96
expression and storytelling as methods of communication and connection.(Hammond and Jackson
2015). Because the cohosts of The Social Breakdown
are deeply self-reflective about their identities and
roles as students and notably warm, honest, and
engaged in their conversations, their podcast could
be uniquely inspiring to students attempting to produce their own audio content.
Overall, The Social Breakdown is an incredibly
valuable resource for supporting the learning of
sociology students at all levels. Each episode can
serve as a revelation or reminder of the deep relevance of sociological inquiry. As cohost Omar T.
Bird asserts, “In one sense, that is the point of sociology—to help you understand that just because
you do not experience something yourself . . . we
need to understand that these things happen in society on a large scale and indirectly will shape your
world” (“SOC503–Social Problems and Social
Causes: We Have an Episode on It”).
Teachers seeking to add voices beyond their own
to the instructional conversation could do no better
than this podcast’s vibrant, diverse cohosts, who
ground their discussions in sociological theory and
data while elevating them with candid personal reflections, cultural relevance, and enthusiasm for the discipline. As the cohosts continue to produce more
episodes and more sociology instructors recognize
the value of podcasts in our courses (Prince 2020),
additional ways of using The Social Breakdown in the
classroom will surely be discovered.
References
Christopher, Karen. 2020. “Analyzing Masculinities
with Digital Media: A Podcast Assignment.” Class
activity published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources
and Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington,
DC: American Sociological Association. http://www
.asanet.org.
Hammond, Zaretta, and Yvette Jackson. 2015. Culturally
Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting
Authentic Engagement and Rigor among Culturally
and Linguistically Diverse Students. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Corwin.
López-Alt, J. Kenji (@kenjilopezalt). 2021. Photo of article “The Normalization of Violence in Commercial
Kitchens through Food Media.” Instagram, August
22. https://www.instagram.com/p/CS3cGuQryKO.
Meiser, Ellen T., and Penn Pantumsinchai. 2021. “The
Normalization of Violence in Commercial Kitchens
through Food Media.” Journal of Interpersonal
Violence. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260521100
5138.
Oslawski-Lopez, Jamie, and Gregory Kordsmeier.
2021. “‘Being Able to Listen Makes Me Feel More
Teaching Sociology 50(1)
Engaged’: Best Practices for Using Podcasts as
Readings.” Teaching Sociology 49(4):335–47.
Otter.ai. 2021. Help Center. https://help.otter.ai/hc/en-us.
Prince, Barbara F. 2020. “Podcasts: The Potential and
Possibilities.” Teaching Sociology 48(4):269–71.
Sytsma, Alan. 2021. “How Celebrity Chefs Warped
Our View of Real-World Restaurant Abuse.” Grub
Street, blog, New York Magazine, August 25. https://
www.grubstreet.com/2021/08/how-celebrity-chefswarp-our-view-of-real-world-kitchen-abuse.html.
Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, producers,
writers, hosts
You’re Wrong About. Burbank, CA: Independent,
2018. 147 episodes. https://www.stitcher.com/
show/youre-wrong-about
Reviewed by: Rena Zito, Elon University, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0092055X211063326
You’re Wrong About is a podcast that corrects public misconceptions about events, social issues, and
high-profile persons through research-based myth
busting and claims debunking, delivered with a
healthy dose of humor. The premise of the show,
now in its fourth year, is that the public, influenced
in part by media narratives, collectively misremembers or never truly understood the nature and
complexity of historical events and (real or imagined) social problems. The podcast hosts, journalists Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, seek to
reveal the truth of what we are collectively “wrong
about” and the social processes by which we come
to erroneous conclusions. The podcast’s emphasis
on moral panics and media framing makes it useful
for introductory sociology and many subdisciplines, such as social problems, sociology of deviance, criminology, and social movements.
Episodes of You’re Wrong About fall into one of
three categories: (1) events, such as the Stonewall
uprising, the Challenger explosion, the Stanford
Prison Experiment, and the Tuskegee Syphilis
Study; (2) broad topics, such as homelessness, obesity, sexting, and human trafficking; and (3) persons, such as “maligned women of the 1990s”
Tanya Harding and Monica Lewinsky. The topical
episodes will be of greatest interest to sociology
instructors, although some event-focused episodes
may also be relevant.
