Incident Update 8︱Pro-Russian narratives among Tenet Media influencer podcasts
Author: Aengus Bridgman and Jean-Romain Roy
Organization: Media Ecosystem Observatory
Key takeaways:
All the Tenet Media influencer podcasts frequently discussed Russia and were among the most frequent sharers of pro-Russian narratives over the past four years, far in excess of relevant comparison groups.
While we saw a high level of propagation of pro-Russian narratives among these influencers prior to the invasion of Ukraine, these narratives increased dramatically after the invasion. It is likely that the Tenet Media influencers were identified as worthy of recruitment and support given their clear pro-Russian sympathies.
We find no evidence that the establishment of Tenet Media itself increased pro-Russian narratives among Tenet Media influencers.
Tenet Media productions themselves did not frequently discuss Russia but when they did, pro-Russian narratives, particularly regarding western governments not acting in the interests of their own citizens and information control and manipulation in the west, were found in excess of even other Tenet Media influencers’ content.
Introduction
In this incident update, we evaluate shows (podcasts and videos) produced by Tenet Media and by those influencers recruited to be part of Tenet Media. Our evaluation focuses on the extent to which:
Russia is an area of interest for the influencers and Tenet Media
Pro-Russian narratives are platformed and espoused on Tenet Media and Tenet Media influencer content
The content and attitudes of Tenet Media influencers noticeably shifted as a result of joining Tenet Media
To do this, we assess the Tenet Media Influencers’ statements and the statements of those that have been platformed/hosted over the past four years concerning Russia over the period where Russia invaded Ukraine as well as the conception, establishment and launch of Tenet Media. We collected and transcribed 4,819 episodes from six shows: Tenet Media on Rumble and the five podcasts produced by the major Tenet Media influencers: Tim Pool (Timcast IRL, Culture War, Daily Show), Dave Rubin (The Rubin Report), and Benny Johnson (The Benny Show). The five podcasts are the same ones as analyzed in Incident Update 4 Discussion of and sentiment towards Canada on Tenet Media influencer podcasts, but this update also includes 560 Tenet Media episodes posted on Rumble and focuses on pro-Russian narratives instead of content directed at Canada. We collected data going back to January 2020, well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All five of the shows predate the conception of Tenet Media and have been running since 2020 or 2021, while Tenet Media Rumble content is only available since November 2023.
As attention to the region and conflict dramatically shifted over the entire information ecosystem during this period, we also collected, transcribed, and analyzed comparable show samples from popular right-wing American creators as well as a selection of American, Canadian, and UK-based creators with a focus on current affairs. Table 1 shows the different data sources used in this analysis.
Table 1: Analytical groups of shows (podcasts and web series) used in this analysis of pro-Russian narratives among Tenet Media content and that produced by Tenet Media influencers.
Transcribed video and podcast data is uniquely well suited for evaluating the three areas described above: these creators have spent hundreds of hours discussing current affairs including frequent news stories concerning Russia, Ukraine, and other global geopolitical events. These conversations provide rich ground to understand the true and unfiltered opinions of the influencers.
How often is Russia discussed?
First, we assess the frequency of conversations about Russia across the show groups over time (Rumble content is excluded here as it covers just the last narrow time period). We identified Russian-concerning segments by keyword searching for related entities (e.g., Russia, Ukraine, Zelensky, Donbas, etc.). Figure 1 displays attention paid to Russia over time, with the y-axis showing the percentage of all podcast time devoted to Russian-concerning segments in a given month for each of the three podcast categories (Tenet Media influencer podcasts, International non-right-wing podcasts, and Other American right-wing podcasts). The Figure shows two key potential inflection points that may have shifted attention towards or away from Russia among the influencers: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the launch of Tenet Media.
Figure 1: Proportion of all podcast time devoted to Russia-discussing segments in podcasts January 2020 to October 2024, with rolling three-month average line shown for each of the three podcast categories.
Figure 1 shows that the Tenet Media influencer podcasts devoted the most attention to Russia prior to the invasion, at a rate approximately four times that of the right-wing podcasts and nine times more than centrist and left-leaning international podcasts. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all podcast categories significantly increased coverage, with the Tenet Media influencer podcasts continuing to devote the most attention to Russia. After the launch of Tenet Media, the Tenet Media influencers did not increase their attention to Russia and overall coverage, but continued to devote more of all podcast time than both other categories of shows. Across the whole time period, the five Tenet Media influencer podcasts discussed Russia for approximately 325 hours.
Was the content of the podcasts more sympathetic to Russia after Tenet Media was founded?
