Mental images and emotive voices in true crime podcasts focused on female victims
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rapid rise in true crime podcasts is a notable trend accompanying the widespread expansion of podcasting in the twenty-first century. Critics and scholars of true crime podcasts are particularly interested in reconciling the predominantly female listenership of these podcasts with content that often focuses on female victims. This chapter considers the presentation of murdered or missing women in a range of podcast series, with reference to questions of voice and the ways in which, even in an audio medium, stories of violence against women can be sensationalist and emotive forms of infotainment. I argue that forms of affective response – of being overwhelmed, of feeling affection for victims – may help to explain the appeal of such true crime podcasts to women. The podcasts chosen for discussion provide a range of production contexts and approaches to their presentation of female victims’ stories, including the American viral sensation Serial (2014), the Audible podcast West Cork (2018), which is set in Ireland and focuses on the unsolved murder of Frenchwoman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, and Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo (2018), which was produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and explores the disappearance of a young Indigenous girl. After first considering how mental images of victims’ bodies are presented verbally, I examine aspects of the use of the voice in true crime podcasts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".