pointed example was the questions he faced about why he repeatedly hosted former hard right Fox personality Bill O’Reilly on his Comedy Central show. “Well, I have people in my family who are to the right of him and I still talk to them, so why not talk to him?” he said, pushing for more questioning, not less. “You have to engage. Like, how do you not engage with people? The whole point of engagement, is hopefully, clarification … it might be a fool’s errand, but I will never give up on engagement.”
His advice: Engage on Spotify and “neuter the algorithms … that’s where the true pain is.”
Watch Stewart discuss the situation below.