Empirical evidence from the social sciences features prominently throughout each You’re Wrong
About event- and topic-focused episode. For example, the episode “Homelessness” (episode 44)
Podcast Reviews
weaves together compelling personal stories of
homelessness with research on the extent of visible
versus invisible homelessness, the history of lowincome housing policy, criminalization of homelessness, and the strengths and limitations of
“housing first” solutions. Topic-focused episodes
like this one intertwine knowledge from multiple
disciplines, including sociology, social work, media
studies, and political science/public policy. This is a
welcome departure from many other popular “social
science” podcasts that give almost exclusive attention to behavioral economics and psychology.
One reason that You’re Wrong About will attract
sociologists is the obvious sociological imagination that infuses each episode. Although interactionism is central in the series (see discussion of
moral panic episodes in the following), the hosts
are not chained to this level of analysis. Social
problems and the moral entrepreneurship that
frames them as problems are presented as structural in origin and certainly structural in consequence. For example, “Gangs” (episode 54)
describes sociological perspectives on the genesis
of drug markets and rivalries, including labor market segmentation and segregation. Contemporary
(or nearly contemporary) issues and events are
always couched in historical context, and individual stories offered up to draw in the listener are
used to demonstrate the individual impact of
macro-level social forces. The intersection of history and biography is always apparent.
Although not stated explicitly, it is clear that the
hosts come to their topics as social constructionists.
The hosts’ reference to “patron saint Joel Best” in
episode 61, “Human Trafficking,” will be a giveaway to anyone familiar with Best’s long career
writing about the misuse of data in the construction
of social problems. Paying tribute to the patron
saint, titles of many of the topic-focused episodes
of You’re Wrong About seem to have imaginary
(scare) quotes around them: “Stranger Danger”
(episode 26), “Shaken Baby Syndrome” (episode
23), “The Obesity Epidemic” (episode 21), and
“Crack Babies” (episode 3). Episodes of this variety trace the historical origins of moral panics,
including the kernels of truth from which they were
launched. They use the language of moral panics in
these episodes, and they call into question the
veracity of claims makers’ statistical assertions and
the role of powerful groups in harnessing public
anxieties for their own ends. Additional moral
panic episodes, like “The Satanic Panic” (episode
1) and “The Ebonics Controversy” (episode 40),
lack imaginary quotation marks but similarly
97
deliver on incisive and evidence-based description
through a constructionist lens.
The moral panic episodes usually prove the
most sociological of the bunch and the most valuable to instructors teaching courses on the sociology of deviance, medical sociology, and symbolic
interactionism sections of introductory sociology.
Sociology of deviance instructors, in particular,
will find that these episodes offer ample opportunities for students to apply course concepts. Although
the hosts refer to moral panics throughout many
episodes, they usually offer little additional analysis of the components and variety of moral panics,
such as whether they are the product of grassroots,
elite-engineered, or interest group efforts and
whether their motives are ideological or material
(see Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2012). Students can
be asked to identify these concepts and examples of
rule creators, rule enforcers, folk devils, and more.
(One exception is found in episode 54, “Gangs,” in
which Hobbes describes several components of
moral panics typified by the early 1990s panic over
street gangs, including kernels of truth, media magnification, and wildly disproportionate social and
legal responses.)
Although most episodes are hosted solely by
Hobbes and Marshall, some feature interviews
with researchers and authors. The interview-based
episodes tend to be more straightforwardly academic (although still interwoven with the hosts’
humor), rendering them more classroom-friendly
than the typical You’re Wrong About fare. One
example is the episode “Sexting” (47), which features Amy Hasinoff, author of Sexting Panic:
Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent
(Hasinoff 2015). The episode covers sociologically
relevant terrain, including the operationalization of
sexting, the evolution of sexting panics, and the
treatment of underage sexting as a criminal offense
(punishing it as “child pornography”) with patterns
of prosecution varying based on the race of the
sender and recipient. Instructors who teach the
sociology of gender, technology and society, and
criminology may find this episode particularly
valuable.
The not-quite-accurately titled episode “The
Anti-Vaccine Movement” (episode 116), whose
focus is almost exclusively on false claims about
vaccines and autism rather than the broader antivaccine movement, as explored by sociologists like
Jennifer Reich (2016), features Eric Garcia, journalist, and author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the
Autism Conversation (Garcia 2021). This interviewbased episode is valuable less for its coverage of
98
the antivaccination movement and more for its discussion of the history of thought and policy regarding autism and the construction of autism (by
people without autism) as something to be “battled” and “cured.” The episode would be useful in
medical sociology and related courses.
