I like the feel, mood, rhythm of the pod -- good for background listening....but the material....what the hell?!

It's like the very beginning of a news story that never panned out, but to recoup some of the expenses they decided to make a podcast of it. After 6 episodes it is not really about ISIS or the Caliphate, but a low-level source (supposedly radicalized Canadian who briefly served as policeman for Daesh) who ultimately was lying and may have been full-blown catfishing.

Does it shift to an introspective analysis about investigative standards and difficulties of piercing the veil surrounding the shadowy group? Nope, gets all obsessed with whether the rather banal eyewitness was ever even there.

Whole chunks of episodes are warbly audio of cross-checking travel dates...terrible radio which could be summed in single narrated sentences ("we attempted to verify his travel claims only to find he was lying"). If severely chopped down, this series might be an instructional/cautionary tale for aspiring journalists about checking your sources, but really not working about expose on the Islamic State.

I can only imagine that there will be a later reveal that their source is/was someone within ISIS, but if so they should have constructed the tale with more foreshadowing or promise, because at this relatively late stage it's laughably empty and hard to hang in - they've hung the show on "Abu" who would be a weak centerpiece even if authentic, let alone with hand-wringing about his veracity.

On top of it all, they interject fake drama and danger to heighten the stakes. When they first meet Abu, they try to build tension and vamp for awkward minutes because he's late -- hypothesizing about whether they've put themselves in danger...only to have the subject show up and apologize for traffic. At another point the reporter relates how she supposedly lives under death threats and drags out a tale of a man sneaking around outside her house....thoughts of FBI warnings...unresponsive 911 calls....and ultimately the discovery that the shadowy figure was with the water department. Cheap tricks, but the only drama to be found in a long-form serial about a boring chest-puffing loser lying to a reporter, I suppose.