Introducing "Scandalized": a podcast of political impropriety

Welcome to the nerd version of celebrity gossip

Historically, I’ve not been much of a reality TV person. I sincerely can understand the appeal of Housewives, Below Decks, Love Is Blind, and all the rest. In the early 2000s, I had a real soft spot for Survivor (it was all that “voting”, probably). But aside from our home’s near-constant rotation of old seasons of The Great British Baking Show, the closest I’ve been able to come to the can’t-look-away messiness of reality TV is the world of political scandals. The extramarital affairs are juicy (and sometimes international); the corruption is as brazen as it gets; and once in awhile, you even get the stray leaking whale carcass, or self-declaration as a Nazi on a porn site. I can’t get enough. There can never be too many political scandals, and I will never stop being interested.

This is an obsession I share with my dear friend and political science colleague at Boise State, Jaci Kettler. Look for us on a typical Thursday or Friday at 5pm, and you’re likely to find us gushing over some scandal that the politician of the week had landed themselves in, usually over beers at one of Boise’s approximately 6,000 breweries. These conversations included (and still include) a fair amount of basic incredulity: exclamations along the lines of “what the hell was this guy thinking?” or the time-honored “how did they think they were gonna get away with this?”

Jaci and I sharing a not-at-all-staged laugh about a political scandal - before the beers (Photo Credit: James Dawson)

But after the second beer, the nerding out really begins, and the questions get a little more nuanced. Why did voters punish this politician, but not this other one? Was this technically illegal, but not actually all that bad? Was it horrendously stupid, but somehow not illegal? Did we learn something from this scandal about American politics that we didn’t know before?

The more of these conversations we had, the more we started to realize that as political scientists, we might actually have something to add to the broader, capital-C “Conversation” about political scandals, why they matter, and what actual important stuff they can tell us about American politics. And so it came to pass that, during one of those brewery visits a couple of years ago, we started voicing aloud the seven words that punctuate happy hour conversations across the world every day: “We should make a podcast about this.”

What separates us from the other 99.9% of those declarations is that we actually did it. We made a podcast, and we’re calling it Scandalized. Our eight-episode first season will air weekly starting next Monday, September 30th. You can listen to the trailer right now:

Over the course of these episodes, Jaci and I will dig deep on some of our favorite stories of political scandals from across American history; tell the stories in all their scandalous detail; then get into the political science that can help explain them.

Although Jaci and I wrote, recorded, and produced the show ourselves (I’ve learned way more than I ever wanted to about audio editing in the past year), we’ve been lucky enough to work with our local NPR affiliate, Boise State Public Radio, to shepherd through, market and distribute Scandalized. Our show is part of the NPR podcast network, and you can subscribe and listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Overcast and Pocket Casts (or just search “Scandalized” wherever you listen).

I won’t lie, the part of this whole experience I might be most excited about is the absolute banger of a cover art image the NPR folks made for us:

I won’t go on at length describing the show or the scandals we’re going to cover this season — the trailer takes care of that. But I will issue a few thank yous to the folks who made this absolute joy of a project possible: first, obviously, to my co-host and co-creator, Jaci Kettler. It was no guarantee that writing polisci journal articles together would translate into producing a podcast together, but you’re so easy to work with that I should have known that it would.

Second, to Boise State Public Radio — and particularly to Tom Michael and Lacey Daley — for giving us notes on early episodes and helping this feel like a real podcast.

Third, to my and Jaci’s place of work, the Boise State School of Public Service. Not only is SPS our season sponsor, but they also provided space, time, and funding to help get this project off the ground. Much of that funding went to our amazing researcher and former student, Payton Jenkins, who was an absolute beast at tracking down details about these scandals, and actually might be more of a political junkie than Jaci or I could ever hope to be.

Jaci and I in the studio, August 2024. (Photo Credit: James Dawson)

Finally, thank you to my dear wife Keara for listen to me go on endlessly about political scandals — and this massive project — over the past couple of years. Thanks for thinking this is cool, or at least pretending to so I could muster up the stamina to keep working on it.

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I’ll issue a final, preemptive thank you to You Are Here readers for supporting this project and helping get it off the ground. This type of research is an area I’d really like to explore in the next stage of my career, and this podcast being successful and widely listened to would be a huge step in that direction. If you want to help (or just want to hear the gory details of some political scandals), there are a few ways you can do that:

• Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts: Spotify and Apple Podcasts are by far the most common, but you can also find it on smaller platforms like Overcast and Pocket Casts. When in doubt, just search for “Scandalized.” You can also listen on NPR.org or by searching for Scandalized in the NPR app.

• Rating the podcast (ideally five stars if you deem it worthy) or even writing a review — particularly on Spotify and Apple — goes a long, long way towards helping it reach a bigger audience on those platforms. We understand if you’d rather reserve judgment until you’ve heard a full episode to make sure we’re legit :)

• Sharing it directly with a friend (or 2 or 3) would also be a huge help in terms of reaching folks outside of the very key “family + other political scientists” demographic

Over the next couple of months, I’ll feature episodes in this space, and maybe offer a few extra stories about them that we weren’t able to fit into the episode. We’ll also be debuting a website as a companion piece to the show, so stay tuned for that.

Cheers, and see you at the next scandal!