Next, we evaluate the extent that these discussions shared pro-Russian narratives that have emerged over the past four years. These narratives are often used to criticize the west, promote Russian interests, and undermine the Ukrainian government. To do so, through extensive manual review by both authors, identified hundreds of distinct narratives related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and debates about the relative merits of Western and Russian forms of government. These narratives were ultimately grouped into 5 major narratives, each consisting of 5 sub-narratives: see the full mapping here. The main narratives assessed were the following:
Western military encroachment caused the conflict;
Legitimacy, sovereignty, moral, and humanitarian narratives;
West not acting in the interests of its own citizens:
Decline of western influence and culture; and
Information manipulation in the west.
Using LLM assistance (GPT-4o), we classified the approximate 28,000 segments of podcasts and videos that concerned Russia for the presence or absence of these narratives. If a segment was classified as containing a narrative, we validated that the narrative was present AND that it was endorsing the narrative using a separate LLM (Llama3.1:70b): we required a double positive. See Examples 1 and 2 from Tim Pool for example texts that contain numerous pro-Russian narratives identified by our classification method. All segments and their associated classifications are available here.
Example 1: Timcast IRL 716, February 16th, 2023
“Guest: They think that all of a sudden Putin woke up one night and decided to invade Ukraine and be a jerk. And that's not what's happening. In fact, he's the one who's been pushing for peace talks. NATO sabotaged it because they don't want a peace agreement. They want to put an economic hurt on Russia and they don't care how many Ukrainians get slaughtered to do it. The Ukrainians are just cannon fodder for an economic war pushed by the West and NATO.
Tim: You're familiar with the Qatar Turkey pipeline? It's all interconnected. And I always phrase it this way because, you know, I'm the milquetoast fence-sitter guy. I'll say the United States wanted to build a pipeline through Syria, through Turkey, into Europe to offset the Gazprom natural gas monopoly. And then Syria said, no, our ally Russia would not appreciate it if we allowed you to compete with them and it would hurt their, you know, hurt them economically. So Syria, Russia, Iran, they wanted to build an alternate pipeline that would tap the same gas field and send it up through Iraq and Turkey into Ukraine, into Europe, which would give Russia more control. And then, I guess, the United States just got really lucky. Somehow, Syria fell into civil war. And, of course, we opposed Bashar al-Assad because of all the awful things he did.”
Example 2: Tim Pool Daily News, August 22nd, 2024
“This is psychotic. Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy. Being funded by the Democrats, I will stress again, one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine. They are expanding this war. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know you’ve got criminal elements of the US government pushing them and guiding them and telling them what to do. Ukraine is now accused. A German warrant issued for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline is triggering this conflict. Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia.”
Figure 2 plots the prevalence of these narratives about Russia during the three key periods for our three podcast groups plus the Tenet Media Rumble content (given the content is only available after the launch of Tenet), with the y-axis showing the frequency of the narratives across all three podcast groups. Tenet Media influencer podcasts post more frequently about Russia so instead of showing total number of narratives, we show normalized likelihood to share pro-Russian narratives in conversations about Russia to provide an idea of what a listener would hear if they listened to a single segment about Russia from one of these shows.
Prior to the invasion, we find that both Tenet Media influencer podcasts and other American right-wing podcasts were far more likely to share pro-Russian narratives than the other podcast group After the invasion, the frequency of these narratives increased substantially – particularly for the Tenet Media influencer podcasts. After the launch of Tenet Media, the overall frequency of narratives has remained high, with Tenet Media influencer podcasts sharing far more pro-Russian narratives than the international non-right-wing podcasts and even more than comparable right-wing podcasts in the United States. The launch of Tenet Media is not temporaneous with any increase, however, the Tenet Media influencer podcasts continued to share pro-Russian narratives throughout 2024 at a rate higher than that of other American right-wing podcasts. Tenet Media Rumble content showed rates of pro-Russian narratives comparable to that of other American right-wing podcast content.
Figure 2: Prevalence of Pro-Russian narratives in podcasts for three key periods (pre- and post-Ukraine invasion, post-launch of Tenet Media), from January 2020 to October 2024 for the four show groups. A y-value of 0.5 indicates that, on average, 1 out of every 2 segments about Russia includes a pro-Russian narrative.
What narratives about Russia emerge from the podcasts?
Next, we explore the exact pro-Russian narratives that are being espoused on Tenet Media influencer podcasts and official Tenet Media content. Figure 3 shows the prevalence of top-level narratives across the four show groups, again grouped by time period, again using the classification method described above.
