A true crime vortex is spiraling over the U.S. Can it possibly be good for us?

The past few weeks have been great for true crime fans. The Menendez brothers were given a second verdict, Luigi Mangioni pleaded not guilty, P. Diddy’s ongoing RICO trial was national front-page news, and the Karen Read case was back for a second installment.

It was as if a true crime story vortex was spiraling over the United States, drawing our collective attention toward yet another retelling of these sensational stories about horrible events.

Even without such headlines, the genre continues to dominate the media landscape. A YouGov poll last year found that 57% of Americans consume some form of crime-related entertainment; when filtered for women, the number jumped to 61%. Of folks who listen to podcasts, according to Pew Research from 2023, more than a third have tuned in to true crime.

Those numbers suggest that more than 150 million Americans consume this genre of media. For comparison, only 22% of the country watch local news, according to Pew. True-crime stories turn up on social media and at the water cooler; they blare from radios and smartphones. And they exist in American culture without nearly as much controversy as politics.

“True crime, broadly defined, is a kind of unifying experience that people have, and it raises so many ethical and moral issues,” said Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of media ethics at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.

Phillips’s point is an uncomfortable one to consider as true crime has become practically ubiquitous, expanding to other aspects of the criminal justice system, including mugshots, and body cam and police interrogation videos marketed as entertainment.

Even if viewers of this content have lots of company, is there anything strange — and even unethical — about spending so much of our downtime on stories of violence and crime? Is it fair to the victims, their families or even the families of the perpetrators to sensationalize these already tragic moments?

What about a media ecosystem that has a demand for real-life tragedies? Will it have any adverse effects on our mental health to keep watching?

Just like the mysteries within the crime stories themselves, there isn’t always a clear answer to these questions. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth asking.

Why we watch

A recent New Yorker cartoon by Kim Warp depicted a woman watching television on her couch, while petting a cat and eating a bowl of popcorn. The caption read, “When are they going to have some new murders? I’ve seen all these.”

It’s funny, but also kind of repugnant — especially if it hits close to home.

And yet viewers of true crime aren’t just being entertained by tragedy. According to some experts, the genre offers an opportunity to express empathy, to educate ourselves about possible threats, and also to assess our relationship with our media ecosystem.

Through his research about why people are so obsessed with true crime, Scott Bonn, the criminologist and author of "Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Killers,“ found that a lot of the appeal has to do with empathy.

“We humans are empathetic creatures,” Bonn told me. “We are drawn to both the good and the bad in the world to understand it.”

Bonn also found that people are most often drawn to events that are both larger than life and deadly. Examples are storms, tsunamis, earthquakes and — what he believes is the closest approximation in nature to violent criminals — great white sharks.

The serial killer presents a human amalgam of the threat sharks pose, he said — in their rarity, as well as their deadly and exotic nature.

By watching, listening to and researching these stories, people are finding ways to understand and overcome the anxiety that comes from such threats existing in the world. In doing so, the exposure might “relieve our own tension, anxiety and terror in all of this,” Bonn said. “It’s almost like a defense mechanism: ‘If I can just figure it out, maybe it’s not so terrifying after all.’”

He added: “It’s just the incredible curiosity, the horror of it all — we’re compelled to try to understand. True crime allows us to experience that horror, that adrenaline rush, but in a safe environment.”

Bonn has a podcast and tours the country giving presentations on his research. He said that 75% of his audience are women who identify with the victims, and he believes they find learning as much as they can about violent crime a form of practical education.

Women often “put themselves in the shoes of the victims, who — more often than not — are women in these morality plays, these serial killer stories, these true crime shows,” Bonn said. “Many of them will go so far as to say, not only do I not want to be a victim of the next Ted Bundy, but I don’t want to date him or marry him either.”

Bonn also uses his speaking tour to highlight some of the ethics of these stories. He’ll ask his audience if they know the name Ted Bundy; most of them will know about the serial killer who at one time attended law school at the University of Utah.

“Well, he killed at least 30 women. Can you name one of them?,” Bonn then asks. Inevitably, those women’s names are not known.

The killers “become the story and we lose sight of the victims ... which is not necessarily a healthy thing or a good thing,” Bonn said.

His advice — to the media, law enforcement and viewers — is to focus on the victims without dramatizing, sensationalizing or glorifying the perpetrator. He pointed out that the victims include the families, friends and communities of those affected. They also include, less intuitively, those folks that are connected to the perpetrators.

“I happen to know the relatives of some serial killers who had no idea that their father, their brother was this monster, and their lives have become hell as a result,” Bonn said. “So, yes, it’s important to recognize that victims come in many forms.”

Alternative approaches

One of Bonn’s contemporaries is Keith Rovere, the host and producer of “The Lighter Side of True Crime with Keith Rovere.” Rovere began his journey into true crime through his outreach as part of Christian ministry in southern New Jersey, where he visited incarcerated men. He came to understand the power of positive reinforcement on recidivism rates in places like Norway and became curious to see if it could work here.

