
Selective Hearing: On the specious new history podcasts - benbreen
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/selective-hearing-specious-history-in-new-podcasts/
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gangstead
The worst offender they mention, Crime Junkie, in the article is a weekly
podcast. Looking at the last few episodes they are all 40 - 60 minutes. It
appears to be a small (just 2 people?) team.

Of course there's going to be zero fact checking with a lean crew cranking out
that much content so fast. I tend to cull those types of podcasts from my feed
because they devolve into some combination of 1) people reading wikipedia to
you and 2) talk radio style low quality babbble. I've never listened to Crime
Junkie but the article's claims of plagiarizing other online articles and
reddit posts suggest it's pretty low quality stuff.

Unfortunately podcasts that without an alternate source of incoming like a
non-profit have to chase the iTunes charts algorithm to get advertising
dollars like most YouTubers and YouTube's algorithm. This means consistent
quantity prevails over quality. To advertisers a download of an episode where
you spend weeks interviewing primary sources counts just as much as two people
summarizing online articles. Fortunately since podcasts are distributed via
RSS feed there's room for everybody's preferences out there, but the good ones
might be incrementally harder to find.

Just beware when you see these premium podcast ecosystems like Stitcher come
in who want you to ditch the RSS feed and pay for your podcasts solely through
the app you use to access them. The podcast world they have in mind looks more
like Crime Junkie and a lot less like This Is Criminal or BackStory.

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gnicholas
> _Yet, in an era in which fact-checking has become a national pastime,
> podcasts have largely evaded serious scrutiny._

I think one of the reasons for this is that there is more friction involved in
quoting and disproving a claim in a podcast, versus a blog post or news
article. You can’t just copy/past and then link to a source that disproves the
claim. You have to rewind, transcribe, include a time stamp, and the new
source.

This is certainly not the only reason, but as someone who has listened to
podcasts and wanted to correct things via twitter or wherever, this has been
an important factor for me.

~~~
jccalhoun
This might be one of the reasons why I tend to dislike scripted non-fiction
podcasts. When I read non-fiction I am a habitual checker of sources. I want
to make sure they actually say what the book I'm reading claims they say. That
is a lot harder to do with podcasts.

~~~
awb
> When I read non-fiction I am a habitual checker of sources

That's amazing. How often do you find errors and how egregious are they?

People cherry pick facts all the time, so I tend to take any citation with a
grain of salt.

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jccalhoun
When I was in grad school doing research for my dissertation there was more
than one time when I came across a great quote I wanted to use, read the
original source, and found it didn't have that quote at all. At least twice I
searched for that "quote" online and eventually found that it started life as
a paraphrase of the work in question and the book I first read and taken it as
a quote.

In more casual reading I will more often find someone making a grand claim
with only a citation to support it and I want to make sure that the source
actually makes a solid argument for that grand claim. So it might be something
like "Charles Babbage predicted the internet" and I need to go see what he
actually predicted to see what he actually said/wrote (I just made that
example up)

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xvector
I find that Revisionist History (ironically) is particularly guilty of not
fact-checking.

In their episode “Blame Game”[1] they discuss how the vast majority of “brake
failure” is actually due to driver error (pedal misapplication). They then
vocally blame Consumer Reports for spreading “dangerous misinformation” — CR
says that drivers should keep their pedal pressed hard on the brake.
Revisionist History instead says that drivers should take their foot off what
they think is the brake and try finding it again.

Consumer Reports again counters this[2] by describing that if you believe you
have your foot on the brake, you best not take it off, or you will lose power
braking and be unable to stop. (Power braking takes time to regenerate.)

Revisionist History does not counterargue, but doesn’t update their podcast to
provide a full and honest view of the situation either.

What is it about podcasts that makes them speak with such an air of authority?
Are they riding the wave of trustworthy investigative radio journalism, ala
NPR? Is it the low-pass voice filters and pop filters in front of the
microphone that remind us of these journalists and make us inadvertently
attribute the same sense of respect to podcasters?

