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VisualPolitik
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VisualPolitik is a political YouTube channel that provides detailed commentary on world politics and current affairs, often from an aggressively neoliberal perspective. Originally founded by Enrique Couto, Enrique Fonseca and Alberto Rodriguez in 2017 as a Spanish-language channel,[1] it has since created English- and German-language subsidiaries, with the English-language version presented by Simon Whistler as only one of his approximately 2 million infotainment channels. These channels provide little of their own content, instead doing cut-and-paste translations of the videos on the original Spanish channel, and as a result there's a large number of videos about Spain or Latin America by the standards of English-language media. As of May 2020, the English-language channel alone has close to a million subscribers and more than 100 million total views,[2] while the original Spanish channel has almost double these numbers.
In spite of the channel's success, its videos have received some criticism both for their openly neoliberal ideology, with a large number of their videos advocating for free trade and tax breaks for large businesses as the main method of achieving economic development, and more generally for being sloppily-researched and valuing quantity over quality. A good example is its video on New Zealand about how it was such a great economic success story due to its policy of Rogernomics,
[3] in which they used clips of a demonstration in the early 1980s that they insinuated was due to economic turmoil, but was actually an anti-apartheid demonstration and had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the domestic issues at the time. Its videos about Canada, in particular, have also come under fire for oversimplifying Canada's main political issues and for aggressively cheerleading the government of Justin Trudeau.[4] In addition, they have been criticised for using tactics to pad out the runtime of their videos, such as repetitive use of the same three songs in all their videos (often over the top of the presenters themselves so you can barely hear what they're saying), long pauses and captions read out in slow motion by a guy who sounds like he's had a couple of pints too many.