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Skeptic Podcasts (and the general tropability of non-fiction podcasts)

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MissConduct (Septatroper)
#1: Sep 16th 2023 at 4:38:48 PM

I was cleaning out What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs? wicks when I found Desert Air Podcast, an atheist/skeptic podcast that has no fictional narrative. Its material consists solely of discussing issues relevant to the atheist lifestyle and current events. Most of its examples are ZCE's, gushing over the hosts (Nerds Are Sexy, anyone?note ), or NRLEP violations. Aside from trope cuts and reorganizations done by cleanup efforts, literally all of this page (and its itty bitty YMMV) was written by one user in 2012.

Through wikiwalking I found a bit of a rabbit hole of skeptic podcasts/cable access shows with lengthy pages - The Skeptics Guide To The Universe, The Atheist Experience, Skeptoid, Talk Heathen, and the creator Matt Dillahunty. I imagine there's more. None of these are quite as poorly written as Desert Air Podcast's page but these do have concerning problems, like Talk Heathen's calling real callers-in Jerkasses, and TSGTTU's page calling its hosts "Science Heroes" with a very gushy paragraph. None of these works have any fictional narrative. As a rule, these aren't tropeworthy, right?

Further adventures down the rabbit hole show even more podcasts with questionable tropeworthiness. This Week In Virology is cut-and-dryly just a podcast about real virology. Disgraceland is a straightforward chronicle of the lives of musicians, and much of the page consists of NRLEP violations. Well There's Your Problem, which is about real engineering disasters, admits in its article that sometimes it's more Author Tract than history. Are any of these page-worthy?

SamCurt Since: Jan, 2001
#2: Sep 17th 2023 at 8:08:33 AM

[up] If the last one contains a large amount of Author Tract, then those content might be tropable, but I'm not sure on that. The rest, no, since we can apply our standards on nonfiction in other media to podcasts.

Scientia et Libertas | Per Aspera ad Astra Nova
MissConduct (Septatroper)
#3: Sep 20th 2023 at 8:12:12 AM

There's a lot of red links on the Podcasts page even before I started cutting - should we just axe any red link there? If they're tropeworthy and someone cares to make a page for them that's different, but it's not our job to be a repository of all podcasts ever, right?

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