Listening in Good Faith: Cosmopolitan Intimacy and Audio Journalism

This article interrogates the privileging of intimacy in contemporary discussions of media in general and audio journalism in particular (within a broadly Anglo-American frame). It posits that the prominence of the term in relation to podcasting specifically, together with the communicative practices it purports to describe, has become ideological. The article begins by exploring how the intimate address of radio and podcasting has been variously invoked and celebrated in public and academic discourse across a century of spoken word media. This historical overview provides a context and counterpoint to the ways in which intimacy is invoked in contemporary discourses and the contradictions encapsulated by the notion of an “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, 1998). It highlights how the language of intimacy in the public realm—with all its positive connotations, including in relation to building trust—can be appropriated or transformed under the logics of communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005) to disguise unequal power relations, restrict communication across difference, and feed into a culture of atomised individualism. The article turns instead to a cosmopolitan ethics of “proper distance” (Silverstone, 2004) combined with a feminist ethics of care as a way to negotiate the balance between intimacy and trust for the listening public.