Fairness in science podcasting: podcasters’ roles and fairness in content creation

Science-related topics are a popular genre of podcasts and are growing as a form of science communication. Science information is a resource, and when accessed through podcasts, a disparity in its allocation can occur. Using fairness as an ethical framework for knowledge selection and distribution, we surveyed 147 top science podcasters and assessed their views on how listeners benefit from content decisions (distributive fairness) and whether decisions reflect audience voice, respectful treatment, and transparent explanation (procedural, interpersonal, and informational fairness). Our results indicate podcasters view themselves as an intermediary between scientists and general audiences. They gather information primarily from scientific research articles and by interviewing researchers. We also note that while podcasters strive to maintain high ethical standards in the pursuit of trust from the audience, their actions, intentionally or unintentionally, do not always indicate this. We discuss potential tactics to enact fairness and future research areas to examine within this area.