Bedroom broadcasters are pumping out pods unchecked – and now, some are being accused of plagiarism, voyeurism, even scuppering lawsuits. Is this booming industry doomed?
‘I am a comedian, not a journalist, and am stumbling my way through this … I thought I was doing everything correctly with the source link in the description. Again, very sorry.” So wrote podcaster Dave Anthony in a post on Reddit this year, responding to allegations of plagiarism against his podcast The Dollop, in which he riffs on episodes from US history with fellow comic Gareth Reynolds. Anthony ran into trouble this summer when Slate editor Josh Levin observed that sections of a Dollop episode from 2017, about the notorious fraudster Linda Taylor, had been lifted verbatim from a piece Levin wrote in 2013. The kerfuffle drew attention to a 2015 incident in which the history/science podcast Damn Interesting claimed that The Dollop had relied heavily on its work.
Elsewhere, the makers of US true-crime show Crime Junkie removed several episodes from its back catalogue after complaints from multiple journalists and podcasters that it had used their research uncredited. As for The Dollop, it improved its practices for citing sources, while also announcing itself as “a fair use podcast” – ie they believed their use of other people’s work to be allowable under copyright law. It wasn’t enough to satisfy Levin. “That legalistic debate misses the point,” he wrote on Twitter. “Whether it’s fair use or not, this behaviour from The Dollop is certainly unethical/ungenerous/rude/shitty.”