Jemima Kelly had an unwarranted conniption about podcast advertising in the Financial Times yesterday.

Kelly cites Russell Brand’s promotion of underwear as well as Lex Friedman’s inept plug for AG1, a pricey nutrition supplement, as “virtually indistinguishable from the content they are inserted into.” The fact that Kelly can issue this claim while acknowledging the awkward placement of the ads is . . . curious.

And by “curious,” I mean logically inconsistent; the ad placement can be either ham-fisted or seamless — it can’t be both. Nonetheless, Kelly is undeterred from describing such obvious interjections as exploitative, disconcerting, and guilty of rendering the line between propaganda and content “indistinguishable.”

Really?

Kelly herself provides the following example of Russell Brand’s podcast advertising in her piece:

It’s getting hot out there, and I don’t know about you Ron, but I’m getting pretty hot down there. . . Summertime is not an issue if your wear Sheath underwear. . . There’s something for everyone’s testicles and penis.

I have the sneaking suspicion that every one of Brand’s viewers was able to distinguish between the political dialogue with Ron DeSantis and the pitifully — and comically — segued discussion about, ahem, one’s nether regions and how to accommodate them in the summer.

If Kelly is genuinely concerned with the grave societal problem of the devaluation of truth, to which she alludes, her time and words are better spent elsewhere. Anywhere.

Perhaps the genuine motivation for Kelly’s antagonism derives from the size of the “dirty business of advertising.” She provides data regarding the industry’s revenues — $1.8 billion in the U.S. in 2022 — and the share composed of host-read ads — 55 percent in 2021 — at which she takes great umbrage. Responding to these impressive figures, Kelly rhetorically ponders, “When did we collectively decide to accept this level of grift?”

There’s an actual answer: When accepting obvious ads for products whose purchase is entirely optional enabled listeners to hear from heterodox voices at exactly zero cost to themselves.

Kelly concludes that “we should see host-read ads for what they really are: a shady and deceptive bit of window dressing for the dirty business of advertising” and advocates their abolition. But that “dirty business of advertising” is precisely what allows these — and so many other — podcasts to exist. Kelly’s real issue is with the podcast business model itself — a business model that extends the product to those consumers with the lowest ability to pay. If Kelly were to succeed in ending host-read ads, the result would be regressive.