by True crime is among the most popular genres in podcasting. One of the biggest stories of the coming months is the wave of criminal charges facing former President Donald J. Trump.
The result: a boom of podcasts dedicated to the criminal cases against them.
MSNBC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NPR, Vox Media and The First TV, a new conservative media company, have launched or are about to start new shows examining Trump’s travails in the courts as he campaigns to take back the House White.
In “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” legal commentators Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord offer analysis drawn from their years as prosecutors. A recent episode of “Break down,” from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, includes a news interview with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Recently in “The Trump trials” NPR host Scott Detrow discussed whether Trump could claim presidential immunity.
The criminal charges against 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 on the U.S. Capitol and his handling of sensitive documents. and payments to cover up a sex scandal. Trump denies wrongdoing.
Many of the anchors interviewed by The New York Times cited the news value of the story (a former president and a leading candidate for office faces a legal attack as he fights for the White House) as the impetus for going wall-to-wall. wall with dedicated podcasts. .
“He is by far the favorite for the nomination and has a real chance of being president again,” Detrow said. “That, to me, is a huge legal story, a huge political story.”
But there’s also a major potential economic advantage: capturing a portion of the $2.4 billion advertisers are expected to spend on podcasts in 2024, according to data firm eMarketer. For years, news organizations have benefited financially from public interest in Trump, known colloquially as the “Trump coup.”
“The number of users has increased, but the number of people competing for those users in terms of dollars has also increased considerably,” said Chris Balfe, founder of The First TV.
Trump’s legal challenges present an unusual twist on the true crime genre, which often focuses on gruesome murders or dramatic heists. “Serial,” a podcast from the creators of “This American Life,” pioneered the category, which also included contestants like “Get out of the scam” (about a missing cryptocurrency tycoon) and “Last seen”, a suspenseful story about the theft of 13 irreplaceable works of art 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, DC.
Podcasts are an ideal format for explaining nuances to the public, because they give journalists the time and space to examine complicated topics in depth, Balfe said. They also allow news organizations to create a listener destination for coverage quickly and relatively inexpensively, with two microphones and a simple distribution channel for Spotify and Apple Podcasts, he said.
“You don’t have to rent a beautiful studio on Sixth Avenue and hire a crew and all that other stuff,” Balfe said. “A podcast is a simple, high-level way to start a new product. And if it works, it can be very successful and very quickly.”
Last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia’s largest newspaper, dedicated the latest season of its true crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the criminal investigation. Since then, it’s been all Trump, all the time, with 22 episodes on the topic since August.
This year, the podcast garnered more than a 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 Trump’s case in Fulton County, where he faces 13 felony charges, including racketeering.
Tamar Hallerman, one of those reporters, is a co-host of the podcast. She describes herself as a “recovering Washington correspondent.” She (she was previously a reporter at Roll Call).
“All of these legal cases that Trump finds himself in are already creating a unique set of circumstances for a leading presidential candidate,” said Hallerman, who covered the 2016 presidential campaign. “This is not at all business as usual for the body of campaign press.
Preet Bharara, former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, dedicated much of one of his three podcasts for Vox Media to the criminal investigations facing Trump. Bharara has covered Trump’s legal troubles since 2018 and said, “There really has been no shortage of legal-based news.”
However, “the dam broke” in April, he said, after Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, filed the first criminal charges against Trump.
“Every month or two, there was another one,” Bharara said. “And it became clear that that was going to be a central focus.”
Political coverage of Trump should focus on criminal investigations into the former president, rather than traditional horse racing coverage, said Timothy Crouse, whose 1973 book, “The Boys on the Bus,” about media coverage of the presidential elections of the previous year. 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, Crouse said. At the time, many campaign reporters were skeptical of those stories. He added that the sustained exploration of Trump’s criminal charges would likely follow the same pattern.
“Fewer political journalists might be fine, but only if that decrease was balanced by an increase in investigative journalists,” Crouse said.
