Steve Bannon’s podcast is a top spreader of lies and 'disinformation': report

09 February 2023

In early February, the Brookings Institution published an in-depth report on political podcasts and the role they can play in spreading lies and disinformation. And Brookings found that the worst offender is Steve Bannon’s “War Room.”

Journalist Dominick Mastrangelo, reporting for The Hill in an article published on February 9, observes, “Close to 20 percent of all episodes of Bannon’s show that were assessed featured claims that Snopes and PolitiFact fact-checkers or the terms dictionary flagged as unsubstantiated or false, the study found.”

The far-right Bannon, who served as executive chairman at Breitbart News before becoming White House chief strategist under President Donald Trump in 2017, has been a prominent figure in the MAGA movement. MAGA Republicans often appear on “War Room,” and Brookings found that Bannon has been a frequent promotor of the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through widespread voter fraud.

Moreover, Bannon has not been shy about promoting authoritarian figures in other countries, including former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and white nationalist Marine Le Pen (who President Emmanuel Macron defeated in France’s last two presidential elections). Bannon has falsely claimed, without evidence, that Brazil’s 2022 presidential election was stolen from Bolsonaro by supporters of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Mastrangelo notes, “In citing the unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud that helped ignite the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the study noted Bannon’s show before and after the incident ‘offers a chilling example of the types of unsubstantiated and false claims spread by prominent political podcasters after the 2020 election.’ Bannon devoted more than 130 episodes to promoting election fraud narratives, the researchers found, and accounted for nearly three-quarters of all conspiracy-related content on political podcasts about the coronavirus pandemic, masks and vaccines.”

Read the Brookings Institution’s full report at this link.

Read The Hill’s article at this link.

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