Today, Rovere interviews serial killers and other criminals on his podcast. His focus is on what we can learn from these men and women, and what is possible when even the worst criminals are shown kindness and empathy. One guest on the show has been David Berkowitz, “The Son of Sam” killer, who is now an evangelical Christian.

“My platform is faith,” Rovere said. “The power of God can change anybody’s heart no matter what you are, and if you’re not religious, it’s positive, unconditional love for somebody who certainly doesn’t deserve it, but that’s what’s changed their lives.”

While there are those who have an unhealthy relationship with the subject, Rovere believes seeking to understand certain aspects of violent crime is useful — debunking myths, showing the humanity of criminals and providing greater insight into mental health disorders, all of which might help prevent crime later, he said.

Dustin Terry’s approach is entirely different. His venture, "The Cold Cases," which launched earlier this year after success with several YouTube videos, is dedicated entirely to the perspectives of the victims and their families.

While working as a mental health aid in central Florida, Terry learned the importance of the justice side of such stories, as opposed to passive consumption of true crime that glosses over the trauma of the real people involved.

“If you’re watching true crime from an entertainment perspective, I think that means you lack a moral compass,” Terry said. “If you’re watching it from a justice perspective, that’s more a way to cope with it and be ethical in the way you’re viewing it.”

He recognizes, however, that those seeking this sort of entertainment might also be the same people visiting his website.

“That’s the sad reality of the industry,” he said “You can make content trying to steer away from that, but that’s always a fear.”

A media ‘gut check’

At the University of Oregon, Phillips teaches a class on media ethics that focuses on true crime stories. She defines the genre as “a nonfiction account of crime that has at least some element of entertainment value.”

True crime may be associated with podcasts like "Serial," the investigative journalism show owned by The New York Times, but true crime is also embedded into all forms of social media, legacy media and streaming services.

Netflix, for example, has a substantial library of true crime content, both documentary style investigations and fictionalized retellings of true crime with famous actors like Zac Efron, Javier Bardem, Molly Ringwald and Richard Jenkins. Fox News recently sent out an email promoting its coverage of the Karen Read trial and the Menendez and Sean “Diddy” Combs cases. “Follow the cases captivating America!” the email said.

Because of the undercurrent of true crime as entertainment, Phillips said, “True crime as a genre, it’s not calibrated to the ethical. That’s not its job.”

She went on to say, “There are ways that you can engage with it that are more ethical than others, and there is media that people can create, produce, engage with, that are on the more ethical side of things.”

But, “it’s never going to be a pure form in terms of morality or ethics. Which makes it very interesting to discuss, but also means that inherently it’s going to cause problems. And it’s always one step away from being absolutely terrible.”

She believes that’s because “sensationalism is the guiding logic of popular culture in the United States” and points out that “it’s particularly present in true crime media.” Which is one of the ways it drives clicks, views, reactions and hours logged watching or listening.

“If you’re talking about something that is driven by metrics and that isn’t values-driven,” she said, “you’re going to have a really hard time cultivating values-driven responses.”

At the same time, Phillips does not judge people who enjoy the genre — she herself watches it — because there are many reasons why people are attracted to these stories. They are familiar narratives, for one thing, with heroes and villains and similar story arcs. And we should be careful not to judge others who may be drawn to this content for reasons we cannot understand, she said.

One reason is simply that the stories are now pervasive in the media ecosystem. Parsing whether or not that is good for us requires “a constant gut-check,” she said, and recognizing that the media deck is stacked against our individual ethical considerations. When something is normalized, we may not even think to question its ethical or moral implications.

Another reason is that we do not know why one person or another might find these stories familiar and comforting. “People’s eyes and their hearts and minds are drawn to certain kinds of content for reasons that make sense to them, but might not make total sense to the people around them,” Phillips said.

She cautions, however, that research has shown that the more true crime a person watches, the more paranoid they are likely to become, and that there are secondary traumas like nervousness or paranoia that can negatively affect a person’s psyche.

Tragedy as content

The Karen Read case that is ongoing in Boston is less instructive for Phillips’ class, but it strikes at a different ethical consideration that is at play with true crime stories. On the surface, it’s about the tragic, yet puzzling death of a police office in a suburban town. Over the course of the investigation and the first trial, however, it became a media spectacle that gave rise to a multitude of conspiracy theories.

“You’re not going to be rewarded by engaging with the Karen Read case in like a very kind of thoughtful and nuanced way,” Phillips said. “The people who are going to most rewarded are the ones who have the best conspiracy theories.”

While in moderation, consuming true crime media can be comforting or even relaxing after the general stresses of life, it’s important to keep in mind the pitfalls of the genre, one of which is that some people can come to see true crime as “content.”

“Death, like a tragic death, is an opportunity for people. I think that really summarizes some of the ethical and moral challenges of our contemporary media ecosystem,” Phillips said.