In addition to the strengths outlined previously,
You’re Wrong About boasts several commendable
features: (1) a critical eye to methodology, (2) an
appreciation for the complexity of social problems,
and (3) an engaging podcast format. Host Michael
Hobbes’s attention to methodology and its limitations is particularly noteworthy; he frequently cautions the audience against overgeneralizing from
studies with small sample sizes or questionable measurement of key concepts. In doing so, he models
critical engagement with both topical content and
research methods (in his other podcast, Maintenance
Phase, Hobbes refers to himself cheekily as a “methodology queen”). Indeed, much of the claims
debunking and the “debunking of the debunking”
that You’re Wrong About offers entails taking journalists and politicians to task for making outsized claims
that fit their desired narratives by cherry-picking evidence, relying on poorly designed studies, and making mathematically and logically impossible claims
(e.g., about the number of abducted or trafficked children, see episodes 26 and 61).
Another laudable quality of You’re Wrong
About is the hosts’ appreciation for the complexity
of the topics they address. For example, they
acknowledge that people who wish to build more
homeless shelters and the people who resist the
building of homeless shelters in their neighborhoods have legitimate concerns (“Homelessness,”
episode 44). Another example is found in the recognition that crime victims have a vast range of
perspectives on sex offender registries (“Sex
Offenders,” episode 52). And they note that it is
important for people supporting policy reforms to
tell the stories of “unlikeable” people—that not all
individuals affected by poor policy decisions are
innocent victims of circumstance who deserve public sympathy (and yet harmful policies still ought
to be reformed). Across episodes, the takeaway
message of You’re Wrong About is that social issues
are always more complex and less tidy than the
binary, good-versus-evil terms in which they are
often presented.
The podcast has an engaging expert-learner format. The hosts take turns as the research-informed
expert, with the other host enacting the role of the
learner. This structure appeals to audience members by allowing them to identify with the
Teaching Sociology 50(1)
underinformed host whose preconceived notions
are challenged by new information. The nonexpert
host also reacts to what they are learning, offering
a critical perspective on what they have just discovered. Often their reactions are delivered as jokes
(e.g., Hobbes: “The overwhelming message about
gangs [in news in the 1990s] was that they are
about to come to the suburbs.” Marshall: “Yes,
they’re like Ikea: Always almost here.”). Herein
lies a strength and a potential drawback of this podcast for use in the classroom. The hosts do not offer
dry, dispassionate assessment. In editorializing,
they will engage some listeners, like this reviewer,
by channeling their surprise, confusion, or indignation. However, they may alienate other listeners
who do not share their perspectives.
It will be clear to the audience that the hosts’
views on social issues generally lean left (Hobbes’s
intro as a “reporter for the Huffington Post” may tip
them off), although most of their views would not
be regarded as controversial by sociologists:
Systemic racism exists and is a problem, unbridled
capitalism shapes culture and public policy in ways
that harm vulnerable groups, and policies that
entrench or widen structural inequalities should be
reformed. Communicating to students that they
need not agree with all of the hosts’ commentary
and asking them to reflect on why they responded
as they did may allow instructors to harness disagreement for pedagogical purposes. Indeed, asking them to differentiate the empirical portions of
the episodes from the hosts’ commentary will help
build media literacy skills.
Nearly all episodes of You’re Wrong About would
pair well with teaching resources that focus on mass
media’s role in the construction of social problems,
like Wilcox’s (2020) three-part TRAILS activity,
“Sociological Perspectives on Mass Media,” and
Hipes’s (2020) qualitative content analysis TRAILS
activity, “The Construction of Crime News by the
Media.” Episodes are especially well suited to augment use of Platts’s (2018) Teaching Sociology content analysis project, designed for the Social
Problems classroom, in which students analyze the
social construction of media claims using the concepts of grounds, warrants, and conclusions (see Best
2020). Particular episodes also align with subject-specific pedagogical approaches and resources.
Examples include pairing “The Victims’ Rights
Movement” (episode 53) with Ormrod’s (2011)
case-study approach to teaching social movement
theory and the use of “Gangs” (episode 54) with
Steele’s (2019) in-class TRAILS group activity,
“The Classroom as a Gang.”
