“The Morning Wire” Podcast Is Easy Listening Right Wing Media
By Michael Lovito, January 17, 2023
Since at least the dawn of Fox News, conservative media has gone to great lengths to differentiate itself from the mainstream, not only by putting its own ideological spin on the news of the day, but also by presenting the news through different mediums, styles, and (often hotter) tones. Every once in a while, though, conservative news organizations realize that the more neutral, less combative tone of mainstream media isn’t about ideology or stylistic inertia. It’s about giving audiences what they want and being successful.
This seems to be the lesson gleaned by the creators of “The Morning Wire,” the year-and-a-half old daily news podcast launched by The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing’s budding conservative media empire. According to The Righting’s data, “The Morning Wire” is the fastest growing conservative podcast, recording a 67% increase in subscribers between Q4 2021 and Q4 2022.
There’s no precise way to measure how or why “The Morning Wire” is such a success, but one thing that is clear is that, unlike fellow Daily Wire podcasts like “The Ben Shapiro Show” and “The Matt Walsh Show,” it doesn’t go out of its way to court controversy. Indeed, it gives its listeners as gentle a morning news update as possible. The show certainly has a point of view, but it inserts it subtly, avoiding the open provocations of other conservative podcasts. It doesn’t strike back against the mainstream media by loudly railing it against it. Instead, it tries to imitate it.
The Soothing Sound of Conservatism
“The Morning Wire” launched on July 19, 2021, promising, like most conservative media ventures, to offer an alternative to a media establishment its creators view as biased and manipulative.
“Trust in the media is at an all-time low, and there’s a reason,” Daily Wire Editor-in-chief John Bickley, one of the podcast’s hosts, says in the show’s trailer. “Endless virtue signaling. Manufactured outrage. Feelings over facts. Finally, there’s an alternative, where you can get the facts on stories that matter to you.”
Despite the podcast’s iconoclastic posturing, “The Morning Wire” has the sound and feel of many of its mainstream counterparts, such as the New York Times’ “The Daily” and NPR’s “Up First.” Backed by a breezy funk instrumental, Bickley and his co-host, Georgia Howe, deliver the news in a placid, almost soothing tone that sounds perfectly tailored for a morning commute. The podcast’s fourteen-minute runtime (plus its four-minute afternoon updates) makes it ideal for on-the-go listening. Even two of the show’s sponsors, Black Rifle Coffee and Genucel Skincare, evoke a morning routine. But while “The Morning Wire’s” packaging may be inoffensive, the podcast still attempts to gently guide its listeners to a right-wing perspective.
A Clear Point of View
“The Morning Wire” doesn’t just cover political stories – like “The Daily,” the lead segment of its January 12, 2023 episode covered the severe rainstorms in California and featured a straightforward interview with Matthew Cappucci of the Capital Weather Gang – but when it does, it goes to lengths to introduce conservative talking points. The podcast’s coverage of the invasion of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court and National Congress buildings by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro focused less on the election fraud conspiracy theories stoked by Bolsonaro, and more on why “so many Brazilians [are] afraid of the return of a socialist president” (referring to the recently inaugurated Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva). Rather than throwing to an international correspondent, Howe instead spoke to Mateo Hader, a Latin America research assistant from The Heritage Foundation who emphasized Lula’s left-wing social welfare policies and his ties to the leftist governments of Cuba and Venezuela.
Likewise, when news first broke that Joe Biden had improperly stored top secret documents in the offices of the Penn Biden Center, “The Morning Wire” brought on Andrew McCarthy, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who wrote a book alleging that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tried to rig the 2016 election against Donald Trump, for comment. Other conservative focused stories include a full-length episode about the enrollment successes of faith-based colleges and an interview with Nicholas Giordano, a former Homeland Security official who has claimed that the Chinese government has an undue amount of influence at American universities.
A New Way Forward
Despite dominating the airwaves via traditional talk radio for decades, conservatism didn’t truly make its mark on podcasts until the late 2010s. In 2016, the only conservative shows on iTunes’ top 50 News & Politics chart were rebroadcasts of Glenn Beck and Mark Levin’s radio shows. That was then. As of this writing, Ben Shapiro (4), Megyn Kelly (8), and Matt Walsh (10) all have shows charting in the top ten. In addition to Shapiro and Walsh, Candace Owens (21), Michael Knowles (34), and Andrew Klavan (49) have also carried The Daily Wire banner into the top 50.
But it’s “The Morning Wire,” currently holding the number 9 spot, that may offer a new way forward for right wing media. After years of overheated rhetoric, and with the long shadow of 2024 already darkening the sky, easy listening may be just what the times call for.
Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider. @MLovito
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“The Morning Wire” doesn’t go out of its way to court controversy. Indeed, it gives its listeners as gentle a morning news update as possible. The show certainly has a point of view, but it inserts it subtly, avoiding the open provocations of other conservative podcasts. (Image: Wikimedia)
