General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Ben Shapiro Show

The Ben Shapiro Show is a weekday American political commentary podcast hosted by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and produced by The Daily Wire, the media company he co-founded and where he serves as editor emeritus.¹ Each episode covers the day's news from a conservative perspective, and the show's own tagline promises the news "in comprehensive, conservative, principled fashion."

Key fact	Detail
Format	Weekday podcast and livestream, Monday through Friday, airing live at 11:00 AM ET on DailyWire+; average episode runtime about 54 minutes²^•³
First aired	January 9, 2017, per TheTVDB; Apple Podcasts lists the channel as active since 2015 with over 2,000 episodes³^•⁴
Bias ratings	AllSides rates it Right (low confidence); Ad Fontes Media scores bias 19.68 of +42, labeled Hyper-Partisan Right¹^•⁵
Reliability rating	Ad Fontes reliability score 25.87 of 64, in the Mixed Reliability/Opinion band⁵
Audience	About 25 million subscribers, second among right-wing online shows behind Joe Rogan's, per a Media Matters tally of the 2024 ecosystem⁶
Radio reach	Repackaged by Westwood One in 2018 for terrestrial radio broadcast as a podcast hour feed⁷^•⁸
Listener rating	4.4 out of 5 from roughly 151,000 ratings on Apple Podcasts⁴

Spoilers

Content and framing

A transcript-based analysis by Catchwind covering September 2025 through October 2026, based on 335 transcribed broadcasts of which 297 were read closely, characterizes the program as a national right-leaning political show that critiques progressive figures and policies and engages frequently with culture-war and social issues, and that gives conservative figures such as Donald Trump and Marco Rubio more favorable coverage than the media average.¹⁰ The same analysis finds the show hardest on figures such as Zohran Mamdani and Abbas Araghchi, and warmer toward Senator John Thune than the rest of the conservative side.¹⁰

Academic work situates the show within the lineage of talk radio. A study in Media and Communication by David O. Dowling, Patrick R. Johnson, and Brian Ekdale of the University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication argues that in popular right-wing podcasts such as Shapiro's and Dan Bongino's, opinion amplifies the medium's tendency to relegate news to a secondary concern behind emotional impact, and that Shapiro adopted political positions, media strategies, and even vocal inflections from Rush Limbaugh.⁷ A separate study in Mass Communication and Society used the show as one of two examples of a "mainstream conservative podcast" and found that differences between mainstream and far-right conservative podcasts are often more stylistic than substantive.¹¹ A University of Michigan thesis describes the show's typical move as rephrasing content from news outlets to present it from a conservative perspective.¹²

Format and production

The show runs as a live weekday program on DailyWire+ at 11:00 AM Eastern, alongside the rest of the Daily Wire lineup such as The Michael Knowles Show and The Matt Walsh Show.² Episodes are then released as a free podcast, with a member-exclusive version that removes third-party advertisements and adds a full "Members Block" of extended discussion.² TheTVDB records an average runtime of 54 minutes and lists DW Studios as the production company.³

Radio expansion. In 2018, Westwood One repackaged the show, described in a scholarly account as "consistently a top-10 podcast," for radio broadcast, an example of a born-digital podcast expanding its audience through terrestrial radio.⁷ A Westwood One format clock from 2021 schedules the syndicated Ben Shapiro Podcast Hour feed on weekdays from 3 to 4 PM Eastern.⁸

Spinoffs. In February 2021, Shapiro launched a companion video show called Debunked, in which he responds to clips of left-wing figures making claims he disputes; Axios reported it as an extension of the brand he built with his "viral attempts to dissect left-wing arguments" on the podcast.⁹

Audience and reach

The show ranks among the most-listened political podcasts in the United States. SSRS's summary of Edison Podcast Metrics data places The Ben Shapiro Show, The Dan Bongino Show, and The Tucker Carlson Show at the top of conservative-content political podcasts.¹³ A Media Matters census of 418 popular online shows active in 2024 found 191 right-leaning and 129 left-leaning news-and-politics shows, and counted Ben Shapiro's channel at 25 million subscribers, behind only Joe Rogan's roughly 40 million among right-wing shows.⁶ In 2020, Shapiro routinely dominated Facebook's most-engaged content list, which drew accusations that the platform's algorithm favored right-wing posts.¹⁴

The show's cultural footprint extends to awards politics: when the Golden Globes introduced a best podcast category, the show appeared on the 25-program shortlist but the nominations passed over it along with other conservative-leaning programs, a choice the Associated Press described as avoiding politics or controversy.¹⁵

Fact-checking record

In a February 2023 Brookings study, Valerie Wirtschafter transcribed popular political podcasts and compared their claims against PolitiFact and Snopes fact-checks; among all the podcast series she examined, Ben Shapiro ranked first as the host who most often directly refuted a false claim, with almost 50 episodes doing so, and he also ranked first in rebutting false claims from public figures on his own side of the political spectrum, which occurred in roughly twenty episodes.¹⁶ The same study, which categorized the show as "More Conservative" with 1,120 episodes in its dataset, documented that conservative podcast hosts collectively shared false claims made by conservative figures 681 times versus 16 times for claims by liberal figures.¹⁶^•¹⁷

Bias and reliability ratings

Raters disagree on degree while agreeing on direction. AllSides assigns a Right rating through independent review but states low or initial confidence in it as of October 2026.¹ Ad Fontes Media, whose panels pair one left-leaning, one right-leaning, and one center-leaning analyst, scores the show at 19.68 on its -42 to +42 bias scale, within its Hyper-Partisan Right band, and 25.87 on its 0-64 reliability scale, in the Mixed Reliability/Opinion range that covers sources heavy in opinion or with high variation between pieces.⁵ The Boston Report's news sources guide lists Shapiro's daily show as Right and notes the AllSides low-confidence rating.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Early English-language web series (1997–mid 2010s)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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