Kylie Kelce was at the top of the charts. The former field hockey coach and NFL royalty had dethroned Joe Rogan in his own domain — and his fans could not believe it.

It happened late last year: Kelce — whose marriage to former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce had pulled her into the limelight — had launched a podcast called Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce, promoting it as a medium for her opinions on motherhood, sports, and, occasionally, politics.

Podcasting is a male-saturated world. While Alex Cooper’s uber-successful Call Her Daddy podcast is among the few exceptions, men tend to occupy the top spots on podcasting charts. Think Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Andrew Huberman.

So it came as a surprise, especially to Rogan’s fans, when Kelce’s debut in December unseated The Joe Rogan Experience from Apple’s No. 1 slot, and held the top spot for 10 days on Spotify’s chart. Indeed, some of Rogan’s fans claimed the numbers must have been artificially inflated. Kelce, they claimed, was a nobody.

And yet the two shows would continue to trade places on Spotify for the next few weeks. Even now, though it only publishes once a week, Not Gonna Lie routinely remains in Spotify’s top 10.

There are many plausible reasons for the show’s breakout success: her Kelce and Taylor Swift connections, her ability to speak relatably about motherhood and femininity, the show’s relatively short (45-minute) length compared to competitors. But regardless of what fuels it, her trip to the top of the charts — and the resulting disbelief, mockery, and hot takes about that success — reveal a more interesting dynamic in entertainment and news media consumption in 2025.

Podcasts have quickly become one of the main ways Americans inform themselves. While there are still traditional newscasts from news organizations, the most popular podcasts, particularly since the pandemic, are piloted by charismatic, trusted, and unpolished creators. Their content is a mix of news, political analysis, cultural commentary, and pop culture — with hosts often promising to deliver the truth or have the conversations no one else is having.

But not everyone is listening to the same thing. Americans are sorting themselves into ideological bubbles, giving these shows and their hosts the reach and influence that was once the exclusive provenance of mainstream media.

Audiences’ ideological fragmentation, combined with these hosts’ power, are creating different realms of truth, both via the hosts’ opinions and the current events they choose to discuss for their fans. News and information is getting filtered to distinct groups of consumers in radically different ways — and there are no signs these habits are about to change.

Indeed, as the second Trump administration takes off, they’re positioned to further drive American polarization, serving as the right’s chief communications wing in one realm and as a way to inform and organize opposition in another.

Americans have become obsessed with listening

Podcasts’ role in the 2024 campaign, during which Donald Trump sat down for free-wheeling conversations with the most........

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