On the Ethical Fringes of Journalism: True Crime Podcasting as Diagnostic Journalism

Operating on the journalistic periphery, true crime podcasts offer a growing space with practices historically associated with journalism. That said, distance from the normative core of journalism allows true crime podcasts to approach ethical work in novel ways, at times operating as “heretic interlopers” because they have eschewed essential ethical norms within the journalistic field. This textual analysis explores how Season 1 of the Hidden True Crime podcast discursively constructed ethically acceptable practices when discussing a series of murders perpetrated by Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell. The podcast’s hosts combined two professional fields: one host was a journalist and the other was a forensic psychologist. This case offers a novel connection between field theory and media ethics, applying the Aristotelian Phronesis Model as a touchstone for journalists’ normative commitments. Hence, this study suggests that centrality in the journalistic field occurs in part through adherence to ethics.