The Ethics of True Crime Podcasting: Where Some Shows Cross the Line

Every true crime podcast is, at some level, built out of someone else's worst day. That's not a reason to stop making them or listening to them — the genre has produced real journalism, occasionally decades of dogged persistence that helped free wrongly convicted people. But it does mean the genre has an ethics problem that doesn't go away just because a show is well produced. Three real examples show what that problem actually looks like in practice, rather than in the abstract.

Consent doesn't end when someone dies

S-Town, one of the most acclaimed podcasts ever made, ran into exactly this. Its subject, John B. McLemore, died by suicide two years before the show aired — meaning he never heard, and never approved, the finished product. His estate later sued the production team, arguing that intimate details about his mental health and personal life were included despite McLemore having explicitly asked producer Brian Reed to keep parts of it off the record. The lawsuit didn't succeed in shutting the show down, and S-Town remains widely praised as a piece of audio storytelling. But the underlying question — can someone meaningfully consent to a story that will only be told after they're no longer able to object to how it's told — never really got resolved. It's not a hypothetical for the genre. It's a recurring one.

Our view: a podcast doesn't need to avoid difficult personal material to be ethical. It needs to be honest, in the finished product, about what its subject did and didn't agree to — and it should weigh a subject's specific requests more heavily than the fact that they're no longer around to enforce them.

Whose reporting is it, actually?

Crime Junkie's 2019 plagiarism controversy is the clearest case study the genre has of a different failure: not consent, but credit. Journalist Cathy Frye publicly called out the show for lifting passages — in places near-verbatim — from her own four-part newspaper series on the murder of 13-year-old Kacie Woody, without citation. Once the allegation gained traction, further examples surfaced involving other creators' work. Crime Junkie pulled the affected episodes and host Ashley Flowers acknowledged, in a public statement, that "our work would not be possible absent the incredible efforts of countless individuals who investigate and report these stories originally, and they deserve to be credited as such." The show has since tightened its sourcing practices, and it remains one of the most listened-to true crime podcasts in the world.

That's worth sitting with: Crime Junkie's popularity was never really in question, before or after. What the episode exposed is how easy it is for a true crime podcast — which is, at bottom, retelling stories that someone else did the original reporting to uncover — to blur the line between "researched this" and "read this somewhere and forgot where." The shows that consistently cite original reporting, court documents, and interviews in their show notes are doing something a lot of the genre still treats as optional.

The people the story is actually about don't always get a vote

Serial Season 1 remains the single most influential true crime podcast ever made, and it's also a useful example of what happens when a show can only tell one side. Reporter Sarah Koenig was unable to reach Hae Min Lee's family for comment during the podcast's original run. The result, as the family has said publicly in the years since, was a show that made Adnan Syed — the man convicted, and later exonerated, of murdering Hae — the sympathetic protagonist of a story about their daughter and sister's death. When Syed's conviction was vacated in 2022, the family's statement noted the process had "re-opened wounds that few can imagine," and asked, pointedly, that people remember who the victim was.

None of this makes Serial bad journalism — the show's reporting on the case's evidentiary problems held up, and contributed to a real legal outcome years later. But it's a reminder that a podcast can be rigorous about the evidence and still be lopsided about the people, simply because one side wasn't available or willing to participate. Listeners rarely get told, in the moment, which parts of a story are missing because someone said no.

What this means for how we cover shows here

We factor this into how we describe podcasts on this site, not just how entertaining or well-produced they are — it's part of why our rating system includes a factual accuracy score alongside storytelling and production, not just a single blended number. A show can be gripping and still be worth a caveat. We try to give you both.

If you're choosing between two similar shows on a case, the practical version of all this is simple: favour the one that cites where its information comes from, that's transparent about who it couldn't reach, and that treats the victim as the actual subject of the story rather than the reason the story exists.

See how we rate every podcast on the site → · Read about the Adnan Syed case →