Last weekend, the vaccine scientist Peter Hotez criticized the influential podcaster Joe Rogan for hosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., lamenting the fact that a podcast with millions of listeners lent its megaphone to a notorious spreader of vaccine misinformation.
In response, Rogan challenged Hotez to come on his show and debate RFK Jr. with no time limit, offering to donate $100,000 to charity as an incentive. Although Hotez declined, RFK Jr. graciously accepted, leading Elon Musk to muse that Hotez was scared of debate. Given the audiences that Rogan and Musk command and the following that RFK Jr. has cultivated, the tweets sparked a kind of pressure campaign that ratcheted up quickly. Within hours, their Twitter acolytes were hard at work trying to shame Hotez into saying yes. As often happens on social media, the argument went nowhere and both sides stood their ground. Still, it’s worth addressing the claim that someone ought to debate when challenged, because it invokes the heart of the democratic ideal.
Democracy depends on citizens charting society’s course via their elected leaders, and by extension, an informed electorate is better able to choose those leaders wisely. Debate is part of this process: Humans are not all-knowing, and effective discourse can sharpen our views. But not all debates are created equal, and thus not all are worth indulging. The Rogan incident is an example of how we’ve preserved the rhetoric about the value of debate even as our discourse has moved to digital platforms that undermine that value.
As a mass-communication scholar and educator who studies the social effects of our ongoing shift toward networked digital media, I think of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, seven events that unfolded over the course of nearly two months as part of the 1858 campaign to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate. They were centered on the issue of slavery in America’s westward expansion; the candidates agreed to begin with one participant making a speech for about an hour, followed by a rebuttal of about 90 minutes, and then another, half-hour response. The format demanded a lot from participants and spectators alike. By contrast, in the first of the 2020 U.S. presidential debates—there were only two—the ground rules called for a 90-minute session, during which six complex topics were given a mere 15 minutes each. Candidates had just two minutes to answer an initial question on multifaceted issues, including health care and terrorism, followed by rapid rebuttals.
As debates shifted from in-person events to ones delivered primarily through electronic media, they evolved to serve specific formats. Television is an action medium, and so production is focused on constant dance-and-pivot camera and dialogue work that doesn’t linger on anything too long. Audiences have been conditioned to crave brevity and visual excitement, and good debaters understand the nuances of the medium in ways that have permanently altered audience expectations and debate prep, the kinds of changes that have altered how audiences receive information in new channels such as streaming video or podcasts.
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A particular media type influences how messages are created and perceived. Research suggests that the same message in a photo will be processed more emotionally than text, because our brains deal with images and words differently. Messages in audio take on different characteristics when TV adds visual layers. One can win a debate on substance but lose it in the public consciousness if the message is incongruent with the audience’s medium-specific expectations.
The Rogan challenge highlights another medium-specific layer, and that is the effect of the social internet. For example, U.S. presidential debates happen simultaneously on TV and online. They are second-screen viewing for many who monitor conversation around these events on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, or elsewhere. In this case, candidate speech is being decoded and amplified in an instant social context. “Binders full of women.” The fly on Mike Pence’s head. “Such a nasty woman.” We sometimes remember these things more than the specifics of the debate because they were moments when social stickiness potentially supersedes the information.
In 2012, Mitt Romney named Russia as our chief global adversary, a statement the press perceived as a gaffe, given the war against al-Qaeda that was ongoing. In a presidential debate that year, Barack Obama responded with a zinger: “And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” From a tactics standpoint, Obama did what he had to do. He bent to a format that asked exactly this of him. The rightness or wrongness of Romney’s assertion and Obama’s reply matter less than the takeaway: How Romney’s statement landed was ultimately the result of a cultural interpretation and context more than it was about evidence or reason, even as debates are ostensibly supposed to be about the latter.
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But it’s not just that we’re chattering about the debate as we are half-listening; it’s that we’re doing it in tribal contexts, given how social media splinters us into networks and platforms that align with our beliefs, either by how we build them or by how algorithms learn to show us what we have told it we want. Debate now happens in the context of polarized fandoms for many; political scientists say that the pool of truly persuadable voters has shrunk. We have already decided and sorted before the debate even happens, so if persuasion is out of reach, whom is a debate serving and what is it for?
Rogan, Musk, and everyone else who called on Hotez to challenge RFK Jr. might idealize the value of debate, but even a long-form podcast can favor conjectural broadsides and wild claims. This is an urgent problem given the scale and speed at which debate assertions spread in the electronic age compared with when debates were attended by small groups and information spread slowly. Rogan’s proposal might at first glance resemble Lincoln-Douglas, considering the lack of time limit and singular topic, but the latter happened with some constraints and the participants were readily seen as having equivalent expertise that qualified them for the stage. Conversation, even a lengthy one, can’t get us to a shared truth without prior agreement on basic facts, standards, and methodologies.
Modern debates, then, are usually less a competition to change minds and more like a sporting event, with fans lined up on each side and cheering for a predetermined view. When Rogan challenged Hotez to debate RFK Jr., he was indirectly invoking the Lincoln-Douglas ideal. When Hotez declined, he was acknowledging the reality that debates of this nature are more bloodsport than serious or good-faith inquiry. Rogan’s format has no mechanism for advancing understanding. It treats persuasion outcomes as a black box.
In the sporting context, you see Rogan’s gambit. Debates are entertainment, just as sports are entertainment. Debates bring big ratings to the networks airing them, and so serve media interests (clout and advertising dollars) more than they do the public. Rogan’s challenge was brilliant in its self-service, allowing him to win regardless of whether the challenge was accepted. He got the attention and could say he tried. And if Hotez had agreed, it’d have boosted Rogan’s business by merely happening. Neither scenario prioritizes quality.
“Debate me, you coward!” is a fine bit of rhetorical shame that grafts you to the ideal of debate in a free democracy, but it begs us to look past what debates have become and whom they serve. (At least it’s better than a cage match.)