The Complicated Emotions of True Crime Podcasts

I have been on a very long true crime podcast spree. I’ll find a podcast I like, binge it in its entirety over a period of days or weeks or months, then move onto the next podcast when I’m done. 

I listen to true crime podcasts for the same reason I listen to comedy podcasts and bad movie podcasts: to distract me from the inexorable horror of everyday life. 

I’m currently binging a very addictive podcast called Love Murder that also happens to be very funny thanks to the chemistry and personalities of the hosts. 

But even with a funny true crime podcasts you are nevertheless assaulted by humanity’s viciousness and cruelty. 

Listening regularly to true crime podcasts is like watching the news every night. If you watch the news every night, as people did in the distant past, it’s very easy to get the impression that the world is a cesspool of crime and depravity, where murderers and rapists lurk around every corner. 

Prolonged exposure to the nightly news can be a gateway to reactionary politics. After all, if the worst people in the world are committing unspeakable crimes on a seemingly constant basis, then shouldn’t they all be locked up and punished as harshly as possible? 

The same is true of listening to true crime podcasts. Compulsive consumption of podcasts about murders and swindles and various other forms of criminality can lead listeners to see the world as an unspeakably evil and vile place filled with the kind of deviants you want to bury under the jail. 

The psychology of true crime podcast fandom is thankfully more complicated than that. We don’t just feel appropriate rage towards the colorful monsters that make true crime so insanely popular; we also feel for the victims. 

True crime podcasts deal with a wide array of intense emotions. There’s anger, of course but also compassion, empathy and understanding. We feel for the suffering souls whose families, lives and mental health were destroyed by inhuman monsters. We put ourselves in their place, imagining what they must have gone through and how they suffered. 

There’s something inherently creepy about true crime fandom, in deriving pleasure or entertainment from the deaths and suffering of others. 

It’s consequently a medium that attracts its share of sketchy characters, like Mike Boudet of Sword and Scale. Sword and Scale was one of the first true crime podcasts I listened to but the more I learned about its host, his virulent sexism, crazed narcissism and right wing politics, the less I liked the show. 

Now I cannot imagine listening to another episode of Sword and Scale. That’s one of the things I like about Love Murder. The hosts derive a lot of delight from talking about horrible crimes but they themselves do not seem like bad people, nor does it feel like they’re mocking victims or making light of the criminals at the center of their stories. 

So while I don’t necessary feel good about being so obsessed with an inherently sketchy medium like true crime podcasts I don’t feel too guilty about it either. Like everything in life, it’s all about finding a balance. I want to be able to satiate my bottomless curiosity about all of the world’s ugliness without getting dirtied by it in the process. 

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