I’m pondering renewing my subscription to Daily Wire.  

On the one hand, they’ve got good news coverage. 

On the other, the “membership” user experience needs work. 

So as part of my analysis process, I present:

Mitch Ranks the Daily Wire Podcasts.

Podcasts are rated in terms of

• Overall quality (subjective, judged by me), and
• Standard deviations from the mean likely with any given episode.  For those who don’t wrangle much with statistics (and I realize much of my audience does), standard deviations are a measure of consistency of statistics.  Example:  a sample of several ratings within 70% would have a very small standard deviation; a “90%” leaking in there would have a very large standard deviation.
  

OK.  Let’s get started (subscribe to the Daily Mitch for the…oh, wait.  I don’t do that. Yet). 

Ben Shapiro:

• Rating: 92%.
• Standard Deviation: 3%

Shapiro is just about always super solid. He rarely deviates from a very solid mean; his show on October 8 2023 was two standard deviations above (99%), and his review of “Barbie” was an extremely rare 20 standard deviations below.

Andrew Klavan

• Rating: NA
• Standard Deviation: NA

I can not work up the interest to listen to Klavan.  Maybe I should.  

Someday.  Promise. 

Probably.

Matt Walsh:

• Rating: 65%.
• Standard Deviation: 20%

The problem with Matt Walsh is, when he’s hot, he’s amazing (hence the high standard deviation). The problem with Matt Walsh is that when he really wants to make a point, and has a point to make, he makes the point in such a way as to make the point he has to make. As in, makes the point – the one he set out to make. And then makes that point – and makes the point again. Seriously – I once counted him re-making the same assertion ten times in 90 seconds.

Michael Knowles:

• Rating: 73%.
• Standard Deviation: 2%

Knowles is always Knowles. And by that, I mean he’s a 34 year old guy who lectures people about “growing old gracefully”.  He’s a very strident Roman Catholic who relates have been an atheist at Yale (all good), but goes on to live out the ecclesiastical version of the old saying “the most annoying New Yorkers are the ones that were born in Albany”;  he couldn’t exude “recent RomCat Convert” any harder if he did the show in Latin and squirted incense through the speakers.  But his insights about politics, especially the intersection of culture an politics, are almost always spot-on. 

He’s docked five points for constantly use of the term “weird sex stuff”, like he’s the world’s oldest awkward eight-grade boy. Seriously, taking a drink when Knowles says “Weird Sex Stuff” could be a more toxic drinking game than “Hundred Beer Club”. He gets three points back for getting “Barbie” very right for the same reasons I did.

Daily Wire Backstage

• Rating:  40%
• Standard Deviation: 15

Like The View, if it were done by frat bros with whom I largely agree.