Prior to the invasion we see narratives around information manipulation in the west being most prevalent among both Tenet Media influencers and other American right-wing podcasts, with minor engagement with any other narrative. After the invasion, however, narratives about aggressive western military influence and intervention and western governments not acting in the interests of their own citizens exploded. Across almost all categories, the Tenet Media influencers were the most likely to platform and espouse pro-Russian narratives. They started doing so right after the invasion and have continued steadily since then. Again, the launch of Tenet Media does not appear to have had a meaningful impact on the exact narratives espoused and over time the frequency of all the narratives have faded somewhat (but less so for the Tenet Media influencers). For Tenet Media Rumble content, the narratives of western governments not acting in the interests of their own citizens and information manipulation in the west were significantly more prevalent than that American right-wing or other Tenet Media personality content.
Figure 3: Pro-Russian narratives found in podcasts from January 2020 to October 2024. A y-value of 0.2 indicates that 1 out of every 5 discussions of Russia includes that specific pro-Russian sub-narrative.
See Examples 3, 4, and 5 from The Benny Show, the Ruben Report, and direct from Tenet Media for further example texts that contain numerous pro-Russian narratives identified by our classification method.
“We staged a coup in that country. We installed our own leaders. And then we made Ukraine a client state of ours. It is effectively a United States state right there on the border of Russia. That's what we did. Here, according to the New York Times, they talk about the unbelievable number of CIA station houses in Ukraine. How the CIA has all these agents sitting in Ukraine, working with the military. How these agents come under fire from Russia. That seems a little dangerous. I thought this was Ukraine fighting Russia. Wait a second. No? Yeah. No.”
Example 4: Rubin ReportSNL Crowd Goes Silent as Woody Harrelson Goes Off-Script on COVID, February 27th, 2023
“This Ukraine-Russia situation is spinning out of control incredibly fast. Let me, for the record, because it's a Monday, just say I am not for war. I would prefer not to go into World War III. I would rather help the people of America, say, in East Palestine, who are having some problems because of a massive explosion and chemicals in the water, than continuously giving money to Ukraine with no receipts and having no freaking idea what's going on over there. But somehow we do everything backwards here, right? The media is in it with the politicians. They really, really want not only to continue driving us to the path towards war, but to make sure that if you somehow ask a question about that, you will be thought of as a Russian stooge or a Putin operative or you're on the take or something like that.”
Example 5: Supreme Court Hears Homelessness Case, ‘Crackhead Barney’ v Alec Baldwin | The MC Hour #23, November 8th, 2023
“So anyway, all right, let's get to the next, well, to the to the big story of the day, which is that that Joe Biden has signed that for an aid bill completely expected, of course, but he has in fact signed it today going to send 95 billion combined dollars worth of stuff to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. This after the Senate passed the bill yesterday, we're just like in the house. There is unusually broad bipartisan support to send money. We don't have to go to other people's war zones on the other side of the world. If it's all for defending freedom, of course, not for enriching congressional friends and stock portfolios, but the final vote in the Senate was 79 to 18.”
For each of the narratives described above, we further assessed sub-narratives as found here. Figure 4 shows the sub-narratives that are the most-commonly shared on Tenet Media influencer podcasts and Tenet Media videos across the whole period. The Figure shows the relative frequency of the narratives and sub-narratives against each other. Again, we observe that pro-Russian narratives around aggressive western military influence and intervention, information manipulation in the west, and western governments not acting in the interests of their own citizens are the most frequently espoused on the Tenet Media influencer podcasts. Several sub-categories stand out as well, with (western) Government corruption and elitism and Censorship and suppression of dissenting voices both being over 7.5% of all pro-Russian narratives shared.
Figure 4: Pro-Russian narratives in podcasts and Rumble content produced by Tenet Media influencers from January 2020 to October 2024 as a proportion of all pro-Russian narratives found in their content.
Conclusion
Our evaluation has shown that the Tenet Media influencers regularly discussed Russia and espoused and platformed pro-Russian views on their podcasts far in excess of relevant comparison groups. We have provided examples of pro-Russian messaging above but there are thousands of examples available for review. We conclude that the influencers selected for support and funding by the RT operatives (through Tenet Media) were most likely chosen as a result of their large audience and consistent pro-Russian messaging. While their messaging did not shift after the establishment of Tenet Media, they were already among the most severe pro-Russian apologists in western political discourse. As shown in Incident Update 4 Discussion of and sentiment towards Canada on Tenet Media influencer podcasts these podcasters also produce a steady stream of anti-institution and polarizing content, often in relation to Canada. In this sense, funding these influencers advanced two Russian strategic objectives: spread of pro-Russian narratives and cultivation of polarization and institutional distrust in the United States and Canada.
