Selective Hearing: On the specious new history podcasts | Hacker News Reader

Selective Hearing: On the specious new history podcasts

harpers.org

38 pointsbenbreen17 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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)

One thing that NPR usually (always?) does, which I quite appreciate, is put out transcripts of their episodes.

If the podcast is scripted/produced to any significant degree (ie, it's not just a discussion show), I can't think of many reasons why everyone shouldn't be doing this.

Yes!

Maybe I'd follow some, if they did.

I mean, I don't commute. And it's hard for me to focus simultaneously on what I'm doing and what I'm hearing. I don't even like music with lyrics, unless I'm just chilling.

And generally, I find it much harder to follow audio. Reading anything, I'm always jumping around. I scan, and then loop back for details. And not always linearly. But doing that with audio is nontrivial.

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

[2]: https://www.consumerreports.org/cars-malcolm-gladwell-mistak...

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. :)

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.

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

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

>"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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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