The Bias and Problems with Serial

The Bias and Problems with Serial

What if a tragedy occurs, and someone digs into the incident furthermore and turns it into a podcast so the world can listen? The podcast Serial produced by This American Life and hosted by Sarah Koening does precisely this. This podcast, Serial, tells a story each week about a murder that occurred in the year 1999 of a seventeen-year-old student, Hae Min Lee. Her cause of death was manual strangulation, and the star witness of the case was Jay Wilds as he was the one that provided the most of the evidence for the situation. Since then, Adnan Syed was sentenced to prison in 2000 for the murder. Most people don’t see him to be guilty as there was absolutely no physical evidence that he did it, but with his strange behavior, before and after the murder, he was determined to be guilty. This podcast is biased towards Adnan, portraying him to be innocent and rather putting the blame on Jay. Koening is not straightforward and often misleads the audience, making the podcast out to be more entertaining than a simple investigation. With this, I believe that this podcast is biased, unbalanced, and is problematic for a podcast formatted this way.

        First and foremost, while listening to the podcast, Koening becomes very biased towards how Adnan should be seen as innocent, and Jay guilty. For a majority of the podcast, Koening features Jay’s testimony or clips of his interview with the cops. This repeated evidence shown in the podcast causes Jay to have a guilty image. “The story Jay told the police had problems, because it kept changing from telling to telling.” (Episode 5) Shown in this quotation, Sarah begins to manipulate the listeners into believing that Jay is guilty. During this part of the quotation, Koening states that Jay is a liar because his story about the murder kept changing each time when the cops interviewed him. Following this, Koening continuously talks about how suspicious Jay is, with his inconsistent stories. She then takes the investigation further as she interviews people who know Jay and went to school with him. “Three women who knew him from Woodlawn, including one teacher. Told me unflattering things about him. Nothing terrible, just that he was mean or intimidating. Some kids thought of him as ‘shady,’ that you wouldn’t want to push him.” (Episode 8) Shown in this quotation is how others thought of Jay. Koening mentioned some of the positive thoughts of Jay, but included more negative thoughts, making look worse. The people she decided to interview had a major impact on the way Jay is looked at. For example, having an interview with teachers makes it look worse because it has more meaning than getting friends or people who know Jay. This is further proof of Koening’s bias as she continues to convince us, listeners, that Jay is somehow guilty.  As Jay is also one of the “star witnesses” of this whole case, Koening made two episodes just dedicated to how suspicious Jay is. Koening also visited Jay to gather answers and the truth. “That’s right, he said, ‘who did it? I was there, I saw it, I know what I know’. He was very forceful, ‘I can’t even believe that he wouldn’t man up and admit it” (Episode 8) Seen from this quotation, Sarah brings up how forceful Jay was when she and one of her producers went to try to get information from him. “He was very forceful” emphasizes how he might have lied during that point of time and to make it seem that he should be the one held in prison. After hearing this, listeners begin to assume that Jay is guilty. Evidently, Koening tries to persuade the listeners of the podcast that Jay has done the murder, not Adnan. She manipulates the negativity about Jay by questioning his story, interviewing his teachers and friends, and making direct bad comments on his attitude With this, it concludes how Koening is biased towards Adnan’s innocence. With Jay being the base of Adnan’s case, it is shown in many parts of each episode of the podcast that Jay is always suspicious.