Galen Stocking is a Senior Computational Social Scientist at the Pew Research Center, where he uses large datasets and advanced statistical and computational techniques to understand the public’s news consumption. Prior to that, Galen was a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Political Science, with his dissertation addressing the media’s agenda setting power in the digital environment.
True crime is the most common topic, making up 24% of top-ranked podcasts; 15% of the top podcasts focus on news. The next most common topics are politics and government (10%); entertainment, pop culture and the arts (9%); and self-help and relationships (8%).
In recent years, several new options have emerged in the social media universe, many of which explicitly present themselves as alternatives to more established social media platforms. Free speech ideals and heated political themes prevail on these sites, which draw praise from their users and skepticism from other Americans.