Ben Shapiro Really Wants a Golden Globe. Does He Stand a Chance?
It’s not every day a political podcast takes over Times Square’s coveted digital billboards. So it goes with The Ben Shapiro Show, which, as media reporter Oliver Darcy documented in his Status newsletter last week, swarmed the heart of Manhattan with ads featuring the Daily Wire co-founder in a clean-cut jacket and shades, looking down at the pedestrians and tourists below. Shapiro is just one of several right-wing podcast hosts among the 25 eligible contenders for the Golden Globes’ inaugural Best Podcast Award — and, so far, the only one mounting a clear For Your Consideration campaign to break into the category. (The Globes will announce the six final nominees for the award on December 8.)
This isn’t the Daily Wire’s first run at Hollywood recognition. Last year, Matt Walsh, another commentator within the Daily Wire universe, made an Oscars push for his liberal-provoking documentary Am I Racist?, which was 2024’s highest-grossing doc. The attempt went nowhere, and Deadline, which featured the film in its “Contenders Documentary” awards-season showcase series, soothingly framed the failure around the doc branch’s supposed aversion to titles with “overt takes” on American politics.
That episode came across to many as a troll consistent with the film’s schtick, a campaign engineered to get snubbed so Walsh could once again bemoan the illiberal tendencies of the elites who supposedly control Hollywood. Shapiro’s campaign, by contrast, seems sincere, underscored by his genial participation in The Hollywood Reporter’s first “Podcaster Roundtable” and his FYC campaign’s core argument of “setting politics aside for one night.” “We will never forego the opportunity to plant a flag in the heart of the cultural debate,” Shapiro told Vulture in a short statement. While his bid may seem quixotic, the Golden Globes have always been the sweatier cousin to the Oscars and the Emmys, prone to oddball choices and messiness. This raises a startling question: What are Shapiro’s chances at a trophy?
A lot is riding on the answer. The choices will set the tone for the category and signal how the Globes, along with its voting body, understands what this podcast award even is. And if Shapiro’s campaign proves successful even for just a nomination, it would suggest that the podcast category, and the Globes more broadly, are drifting into a more complicated and politically charged space.
For the most part, awards watchers think Shapiro doesn’t have much of a shot. “I’d be surprised if he was nominated, and I’d be shocked if he won — I feel comfortable saying that,” says Sonny Bunch, who covers culture and hosts a Hollywood podcast for The Bulwark, a center-right publication. The primary hurdle is the Globes’ international voting body, which will run up against the America-centric nature of the podcast category in general. According to the published eligibility and consideration rules, the award specifically limits its eye to podcasts that are at least produced with an American partner. That tension sets the tone for how votes will probably play out. “How many of them have any idea who Ben Shapiro is?” says Katey Rich, the awards editor at The Ankler. “If you’re an international voter, and English isn’t your first language, maybe you skip this category or pick the one that has the name you recognize, and that’s how somehow like Amy Poehler wins.”
The international issue remains true even after the organization’s post-2021 reforms, triggered by the Los Angeles Times exposé that laid out in public the Globes’ long-whispered issues: an opaque membership body, a lack of Black voters, and a grab bag of ethical lapses and self-dealing. “Infamously, you used to be able to pick these people up from L.A. and give them gold watches and fly them to Paris for a press junket,” says Rich. The right amount of targeted schmooze had the power to swing an award. Since then, the Globes has overhauled its membership, expanded and diversified the voting body, and absorbed several structural changes. Its parent company, Dick Clark Productions, was eventually acquired by Penske Media Corporation (which also owns almost all the industry trades; more on that in a bit), giving the awards a veneer of a reset.
Still, the post-reform Globes voting body remains relatively small, especially compared to the Oscars, which draw from several guilds’ worth of Hollywood workers. That insularity has long been at the root of the Globes’ wackier moves. (See: Mozart in the Jungle Best TV Comedy win over Veep, or Aaron Taylor-Johnson winning a Best Supporting Actor trophy for Nocturnal Animals.) “The Globes sometimes threw out choices that were genuinely cool and interesting,” says Joe Reid, who writes Vulture’s “Gold Rush” column. “But the general feeling is that the Globes have gotten less kooky and strange since reformation, which is why I feel the podcast category would be even less inclined to make any bold statements.” That’s especially true when you have overtly safe choices on the eligible list, from celebrity-fronted shows like Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard, Call Her Daddy, Good Hang With Amy Poehler, The Mel Robbins Podcast, and The Bill Simmons Podcast. And if the Globes were to go a newsier route, there’s no shortage of traditionally journalistic shows to choose from: The Daily and Up First, or even Dateline NBC.
All of that assumes the podcast category functions like the other awards. But the thinking behind the category itself remains muddled, and the rollout hasn’t helped. In theory, the award is a shrewd way to put new-media figures like Alex Cooper and Ashley Flowers in the same conversation as the SmartLess guys and Amy Poehler. But the heavy presence of politically flavored figures on the list — Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and the mainstream-left hosts of Pod Save America (plus, let’s not forget Joe Rogan) — complicates that reading. To some extent, it makes sense: Political programming makes up a huge share of the podcast charts. Still, it may not mean much in the end. “I just don’t feel like Globes voters have historically, either in the former or current version, shown themselves to be in any way politically controversial,” says Reid. “Globes voters are deeply normie people who like normie, pleasant things. In that lens, I would think that Pod Save America is just as unlikely as Ben Shapiro.”
