"Hello Hackis, stay at home!" A standardised content analysis on the representation of politics and COVID-19 in German entertainment podcasts

Abstract

The use of podcasts has grown steadily in recent years, with entertainment podcasts in particular becoming increasingly popular. However, the content of these podcasts remains largely unexplored. This is notable because regular listeners may develop parasocial relationships with podcast hosts, whereby the content conveyed may influence attitudes and behaviour. These potential effects are particularly important in times of socio-political crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This study therefore uses a standardised content analysis to examine how often political content was addressed in three popular German entertainment podcasts and how the COVID-19 pandemic was framed. The analysis shows that political content accounts for up to 15 percent of the content discussed in entertainment podcasts. It is also clear that four thematic issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the podcasts: political discussion, pragmatic proposal, critical criticism and solution-oriented recommendation. Overall, it is clear that the podcast hosts identified the population's handling of the policy measures to combat the pandemic as the dominant problem, and therefore they regularly addressed recommendations for action directly to the population, some of which they underpinned with personal experiences. This shows that popular German entertainment podcasts supported the political measures taken and held the population more accountable than journalistic reporting.