Furthermore, in online discussions, an argument can only go so deep down the
rabbit hole before it loses sight of the original point. Misinformation
requires magnitudes more effort to correct than it is to cause. How do we deal
with this as a society?

[1]: [http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-
game](http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game)

[2]: [https://www.consumerreports.org/cars-malcolm-gladwell-
mistak...](https://www.consumerreports.org/cars-malcolm-gladwell-mistakenly-
blames-drivers-toyota-unintended-acceleration/)

~~~
kbenson
Oh, I think that's just how Gkadwell is. He's much less interested in making
sure the examples he's using to make a point are valid and correct than he is
in using powerful examples for the sake of them being interesting themselves.

I live the series, but it became clear to me in the first season you can't
rely on him to explore all aspects of something,or be unbiased. He's not
presenting a thesis (as much as he loves to present his work in this fashion),
he is _editorializing_. His threshold for how important some mitigating
evidence must be to be considered is much higher than I would expect any
actual news service to be, so he leaves a lot of avenues unexplored that are
inconvenient to his point.

But, as I said, I love the series. I view it like talking to that friend who
will come up with an idea and immediately passionately defend it, even when
you suspect they aren't that tied to it, but just love arguing the point. Fun
to partake, can be thought provoking, but don't expect anything to be fully
thought out and explored, that's homework for you if you're inclined. :)

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burlesona
Perhaps there's something different about these podcasts, but my gut reaction
reading this article was that you could substitute "podcast" with "cable news"
and it would mostly hold up. The difference, I suppose, is that most of these
podcasts are narrower niches and "deeper" ie. longer stories within their
niches than the "soundbite" versions of things that you get on TV, but,
unfortunately, poorly reporting history has been a popular pastime for as long
as there's been media.

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monadic2
For an actual recommendation I have “Revolutions” by Mike Duncan.

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trimboffle
That site has in impressive number of pop outs pop ups fly outs and fly overs.

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corporate_shi11
>"Though this episode is pointedly titled “Utopia for Whom,” it fails to
mention that American slavery began in the colony."

So just because a podcaster doesn't include your favorite pet fact about a
particular topic the entire industry is broken? Since when is there an
official set of facts that must be mentioned when addressing a given topic?

~~~
xvector
The article gives a plethora of examples which show history podcasts
deliberately and seriously mistelling history in favor of intrigue. There are
many more that the article does not mention.

Please, let’s not cherry-pick phrases to present an unbalanced view of the
article.

~~~
corporate_shi11
And that example has nothing to do with misrepresentation or mistelling.
Unless the podcast is specifically about slavery, I see no reason why the
podcaster should be expected to mention slavery in reference to Jamestown.

I'm taking issue with that specific example, but if podcasts are rife with
inaccuracies and misrepresentations it's odd that the writer felt the need to
include that example, which does not support their point.

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droithomme
Hm, so they would like podcasts to be considered fake news or at least
cancelable. As their opening example of problems they cite a podcast which
they claim committed plagiarism because the host rehashed her own series of
articles on a topic. Is copying from yourself plagiarism? I can see why the
fans are skeptical on this claim.

Then they mention the same podcast (I guess they don't have too many examples)
failed to cite three sources.

Failed to cite their sources? I wish they would cite their sources but failure
to cite puts them in the same bucket as articles published in the New York
Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, etc etc etc, pretty much ALL news
media fails to cite their sources. That annoys me. But saying podcasts are bad
for not citing sources while not saying anything about major print media is
absurd.

~~~
function_seven
> _As their opening example of problems they cite a podcast which they claim
> committed plagiarism because the host rehashed her own series of articles on
> a topic. Is copying from yourself plagiarism?_

The _Crime Junkie_ host, Ashley Flowers, was alleged to have plagiarized the
work of Cathy Frye, a journalist at the _Arkansas Democrat-Gazette_