Methodology
Data Collection
We first collected all podcasts produced by Tenet Media influencers: Timcast IRL, Tim Pool Daily Show, Tim Pool Culture War, The Rubin Report, and The Benny Show, with a total of 4,290 podcast episodes from January 1, 2020 to September 19, 2024. We also collected podcasts from two comparable groups. First, from other right-wing podcasts in the United States including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Dan Bongino Show, The Matt Walsh Show, Mark Levin Podcast, Candace Owens, and The Glenn Beck Program, with a total of 9,021 episodes. Second, nine international podcasts representing center and center-left views including Today in Focus, News Agents, The Inquiry, The Rest is Politics, The Intercept Briefing, Pantsuit Politics, The Bulwark Podcast, The Herle Burly, and The Strategists, with a total of 3,145 episodes. We also collected the audio of all 560 Tenet Media videos available on the video-sharing platform Rumble. We then used OpenAI’s whisper-base-en32 to transcribe the text of all the podcasts.
We then identified all Russia-concerning segments by doing a keyword search for at least one of the following entities: Zelensky, Ukraine, Russia, Putin, Donbas, Crimea or Kremlin. We extracted text in a 250 character window around each of the mentions of a Russia-related entity, with sentence completion up to 400 characters and then combined overlapping segments. This gave us 17,016 distinct podcasts or videos with 63,000 hours of content and 28,248 mentions of Russia.
Classification of segments
To develop our narrative scheme, we identified hundreds of distinct narratives related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and debates about the relative merits of Western and Russian forms of government. These narratives were ultimately grouped into 5 major narratives, each consisting of 5 sub-narratives. The main narratives employed were the following:
Western military encroachment: Narratives about NATO, U.S. military actions, and alleged provocations or aggression in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This includes Western arms support, expansionist policies, and criticisms of the military-industrial complex.
Legitimacy, sovereignty, moral, and humanitarian justifications: Narratives questioning Ukraine’s sovereignty, endorsing Russian territorial claims, and more generally framing Russia as morally justified in its actions, often using historical context. May highlight humanitarian consequences of the conflict due to the west, such as civilian casualties or refugee crises.
West not acting in the interests of its own citizens: Narratives focused on the criticism of Western sanctions, the financial burden of supporting Ukraine, and/or Western economic decline or self-harm due to foreign policy decisions. May highlight corruption claims, economic sanctions, resource control motivations, and home population impoverishment narratives.
Decline of western influence and culture: Narratives about the decline of Western power and influence, promoting a multipolar world order with increasing roles for Russia and China. May highlight how Western society is morally or culturally declining and even contrast it with Russian traditional values.
Russian-related information manipulation: Narratives suggesting Western media bias, censorship, misinformation, and suppression of anti-war voices, including claims of Western governments hiding the truth in relation to international conflicts.
Other narrative: Narrative that does not match any of the other topics
The full schema of narratives can be found here. For each segment that contained mention of a Russia-related keyword we used the following prompt with GPT-4o.
Does this snippet of a podcast conversation contain any of the following?1: Narratives about NATO, U.S. military actions, and alleged provocations or aggression in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This includes Western arms support, expansionist policies, and criticisms of the military-industrial complex.2: Narratives questioning Ukraine’s sovereignty, endorsing Russian territorial claims, and more generally framing Russia as morally justified in its actions, often using historical context. May highlight humanitarian consequences of the conflict due to the west, such as civilian casualties or refugee crises.3: Narratives focused on the criticism of Western sanctions, the financial burden of supporting Ukraine, and/or Western economic decline or self-harm due to foreign policy decisions. May highlight corruption claims, economic sanctions, resource control motivations, and home population impoverishment narratives.4: Narratives about the decline of Western power and influence, promoting a multipolar world order with increasing roles for Russia and China. May highlight how Western society is morally or culturally declining and even contrast it with Russian traditional values.5: Narratives suggesting Western media bias, censorship, misinformation, and suppression of anti-war voices, including claims of Western governments hiding the truth in relation to international conflicts.For every narrative that the conversation contains provide me with the associated number (e.g. 1,3,4). If no arguments are found reply with a 0. Provide no additional response.
After all segments had been classified into level1 and level2 narratives, we checked that the narrative was actually present and was not being refuted using the following prompt using Llama3.1:70b:
You will be provided a narrative and a conversation segment from a podcast. Your task is to evaluate if the podcast segment contains language that supports the narrative (1), refutes the narrative (2), or does not contain the narrative (0).The narrative is as follows:The podcast segment is as follows:You must provide me with a single number: 1 for supports, 2 for refutes, and 0 for does not contain. Do not provide any other information.
Any non-1 responses were treated as not having the narrative for the analysis.