According to a study from Media Matters for America, right-leaning shows are dominating the online podcasting and streaming-show ecosystem, and their reach stretches across a variety of platforms and genres.

WNYC's On the Media interviewed Media Matters' Kayla Gogarty about the study. Listen to the show's hosts discuss how right-leaning content and guests are disproportionately seeping into supposedly nonpolitical spaces, including sports, entertainment, and comedy, and their narratives are reaching increasingly broader audiences.

Here is a transcript of part of the discussion:

BROOKE GLADSTONE (HOST): From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

MICAH LOEWINGER (HOST): And I'm Micah Loewinger. So this week, we decided to do something a little bit different for the show. We had the idea of confining our media consumption to the media of the far right. I mean, really marinate in it for 12 hours straight.

GLADSTONE: It wasn't meant to be a data-driven exercise, but rather an anecdotal, experiential one. We wanted to see what issues were reverberating in that space. We wanted to get, in those 12 hours, a visceral sense of the way those media makers depict the world in which we all live.

LOEWINGER: We've known for a long time how influential the media of MAGA are, but Molly Rosen, the producer behind this segment, talked to people who have gathered that data. Hey, Molly.

MOLLY ROSEN (PRODUCER): Hi, Micah. Hi, Brooke.

LOEWINGER: What did they say?

ROSEN: So this is what I heard from Kayla Gogarty, who's a research director at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.

KAYLA GOGARTY (RESEARCH DIRECTOR, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): We found that right-leaning online shows had nearly five times the total following on streaming and social media platforms compared to left-leaning online shows.

ROSEN: And then I also spoke with a computational scientist and UPenn professor, Duncan Watts.

DUNCAN WATTS (DIRECTOR, COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE LAB, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA): People have been talking about the right-wing media ecosystem and how it's trouncing the left, and we actually see a lot of evidence for that in this data. If you look at the sort of top producers, they're mostly right-leaning.

ROSEN: So that gives some sense for why we're doing this segment. Micah, tell me what media you're going to be looking at.

LOEWINGER: Making my Rumble account.

ROSEN: Rumble is a right-wing alternative to YouTube.

LOEWINGER: I'm making my screen name on Rumble OTMKING420. 

ROSEN: Perfect. 

LOEWINGER: I'll start off by watching some of this stuff. Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, Dan Bongino, whatever. And then I'll let the algorithm take hold and see where it takes me.

GLADSTONE: Basically, I'm going to be listening to prominent podcasts. I mean, we've been focused so much on facts more than zeitgeist, and I think that at some point, we have to expose ourselves in order to get some understanding. Will we, after 12 hours? I'd say the prospect of that is zero to nil, but maybe we can get a sense about how a particular story this week is being told through that lens. It's like dipping a toe into the sea.

ROSEN: I think we're ready to go. Does everyone have their energy drinks, coffees?

LOEWINGER: Yes. I'm ready to get started.

GLADSTONE: So the three of us talked periodically throughout the day. Our listening day is Tuesday, but those podcasts don't appear first thing in the morning, so I started by listening to Monday's edition of the Charlie Kirk podcast. 

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GLADSTONE: Media Matters says Charlie Kirk draws 18.6 million followers across several platforms. And one of his, and not just his, dominant themes is that the federal government is rife with corruption.

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LOEWINGER: So I did end up clicking on a video by Benny Johnson, who is a big right-wing influencer.

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LOEWINGER: Basically, what he does is he poses a question, and then he, like, lets it hang there before quickly moving on to a new topic, then posing another question and so on, inviting us to wonder if and how it might all fit together.

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LOEWINGER: The emotional truth is blasted, and then the little bit of plausible, like, deniability at the end. It is effective, I think, at conveying a message while not breaking the law. 

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LOEWINGER: It is kind of driving me crazy. And it is making me feel quite depressed that you might only get your information from this, and you would be this angry, this distrustful, this fearful. I mean, if you watch CNN and MSNBC, you also become fearful and angry. I don't feel like that is like unique to Rumble.

GLADSTONE: I agree.

LOEWINGER: But just the level of paranoia and the particular villains that are chosen, it just makes me feel bad for anyone who would embody this emotional space.

GLADSTONE: Yeah, and it's not even based on what is happening, but what could happen or what did happen, we think, but no proof. You know, all of this corruption, all of this chaos, all of this lying, there's no -- nothing to back it up.

ROSEN: So it sounds like four hours in, you don't feel better about the world that we live in.

LOEWINGER: Was that ever the objective?

ROSEN: Well, you know, it could be, like, all sunny in the MAGA-verse.

GLADSTONE: That's true, but it's not. Because as many social critics have noted, it is designed around an us versus them paradigm. You can't live in a happy world if you have a them to worry about, and that is what defines the MAGA universe. You don't need to go any further than Donald Trump who created it.

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LOEWINGER: Throughout the day, I heard a lot of this style of conspiracy theory rhetoric, a sort of tacit reference to the matrix. You know, take the red pill and you can see the hidden forces that control your lives, that kind of thing. But for all the talk of brave truth-telling, none of these hidden forces were unmasked or identified. The specifics were always just tantalizingly out of view, like Candace Owens' theory about the secret puppet master controlling Donald Trump.

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LOEWINGER: Who are the bad people? We never learn. I think the idea is if you really want to know the truth, you have to keep listening and watching and following along. Brooke, what did you learn from this 12-hour MAGA media experiment?

GLADSTONE: Nothing that revelatory. I was expecting to hear that cutting taxes is great for the economy, which history has repeatedly shown is simply untrue, that President Trump is saving the economy, even as the financial markets lurch, consumer confidence wanes. And, of course, I heard that Biden is more responsible than Putin for Ukraine's desperate plight. Most of all, I heard that the left is more corrupt, more violent, more debauched, and more dangerous than our country can sustain. Inside those studios, it seems no serious attention is paid to the chaos outside, but there is abundant clarity within: We are at war. You're either with us, soldiers fueled by moral conviction and righteous masculine energy, or you're with them, snobs with bogus bleeding hearts, enfeebled by womanish impulses like tolerance and empathy that corrode the true spirit of the nation. Buckle up, everybody.