Given the reporting about the “attribution issues” with the hit podcast Crime Junkie, I thought the time was right to talk about my experience with the comedy/history podcast @thedollop. A THREAD.
Now, The Dollop podcast: The premise is that one guy (comedian Dave Anthony) tells another guy a story from history and they both riff and make jokes. It is well-reviewed and popular -- their website says it gets over 5 million downloads a month dolloppodcast.com
On April 22, 2017, 3.5 years after my article came out, The Dollop did a live show at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre. Tickets cost $25. According to this guy on Reddit, there were “over 900 people in the audience” reddit.com
The title of the live show was "The Welfare Queen." Dave Anthony told the story of Linda Taylor from beginning to end. It was, according to those in the know, one of the best Dollop episodes ever
Near the start (10:48 in), Anthony says Taylor was “a very willful child who would try to prove someone wrong if they told her she couldn't do something.” In Slate I wrote she was “a willful child: If you told her she couldn’t do something, she’d set out to prove you wrong.”
Then this bit came a little more than 30 seconds later, at the 11:23 mark.
Then at 13:19:
Anthony rearranged the material I’d written, and they also added riffs/jokes. But everything in Anthony’s script (with very small exceptions that I’ll lay out in the next 2 tweets) came from my article, either verbatim or slightly rewritten.
The podcast they released is 1 hour and 43 minutes. At the 1:25:25 and 1:37:44 marks Anthony borrows some words and ideas from a New America article that was republished by the Atlantic theatlantic.com
Then at the 1:38:49 mark he says “Welfare queen is still a pejorative term used to refer to women who allegedly collect excessive welfare payments through fraud or manipulation.” That’s from Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
That’s the extent of the material, in this 1 hr 43 min show, that’s not from the Slate article. Here are two other representative examples of borrowing from Slate (and there are a lot more like this).
Dave Anthony didn’t mention Slate or the article or me during the live show. In all the online discussion about the episode, I found only one person (on Reddit) who recognized where the material in The Dollop had come from.
The Dollop does list sources, but they’re hard to find. They’re not linked to from the dolloppodcast.com website or The Dollop’s Twitter or Facebook pages. They’re on a separate Squarespace site. Scroll to the bottom here and you’ll see 3 links the-dollop-sources.squarespace.com
That list of “sources” isn’t close to adequate if you’re basing an entire show off a single source, read at length/verbatim from that source, and don’t tell the audience what you’re doing. Plus, they didn’t ask my permission. And they sold tickets to it!
After I heard the podcast, I Googled The Dollop and found this 2015 post by Alan Bellows of @DamnInteresting. He makes a comprehensive case that Anthony plagiarized the Dollop episode “The Three Jesuses” from Damn Interesting, KnowledgeNuts, and @Slate damninteresting.com
And it was more than just that episode. Bellows assembled a bunch of examples from other Dollop shows. It’s also important to note that Bellows called what The Dollop did copyright infringement. damninteresting.com
Dave Anthony responded by saying (a) that “The Dollop isn’t plagiarism, and it isn’t copyright infringement,” (b) that “historical facts are not copyrightable,” and (c) that what he was doing is “fair use.” reddit.com
As this contemporaneous Plagiarism Today piece explains, (a) and (b) are risible. (c), re: fair use, is a closer call, and it helps The Dollop’s case that they’re adding jokes and using the material as part of a satirical work. Good analysis here: plagiarismtoday.com
But that legalistic debate misses the point IMO. Whether it’s technically infringement or not, whether it’s fair use or not, this behavior from The Dollop is certainly unethical/ungenerous/rude/shitty
Back in 2015, Dave Anthony offered a very limited apology to Alan Bellows. He said he didn’t post sources for The Dollop because the podcast had no website. (The Squarespace sources page came later.) And … that was the whole apology. reddit.com
Anthony portrayed himself as the aggrieved party, blaming Bellows for making “public accusations, rather than reaching out privately.” Anthony said the public nature of the accusation led Anthony and his family to receive death threats damninteresting.com
To be very clear, I don’t want Anthony or anyone else to get harassed or threatened. DON’T DO THAT. But I do think it’s important to lay all this out publicly, for a bunch of reasons.
(1) This is a pattern of behavior. Anthony got called out by Bellows and written up by Plagiarism Today 2 years before he made a whole live show out of my Slate story. He can’t say it was a mistake or an accident. This was clearly willful, and a choice.
(2) During the Damn Interesting kerfuffle, Anthony said on Reddit that he couldn’t cite sources during episodes because he got his material from too many different places. That excuse doesn’t apply when the entire episode is based on one source reddit.com
(3) It pisses me off to see Dave Anthony get credit for my work
(4) The Dollop’s Patreon asks people to give money because “The Dollop is a lot more work than most podcasts, due to the endless research.” In reality, the welfare queen episode had no original research; it just used mine.
(5) I might’ve been inclined to reach out privately if they’d reached out to me privately back in 2017, to ask about using my story for source material. Instead, I found out about it when the show was already over, tickets already sold, podcast already uploaded, etc.
It took me a little less than 6 years to turn that 2013 Slate article into a book, THE QUEEN, which came out this May. Real research is incredibly time-consuming and expensive. It’s insulting and offensive for The Dollop to claim that’s what they do.
I’m not going to make any legal claim against The Dollop. I don't expect an apology. My goal here is to make people aware of what The Dollop is and what it does. If you want to keep listening, fine. Just know what you’re listening to.
I do want people to listen to my podcast, THE QUEEN, which is based on all the original reporting I did, and includes the voices of people who knew Linda Taylor podcasts.apple.com
You can also support my reporting by buying my book, also called THE QUEEN. (@davidgrann called it “invaluable.” The WaPo says it "reads like a detective story.") And if you liked THE QUEEN, spread the word -- book sales are mostly based on word of mouth amazon.com
And for one day only, this Sunday 8/25, the ebook of THE QUEEN is on sale at all retailers for the ridiculously low price of $3.99. ACT NOW!! That’s less than the cost of two 20-ounce sodas at CVS. (I would know.) amazon.com
Thanks for listening (to THE QUEEN podcast) and for reading the thread and the original article and the book!
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