Conservative Podcasters Excluded from New Golden Globe Category | Vanity Fair

For the first time ever, the 2026 Golden Globes will honor excellence in an audio medium, nominating six shows for the awards’ new best-podcast category. After announcing a short list of 25 podcasts eligible for the award this fall, the Golden Globes wound up nominating the following starry podcasts: Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard; Call Her Daddy; Good Hang With Amy Poehler; The Mel Robbins Podcast; SmartLess; and Up First. Notably, none of the right-wing podcasts that made the initial short list—like The Ben Shapiro Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Joe Rogan Experience—ended up making the final cut.

That’s not necessarily for lack of trying. The road to winning the first-ever Golden Globe for best podcast has been paved with both confusion and eyebrow-raising antics.

The drama began when the Globes first announced the category’s birth in May, saying that “the top 25 podcasts” would be eligible for consideration, with six ultimately being chosen as the nominees. At the time, it wasn’t clear what constituted a “top podcast.” Ultimately, the list was determined by data analytics firm Luminate, which measured the popularity of potential honorees based on stats like downloads, revenue, and chart placements.

The result was a short list that mixed buzzy-celeb-forward podcasts with conservative-pundit-led podcasts. But according to The Ankler’s Natalie Jarvey, the final Luminate list was actually the second one created by the company, after the first version “inadvertently omitted several wildly popular podcasts.” The final short list featured podcasts hosted by celebrity names in the space, like Alex Cooper, Amy Poehler, Sean Hayes, Jason Bateman, and Will Arnett—all of whom wound up getting nominated for best podcast. But the list also included shows from controversial right-wing figures, like Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and Joe Rogan, with the latter hosting the most popular podcast across all major podcast platforms. Other popular podcasts that were in the mix included Pod Save America, This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, Stuff You Should Know, and The New York Times’ The Daily.

Once the eligible players were set, campaigning for one of the category’s six coveted spots began. Historically, the Golden Globes have been no stranger to scandal and accusations of fostering a pay-to-play ethos—and the podcast award was no exception to that. After weathering a series of scandals in the early 2020s that led to the ceremony going off the air in 2022, the Golden Globes were bought by Penske Media Corporation. Penske also owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Gold Derby, as well as trade outlets Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline—publications whose bread and butter is awards season coverage. After Penske purchased the awards show, some cried foul, accusing the media conglomerate of engaging in a massive conflict of interest. (Penske also owns Luminate—which determined the award-eligible podcasts.)

Things got murkier when “For Your Consideration” promotion entered the picture. According to Status’s Oliver Darcy, the Globes pitched full-suite marketing packages to podcasts on the show’s short list, offering plum coverage from Penske media brands. Per Status, if a podcast paid $75,000, it would receive a Variety Creative Impact Award as well as a feature story shared across Variety’s magazine, website, and social channels. The $75,000 marketing buy would also get a podcast “an onstage award presentation at a PMC event and a ‘custom 15-minute Variety-moderated conversation’” that would then be shared on the trade magazine’s socials. For $25,000, a podcast could buy “a panel appearance on a Variety-moderated discussion and digital promotion afterward.” For $35,000, one could get “a solo interview and multiple rounds of social amplification.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Penske Media Corporation for comment.)

One person who certainly appeared willing to pay if it increased his chances of getting a nomination was Shapiro. The right-wing podcaster and Wicked critic allegedly mounted an aggressive awards campaign, per Status, buying billboard ads in Times Square and reportedly spending money within Penske to promote his podcast. According to Vulture, FYC ads for The Ben Shapiro Show appeared on Deadline’s home page, and Shapiro sat for an interview with Gold Derby, another Penske property. Shapiro wasn’t too shy about his actions: “Did we campaign? Obviously,” a representative for his Daily Wire media company told Vulture. (To make things even murkier, Penske is the majority shareholder of Vox Media, parent company of New York magazine, the publisher of Vulture.)

“The FYC business is well accepted in Hollywood,” Darcy said in an interview with Vulture. “But bringing podcasts into the mix makes it inherently more political, given how much extremists dominate the podcast charts. Taking FYC dollars to promote those shows is far more ethically dubious.”

Despite Shapiro seemingly pouring money into his campaign, the divisive podcast host fell short. Neither he nor any of his right-wing podcast compatriots made the cut when the Golden Globe nominations were announced on Monday, December 8; in fact, the only politically adjacent podcast to make the cut was NPR’s news podcast Up First. We’ll have to wait until the Golden Globes ceremony on January 11 to see if that journalist-hosted show is any match for the five celebrity-hosted podcasts it’s up against. According to awards-show prognostications from Gold Derby, Good Hang With Amy Poehler is currently the podcast to beat. But remember: Gold Derby is owned by Penske Media. So maybe take that with a grain of salt.

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