Moral Ambivalence: Listeners' Perspective On Ethics In True Crime Podcasts

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Presenter(s)

Makayla Mohr, Michelle Vasquez Loya

Abstract or Description

As the true crime genre continues to gain popularity, the ethics surrounding these podcasts is a topic of conversation for listeners. Our research addresses the issue of how listeners view the ethics behind podcasting and how they view their own contributions to the exploitation of victims. It also highlights the strategies listeners use to help cope with moral ambivalence. This project uses data and transcripts of listener discussions on social media. To refine our considerations, we only examined discussion boards from one primary social media platform dedicated to the podcasts Morbid and Crime Junkie. We conducted a thematic analysis with particular attention paid to parts of discussions referring to specific terms - ethics. Given this term, these are the top ethical challenges we observed in our analysis: dark and super fandoms, plagiarism, and exploitation of victims.