Experts agree: Podcasters heavily influenced the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. That, de facto, makes them custodians of the public good.

But do they fully understand that, and what it means?

In many cases, not likely.

In an ominous if not frightening example of that, Kareem Rahma of the popular Instagram and TikTok social media series “Subway Takes” recently admitted he’d decided not to air a “really, really bad” interview performance by Democrat nominee Kamala Harris before the election.

“Her tape was that bad?” an interviewer asks Rahma.

“It was really, really bad,” Rahma says. “It was like, didn’t make any sense. I can tell you this: ‘Bacon as a spice. Bacon as a spice.’

“Her take was really confusing and weird – and not good. And so, [we] mutually agreed that we shouldn’t publish it.”

Adds Rahma: “And I got lucky because I didn’t want to be blamed for her losing.”

Consider the implications of that: a podcaster with an audience well over a million deciding to hide an embarrassing performance by a presidential candidate in order to protect her – or himself – rather than letting the public see it in order to judge for themselves whether she was presidential material.

That’s simply not acting in the public interest. Period.

That’s no custodian of the public good.

It doesn’t help that Rahma doesn’t appear to have either a journalism or political background. He’s described by Google AI as “a comedian, writer, producer, and musician. … He has also produced and executive produced several films …”

Certainly the legacy media can’t be trusted anymore to vet presidential candidates. In only the latest in a long history of media debacles, ABC News last year disgraced itself with its one-sided hosting of the Trump-Harris debate.

“Trump was fact-checked by ABC moderators 5 times during debate – while Harris was left alone,” the New York Post reported.

Also in the run-up to the 2024 election, a study found ABC, CBS and NBC gave Harris 78% positive coverage and Trump 85% negative.

“Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them,” Forbes reported in 2023.

The result is both predictable and lamentable: According to Gallup, Americans’ trust in the media fell from 72% in 1976 to just 31% in 2024.

That’s a catastrophic collapse of the Fourth Estate’s credibility.

And a delicious opportunity for alternative media.

Indeed, despite Rahma’s ethically dubious decision to help one candidate hide her glaring deficiencies, it’s undeniable that podcasters and posters on social media platform X ended up putting Trump and Harris in sharp relief.

While Harris was getting the kid gloves treatment, Trump’s no-holds-barred interview with podcaster Joe Rogan netted over 33 million views.

“To put that in perspective,” notes one blog, “that’s more than the combined audience of several prime-time cable news shows.”

Yet, as welcome as the new media are, Rahma’s poor choice highlights the pitfalls of relying on broadcasters with no journalistic training – or allegiance to the public good – to scrutinize candidates for the most powerful, most important position in the world.

Sadly, though, that’s going around: Most of the moguls in Big Tech, for instance, aren’t trained journalists steeped in the First Amendment and an obligation to share the unvarnished truth with the American people. They’ve been caught redhanded putting their thumbs on the electoral scale.

In Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s case, it was two thumbs: While censoring conservatives on his platform at the behest of the Biden administration, he was sowing Democrat electoral hopes with over $400 million spent in the 2020 election.

If the new media, these self-styled citizen journalists, want to supplant the biased, discredited legacy media and contribute to the common good, they’ll need to do better than Rahma’s example.

Otherwise, Americans longing to independently educate themselves on the candidates will once again be lost at sea.