The worst offender they mention, Crime Junkie, in the article is a weekly podcast. Looking at the last few episodes they are all 40 - 60 minutes. It appears to

The worst offender they mention, Crime Junkie, in the article is a weekly podcast. Looking at the last few episodes they are all 40 - 60 minutes. It appears to be a small (just 2 people?) team. Of course there's going to be zero fact checking with a lean crew cranking out that much content so fast. I tend to cull those types of podcasts from my feed because they devolve into some combination of 1) people reading wikipedia to you and 2) talk radio style low quality babbble. I've never listened to Crime Junkie but the article's claims of plagiarizing other online articles and reddit posts suggest it's pretty low quality stuff. Unfortunately podcasts that without an alternate source of incoming like a non-profit have to chase the iTunes charts algorithm to get advertising dollars like most YouTubers and YouTube's algorithm. This means consistent quantity prevails over quality. To advertisers a download of an episode where you spend weeks interviewing primary sources counts just as much as two people summarizing online articles. Fortunately since podcasts are distributed via RSS feed there's room for everybody's preferences out there, but the good ones might be incrementally harder to find. Just beware when you see these premium podcast ecosystems like Stitcher come in who want you to ditch the RSS feed and pay for your podcasts solely through the app you use to access them. The podcast world they have in mind looks more like Crime Junkie and a lot less like This Is Criminal or BackStory.