It felt like watching Ronald Reagan take off his shirt, paint on some jeans, and start screaming like Jello Biafra. But, in the past few years, podcasts have trended toward what we can loosely call professionalization, which made CNN’s recent effort even odder. What happened in podcasting is that money arrived, and some of it went into producing video clips. Today, all the professional podcast sets look similiar—a table of microphones, some swivelly mid-century-modern chairs, a dark wall—and they convey nothing at all, really. podcast look has decreased.

Source: CNN March 24, 2026 13:06 UTC