Podcast Reviews
There are also arguments to be made against
assigning episodes of You’re Wrong About to
undergraduate students. Expert listeners will recognize the studies referenced in episodes that
address their subject specialties, although rarely
because studies are cited by title or author. This is a
point of frustration: The hosts refer to particular
studies, saying something along the lines of “In one
study . . . ,” without including enough information
for listeners to seek out the referenced research
(they do occasionally refer to specific researchers).
This style makes the episodes more listener
friendly. However, it might model behavior that we
do not wish to instill in our students. The podcast
would be more attractive to sociology instructors if
each episode’s show notes included a list of sources
with corresponding time stamps.
Instructors may take pause before assigning an
episode of You’re Wrong About to their undergraduate students because of concerns over the hosts’
style of delivery. Although the hosts never stray
from the topic at hand and each episode is exceptionally well researched, the series lacks the polished, academic tone of NPR podcasts and their
ilk. The hosts frequently swear, which may be offputting for some listeners. Plus, the podcast is
infused with humor, sometimes sardonic, that will
not appeal to all. Irish Times reviewer Sarah
Griffin (2019) commended the hosts for
“handl[ing] incredibly dark subjects with a levity
that never feels disrespectful,” a sentiment shared
by this reviewer. The conversational tone and
witty repartee provide the listener with the sense
that they are learning from incredibly wellinformed friends rather than professors, as is more
the case in other sociologically relevant podcasts,
such as Hidden Brain or Revisionist History,
which strike an erudite tone (see Walter’s [2020]
review of Revisionist History in Teaching
Sociology). Nonetheless, instructors seeking a
purely academic podcast that features only serious
discussion of sociological research are encouraged
to look elsewhere.
An additional consideration is that the hosts’
humor sometimes relies on pop culture references
that may predate traditionally aged students,
although this is unlikely to stymie the listeners’
overall comprehension. Indeed, the entirety of the
podcast seems designed to appeal to an audience
that remembers (or misremembers) the 1990s,
although this is truer for person-based episodes
than those of interest to sociology instructors.
Episode content may be perceived as “historical”
99
to students who have no memory of “going postal”
mass shootings (episode 2) or the collapse of Enron
(episode 34), but episodes are no less useful for the
vintage of their topics. In fact, a focus on moral
panics and events of yesteryear may provide opportunities for student-identified connections to contemporary panics and events. Even if instructors
opt not to assign an episode of You’re Wrong About
for these reasons, they will undoubtedly learn
something from their own listening that will
strengthen their classroom teaching.
References
Best, Joel. 2020. Social Problems. 4th ed. New York,
NY: W.W. Norton.
Garcia, Eric M. 2021. We’re Not Broken: Changing
the Autism Conversation. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt.
Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. 2012. Moral
Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. New
York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell.
Griffin, Sarah. 2019. “Podcast of the Week: You’re
Wrong About.” The Irish Times, January 26. https://
www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/podcastof-the-week-you-re-wrong-about-1.3767795.
Hasinoff, Amy. 2015. Sexting Panic: Rethinking
Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press.
Hipes, Crosby. 2020. “The Construction of Crime News
by the Media: A Class Activity.” Class Activity
published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and
Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington, DC:
American Sociological Association. (http://trails.
asanet.org).
Ormrod, James S. 2011. “Practicing Social Movement
Theory in Case Study Groups.” Teaching Sociology
39(2):190–99.
Platts, Todd. 2018. “Analyzing the Social Construction of
Media Claims: Enhancing Media Literacy in Social
Problems Classes.” Teaching Sociology 47(1):43–50.
Reich, Jennifer A. 2016. Calling the Shots: Why Parents
Reject Vaccines. New York: NYU Press.
Steele, Jennifer L. 2019. “The Classroom as a Gang:
An Active Learning approach to Teaching
Undergraduates about Deviant/Criminal Groups.”
Class Activity published in TRAILS: Teaching
Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology.
Washington, DC: American Sociological Association.
(http://trails.asanet.org).
Walters, Kyla. 2020. “Podcast Review: Revisionist
History.” Teaching Sociology 48(4):378–81.
Wilcox, Annika. 2020. “Sociological Perspectives on
Mass Media.” Class Activity published in TRAILS:
Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for
Sociology. Washington, DC: American Sociological
Association. (http://trails.asanet.org).
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Filip De Boeck
KU Leuven
Cristobal Bonelli
University of Amsterdam
Eszter Banffy
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Noel B. Salazar
KU Leuven
