- Longtime true crime podcaster Mike Boudet conducted a strikingly callous Twitter poll yesterday.
- "When listening to a true crime podcast, which race do you prefer the murder victims to be?" he asked.
"Sword and Scale," the long-running true crime podcast, is under fire for a wildly insensitive Twitter poll conducted by the show's creator and host, Mike Boudet.
"When listening to a true crime podcast, which race do you prefer the murder victims to be?" Boudet's Sword and Scale account tweeted on Monday. The poll came with three options: White, Black, and Indigenous.
People were shocked by the poll's strange and callous overtones. "I think 'preferring' any one type of person is completely fucked up personally and a really weird thing to ask," one person wrote.
The tweet encapsulates several key ethical questions that have come up in recent years as the true crime genre has gained massive popularity. Experts have widely criticized true crime media for its outweighed focus on white victims. Boudet, however, questioned whether that had led to white crime victims no longer being covered.
"I've heard certain popular podcasts are no longer covering stories with white victims," he wrote in a follow-up tweet. "So wondering if this is due to audience preference?"
Viewer feedback appeared to have proven him wrong. With three hours left, a majority of respondees (67%) voted for white victims, followed by Black (19%), and Indigenous (14%).
As outrage over the poll itself poured in, Boudet hid some of those replies while he also made jabs at wokeness. In a non-sequitur, he also called out "people with pronouns in their bio" who he claimed were "feigning outrage at this question."
Insider has reached out to Boudet for comment.
This isn't the first time that the podcast host has courted controversy. In 2019, former podcast partner Wondery severed ties with the show for an Instagram post authored by Boudet on International Women's Day that read, "I don't understand dumb c-nts," The Wrap reported at the time.