True crime is among the most popular genres in podcasting. One of the biggest stories in the coming months is the wave of criminal charges facing former President Donald J. Trump, reported The New York Times.
The result: a boomlet of podcasts dedicated to the
criminal cases against him.
MSNBC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NPR, Vox
Media and The First TV, an upstart conservative media company, have all
introduced or are about to start new shows examining Mr. Trump’s courtroom
travails as he campaigns to win back the White House.
On MSNBC’s “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” the legal commentators Andrew
Weissmann and Mary McCord offer analysis gleaned from their years serving as prosecutors.
A recent episode of “Breakdown,”
from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, includes a newsy interview with Fani
Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Recently on “Trump’s Trials,” the NPR host Scott Detrow discussed
whether Mr. Trump could claim presidential immunity.
The criminal
charges against Mr. Trump — brought by state prosecutors in New York
and Georgia, as well as in two federal indictments — involve allegations of
election interference, his role in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, his
handling of sensitive documents and payments to cover up a sex scandal. Mr.
Trump denies any wrongdoing.
Many of the hosts interviewed by The New York Times
cited the newsworthiness of the story — a former president and a leading
candidate for the office is facing a legal onslaught while battling for the
White House — as the impetus to go wall to wall with dedicated podcasts.
“He is the far and away front-runner to the nomination
and has a real chance of being president again,” Mr. Detrow said. “That, to me,
is an enormous legal story, an enormous political story.”
But there is a significant potential economic upside
as well: capturing a slice of the $2.4 billion that advertisers are expected to
spend on podcasts in 2024, according to the data firm eMarketer. For years,
news organizations have benefited financially from the public’s interest in Mr.
Trump — colloquially known as the “Trump bump.”
“The number of users is up, but the number of people
vying for those users in terms of dollars is also way up,” said Chris Balfe,
founder of The First TV.
Mr. Trump’s legal challenges present an unusual twist
on the true-crime genre, which often focuses on grisly murders or dramatic
heists. “Serial,” a podcast from the creators of “This American Life,” was a
pioneer of the category, which has also included entrants like “Exit Scam” (about a vanished cryptocurrency mogul) and “Last Seen,” a suspenseful yarn about the theft of 13
irreplaceable artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. (The
New York Times Company now owns Serial Productions, maker of “Serial.”)
The Trump cases, by contrast, involve complicated
questions about the Constitution and democracy. Adding to the complexity: They
span state and federal jurisdictions in Florida, Georgia, New York and
Washington, D.C.
Podcasts are an ideal format to explain the nuances to
the public, because they give journalists the time and space to examine
complicated issues at length, Mr. Balfe said. They also allow news
organizations to create a listener destination for coverage quickly and
relatively inexpensively, with two mics and a simple distribution feed for
Spotify and Apple Podcasts, he said.
“You don’t have to go lease a beautiful studio on
Sixth Avenue and hire a crew and all this other stuff,” Mr. Balfe said. “A
podcast is a low-floor, high-ceiling way to start a new product. And if it
works, it can be very successful, very quickly.”
Last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the
largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated the latest season of its true-crime
podcast, “Breakdown,” to the criminal investigation. Since then, it has been
all Trump, all the time, with 22 episodes on the topic since August.
This year, the podcast garnered more than one million
downloads, making it the newspaper’s most popular, finding audiences in Florida,
California and New York, according to a spokeswoman for The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.
The newspaper also has three full-time reporters
covering Mr. Trump’s case in Fulton County, where he faces 13 felony charges,
including racketeering.
Tamar Hallerman, one of those reporters, co-anchors
the podcast. She describes herself as a “recovering Washington correspondent.”
(She was previously a reporter at Roll Call.)
“All of these legal cases that Trump is in the middle
of are already creating a unique set of circumstances for a leading
presidential candidate,” said Ms. Hallerman, who covered the 2016 presidential
campaign. “This is absolutely not business as usual for the campaign press
corps.”
Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern
District of New York, has dedicated much of one of his three podcasts for Vox
Media to the criminal investigations facing Mr. Trump. Mr. Bharara has covered
Mr. Trump’s legal issues since 2018, saying, “There’s really been no shortage
of legal-based news.”
Yet “the dam broke” in April, he said, after Alvin L.
Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, brought the first criminal charges
against Mr. Trump.
“Every month or two, there was another one,” Mr.
Bharara said. “And it became clear that that was going to be a central focus.”
Political coverage of Mr. Trump should focus on the
criminal investigations into the former president, rather than traditional
horse-race coverage, said Timothy Crouse, whose 1973 book, “The Boys on the
Bus,” about the media’s coverage of the previous year’s presidential campaign,
became a classic of the genre.
Investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein, not campaign reporters, did the most enduring political journalism
of that era, Mr. Crouse said. At the time, many campaign reporters were skeptical
of those stories. He added that sustained exploration of Mr. Trump’s criminal
charges would probably follow the same pattern.
“Fewer political reporters might be OK, but only if
that decrease were to be balanced by an increase in investigative reporters,”
Mr. Crouse said.
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