By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2024-10-31 17:11:24 | Updated at 2024-10-31 19:30:03
2 hours ago
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan is demanding answers from Google for allegedly censoring Joe Rogan’s interview with former President Donald Trump earlier this week.
Jordan (R-Ohio) cited reporting from The Post about concerns that Rogan’s three-hour podcast with Trump on Friday was buried in YouTube’s searches and did not appear on its trending page.
“Americans deserve access to political speech, especially in the closing weeks before an election,” Jordan wrote in a Wednesday letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, whose company owns YouTube.
“Given the company’s recent history of censorship, including at the behest of the Biden-Harris Administration, YouTube’s censorship of former President Trump is particularly troubling.”
On Monday, YouTube admitted to the issue but did not explain what went awry.
“For some searches on Monday the original 3-hour interview didn’t appear prominently,” YouTube explained in a statement. “Short excerpts uploaded by the Joe Rogan channel appeared, but we know it was frustrating for users looking to find the full video. We’ve worked to resolve this.”
Jordan, who also chairs the subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government, demanded YouTube provide a staff briefing about the ordeal.
The Ohio Republican also wants information about potential Google search “elevation of anti-Trump stories about the interview.”
Jordan rattled off a list of questions for the company, including who was responsible for the buried result, how executives at the company learned about the situation, whether the alleged “censorship” was manual or automated, whether that company had correspondence with the Biden-Harris administration about the matter and more.
His team is demanding a response by Nov. 13, just a day after the House of Representatives is poised to gavel back into session after its lengthy recess.
The Post has reached out to Google for comment about Jordan’s letter.
As of press time, Rogan’s sit-down with Trump has garnered over 41 million views on YouTube and is one of the most watched interviews he’s done to date.
The interview now shows up at the top of search results.
Rogan acknowledged there was “an issue with searching for this episode on YouTube” and provided a link to the episode on X.
The podcast king, who tops the charts on Spotify and Apple, shot down speculation of censorship last Friday when his podcast dropped, noting that he delisted it briefly because of a Spotify “glitch.”
Rogan’s interview with Trump came years after the podcast king suggested he would not want to interview the former president due to concerns he wasn’t well-equipped for that and that he didn’t want to help him.
Trump has been blitzing the podcast world during the tail-end of his 2024 campaign, courting interviews that typically entail less aggressive questioning than traditional news outlets.
The GOP presidential nominee has revealed that his youngest son Barron played a key role in handpicking some of the podcasts that he’s done.
Rogan has revealed that he had talks with the Harris-Walz campaign about an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, though that fell apart because of his insistence that it be conducted in studio and be longer than the one hour her team pitched.
“We talked with Rogan and his team about the podcast. Unfortunately, it isn’t going to work out right now because of the scheduling of this … period of the campaign,” Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson Ian Sams told Reuters.
