Only 11% of Americans had ever listened to a podcast a decade ago. Today, the number is 57%. The exponential growth of podcasts’ popularity can be attributed to the low barriers for entry — almost anyone can make a podcast, and almost anyone can listen.
At face value, a podcasts’ accessibility sounds promising, promoting the democratization of information-sharing. And, to an extent, it provides that promise.
A study from the Pew Research Center finds that podcasts can increase engagement with news and public affairs, particularly among younger audiences who are less likely to consume traditional media.
But, this argument assumes that all information within podcasts is equally credible, or at least that listeners can reliably distinguish between credible and non-credible sources.
That assumption does not hold up.
The features that make podcasts valuable — accessibility, long-form storytelling and personal tone — also make them uniquely vulnerable to misinformation. There are no consistent safeguards separating well-researched context from speculation or outright lies.
A Brookings Institution study analyzing 36,603 episodes across 79 political podcasts found that at least 5% of episodes contained false or unsubstantiated claims. More concerning, 71% of those shows had shared misinformation at least once, and 15% of these shows had done so more than 50 times.
This pattern makes sense when you think about how podcasts function. Unlike traditional journalism, podcasts operate in a space with almost no structural accountability. Most of the time, podcasts don’t allow for oversight or editing since the person speaking is the one in charge. This makes fact-checking on large scales difficult.
Spoken audio has to be turned into something that can be analyzed, which usually means transcribing it and using language-processing tools. Even then, going through huge amounts of content to spot misinformation isn’t easy.
Beyond what information or misinformation is shared, we must consider how it is presented. Podcasts prey on intimacy. You might listen to them alone; at the gym, walking to class, driving. Their tone is casual, so it can feel like you’re on the phone with a friend. The longform, episodic format of podcasting gives hosts the time and space to repeat information.
Ease of processing, or cognitive fluency, is an important input in assessing truth. This means that we are more likely to believe statements we hear repeatedly.
Hosts hold authority, because they are familiar and consistent, not because they are correct or experts, which morphs into a substitute for credibility.
Dylan Long, associate director of the Civic Synergy Program through the Hanley Democracy Center, believes there are both pros and cons to people using podcasts as sources of information.
“They can absolutely make information more accessible, especially for people who do not read long articles or follow traditional news sources,” Long said. “At the same time, the barrier to entry is so low that anyone with a microphone, confidence and a loyal audience can present [their] opinion as fact.”
He recognizes that in some cases, podcasts are useful, but that we should be critical of who we choose to listen to.
“Podcasts can make people intellectually lazy by encouraging them to absorb one-sided commentary instead of questioning what they hear,” Long said. “Overall, I think they are useful, but they have become too normalized as trustworthy sources when many of them simply are not.”
None of this is to say that podcasts are inherently bad. The format itself is not the problem, the problem is the absence of reliable consequences for being wrong, and mechanisms for policing.
We tend to worry about misinformation where it is loud and obvious. Podcasts are dangerous because they are neither. They are calm, conversational, and for these reasons, increasingly influential.