New life in an old genre In 2014, the centuries-old genre of true crime found a new medium in the form of a podcast titled Serial, which followed the murder and prosecution of a young man in Baltimore in 1999. The finely-produced narrative series helped kickstart a new communication medium known as the podcast, eventually evolving from a curiosity into a mass medium now competing with television and radio. But like all the true crime works that came before, questions about the ethics and prejudices of the person telling the story bubbled to the surface. The Atlantic Monthly, at the time, wrote an article titled Serial Episode 8: A Study in Bias? This review examined the human tendency to favor information that strengthens beliefs and…