MADISON — Four episodes of a podcast hosted by Ryan Owens — some of them featuring critics of former President Donald Trump — have disappeared from the internet as the Republican candidate for attorney general ramps up his campaign.
Owens on Wednesday offered evolving accounts regarding the removal of the episodes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison podcast.
Initially, he characterized it as a mistake and suggested it might have had to do with the update of a website.
A university spokesman later said officials believe Owens requested that the episodes be taken off the web, and at that point Owens acknowledged sometimes removing older episodes.
Owens was director of the university’s Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership for two years and regularly spoke with politicians and policy observers as the host of its podcast, “The Badgercast.”
Most episodes are still available on the center’s website and podcasting platforms, but four of them are gone. The conservative website Wisconsin Right Now first reported on the absent episodes.
The missing episodes feature talks with Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk show host who became a vocal Trump critic; Michael Murphy, a Republican strategist who opposes Trump; Kenneth Mayer, a UW-Madison professor who faced criticism from conservatives for how he portrayed Trump in a syllabus; and Scott Coenen, who heads a nonprofit group focused on renewable energy.
Owens’ successor at the Thompson Center, Alexander Tahk, told Wisconsin Right Now that he had found the audio for three of the episodes but not the one featuring Sykes.
Sykes told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he did not have a copy of the episode.
UW-Madison is working on “locating and restoring these files in the interest of transparency and public interest in the content,” university spokesman John Lucas said by email Wednesday.
“UW-Madison believes the podcasts in question were removed at the request of the former director of the center,” Lucas said, referring to Owens.
In a statement, Owens initially said he had to transfer his files over to other staff when he left the center. There were some hiccups during the process because of the size of the files, but Owens said he believed the issues had been resolved.
Owens’ initial statement appeared to attempt to address why episodes were missing from the center’s website, but he did not explain why they were taken off podcasting apps like SoundCloud and Spotify.
After the university said it believed he had requested the removal of the episodes, Owens acknowledged doing so.
“I had some podcasts taken down as they aged and the issues became moot or less…
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