The Pabulum of Public Radio and Podcasting: Why It Is Bad and How Academia Can Help

Abstract It is possible to communicate academic thought without being reductive, but that rarely happens in U.S. news media. Instead, academia is mined to produce journalistic edutainment: a media product that turns information into entertainment. Edutainment is pervasive, particularly in U.S. public radio and podcasting, the medium in which the authors work. A major reason edutainment dominates audio is that it is difficult to convey complex ideas in sound. Listeners, unlike readers, cannot control the speed at which they engage with material, which puts them at constant risk of getting lost. In U.S. public radio, the default solution is to make information entertaining. This approach has encouraged strict rules about everything from the length of stories and use of sound to the tone of narration and narrative structure. These rules all but ensure the production of edutainment. It does not have to be this way. Audio can be a powerful medium for academic work. To succeed, one must not pander but instead challenge the rules and explore new formats that honor the complexity of academic work. This is the story of our attempt to do just that with a new audio show, Ways of Knowing.