Whether Shapiro and his right-wing cohort get nominated at all is tangled up in a larger story about the Globes themselves, now under Penske ownership. Today, the awards sit inside an ecosystem that also includes the major industry trades, all also owned by Penske: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline. Even the construction of the eligibility list reflects that same bounded circuit — it was assembled using Luminate, another Penske-owned company, which the rules obliquely notes uses “proprietary technology” that takes into consideration factors like downloads, revenue, and chart placements. Hollywood awards campaigning has always blurred the lines between studios, the voting bodies, and the publications that cover them. Studios buy ads in the trades and collaborate with them on cozy events to get in front of voters; those trades get revenue in return. But Penske’s full-circle consolidation, driven in large part by a desire to corner FYC dollars, intensifies that dynamic and thus shifts how narratives can potentially get set.
This is underscored by how Penske appears to be trying to shape the inaugural podcast-awards race from the top down. In October, Darcy reported that the company was selling full-suite FYC marketing packages — covering everything from display ads and videos to spon-con and participation in FYC panels run through its trade publications — which it had pitched to several right-wing podcasters. The Ankler’s Natalie Jarvey corroborated this and further found that the Luminate-produced list of eligible podcasts was actually the second iteration after the first “inadvertently omitted several wildly popular podcasts.” It’s unclear how many podcasters bought in, but Darcy reported last week that Shapiro is among those putting marketing dollars into Penske, evident in a Deadline homepage ad takeover and a piece of sponsored content in the form of a softball interview posted on Gold Derby, another Penske property. “I don’t have a sense of exactly how much he spent,” Darcy tells me. “But those packages are priced in the tens of thousands of dollars.” (Shapiro’s team played it coy. “Did we campaign? Obviously,” a Daily Wire spokesperson told Vulture.)
At minimum, it can come off a little gross; at worst, the entire enterprise is, as Bunch frames it, “so nakedly self-dealing and corrupt I have a hard time seriously analyzing it in any way.” And with extreme figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens on the eligibility list, the new Penske Globes gives them a theoretical opportunity to launder their reputations. “The FYC business is well-accepted in Hollywood,” says Darcy. “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.” That messiness, which even set off “Page Six,” has caused some eligible contenders, most notably This Past Weekend With Theo Von, to sit out this campaign cycle, as Jarvey has also reported. (And here comes the obligatory awkward disclaimer: Penske is the majority shareholder of Vox Media, New York Magazine’s parent company.)
The Globes’ new podcast award comes with an opacity that echoes the old Globes. And part of what makes the award, and Shapiro’s chances, so tricky to think through is how much it feels like a black box where a thumb could be placed on the scale without anyone really knowing. The mere existence of a shortlist announcing the eligible podcasts is telling; as Reid notes, the Globes doesn’t do shortlists for film or TV. But the obliqueness can work the other way too. “We shouldn’t forget that this is a made-up award,” says Rich. “So if Shapiro wins by votes alone, and they changed it to make it so Amy Poehler won, nobody would ever know the difference and that probably would save them a lot of trouble.” She adds, for the record: “I have no inside information to know whether that’s possible.”
Her larger point still stands: This early in the life of Globes’ podcast award, anything is possible. You could even argue that the Hollywood contingent of Globes voters, staring down consolidation driven by Paramount’s future under David Ellison, whose father, Larry Ellison, is a major Trump ally, might see value in making overtures to conservative America. And of the right-wing podcasts on the eligibility list, Shapiro is technically the nominal “safe” option, being the sort of conservative who could go on The Ezra Klein Show without forcing an excessively long contextual disclaimer from Klein. As one awards observer pointed out, Shapiro is not currently defending pedophiles (as in the case of Megyn Kelly), nor is he saying that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk (Candace Owens), nor has he hosted the white-nationalist Nick Fuentes (Tucker Carlson). Then again, as Darcy notes, it’s not that straightforward. “To his credit, he’s far less extreme than the other potential nominees,” he says. “But while he may take more moderate positions personally, he still profits from the terrible things his employees say. He helped launch Candace Owens in conservative media.”
Ultimately, Darcy thinks Shapiro’s FYC push is sincere. “It would be a huge coup for him to get a Globe nomination,” he says. “He wants recognition from Hollywood and a mainstream audience. Being able to call it a Globes-recognized show, even just as a nominee, is huge.” Of course, Shapiro doesn’t actually need to win in order to “win.” In many ways, Shapiro has already gotten exactly what was valuable from his FYC campaign going: eyeballs, attention, people in the press like myself writing about the whole thing. (Sorry.) “The fact that Status wrote about it is exactly what he wants to happen,” says Rich. “And he gets to participate in these roundtables with people who probably hate him.” And Shapiro gets blanked from nomination, or if he gets nominated and does not win, there’s always the classic right-wing grievance play: casting the whole affair as more proof of Hollywood’s continued antagonism toward conservatives.
Still, another question lingers. What do we make of the right wing’s former enfant terrible posing cheerfully beside Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau for The Hollywood Reporter? “The fact that he was friendly in the roundtable isn’t surprising,” Bunch tells me. (He did find the Times Square billboards more surprising, albeit amusing.) But why does Shapiro seem so drawn to winning a Golden Globe? Won’t this risk making some of his audience wonder why he’s trying to appeal to these commie liberal Hollywood types? The answer to that, perhaps, is one that’s as old as time. “People care about awards,” says Rich. “Even if they know in their heart of hearts it’s all made up, they want them and they work for them.”
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