It’s easy to get frustrated with the charade reporters are supposed to keep up, where they pretend they don’t have opinions or feelings or any kind of human thoughts about a story they’re telling. Plenty of journalists have been trying to break out of that charade. But the decision to do that: it can be a fraught one, with real implications.

Dana Ballout struggled with this on a story she was investigating about Hassan Diab – a sociology professor who’s living as a free man in Canada, yet is convicted of a terrible crime in France. Dana and her co-host Alex Atack open up about their reporting on the series The Copernic Affair, and why Dana ultimately cut her own opinions out of the show, even though her co-host and editors wanted to include them. 

And this prompts Brian to revisit his own experience dropping the charade in a previous podcast he made with Hamza Syed, for The New York Times and Serial: The Trojan Horse Affair. 

You can check out The Copernic Affair wherever you get your podcasts or at https://www.canadaland.com/shows/the-copernic-affair/.

Same with The Trojan Horse Affair: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair.html

To get the phrase from Hamza’s interview that we’re asking people to remix into something danceable, sign up for Brian’s newsletter here: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

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Do you have questions for us? If so, we want to talk to you!

If you have thoughts about Question Everything, critiques of our episodes, or anything you're curious about, that we're covering, or not covering…please tell us. We want to set up some conversations between listeners and Brian and our staff for an upcoming episode. Write to us at hey@placementtheory.com and someone from our staff may reach out.

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Journalists jailed for an article they published. In America. How did this happen?

Brian tells the story of a reporting trip he took to Alabama, where two small-town journalists had been locked up, which led to one of the most honest - and surprising - conversations about journalism he’s had in a long time. 

Sign up for our newsletter to see some stories and pictures from a recent event Brian held in Alabama about his podcast S-Town. Including a photo of an S-Town inspired tattoo somebody was eager to show him. www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

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As trust in traditional journalism plummets, social media content creator V Spehar of Under the Desk News is ascendant, with over 3.4 million TikTok followers. But recently, V found themself in a public dustup with NPR over, in part, how the outlet had classified V in an interview. In this special episode of Question Everything–largely recorded live at On Air Fest–Brian and V take the stage to explore the tensions between traditional and non-traditional journalism, and what the two can learn from each other.

Since talking off the cuff live on stage doesn’t always result in the most precise utterances, here are a few additional corrections and clarifications we didn’t address directly in the episode:

While live on stage, V said that TikTok is owned “mostly by the richest man in Philadelphia, Mr. Jeffrey Yass.” In fact, Yass’ personal share in TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, is 7%, worth roughly $21 billion. 

Regarding the stat in the Under the Desk News video stating “every school in America gets about 20 percent of their total school budget from the federal government,” in reality, public schools may get as little as 0% or as much as 75% of their funding from federal sources, depending on the district. 

The Pew Research referenced in the conversation shows that 1 in 5 Americans get their news from online news influencers, and 54% of Americans get their news at least sometimes from social media.

In on of the Under the Desk News TikTok videos we played, when V's talking about possible effects on taxes as a result of cutting the Department of Education, they said "I don't know a whole lot of people who can afford for their mortgage to go up 20%." However, we'd like to clarify that a 20% rise in property tax does not necessarily mean a 20% rise in mortgage.

And lastly: Senator Tammy Duckworth has fought for about a dozen federal employees fired from the Veteran’s Crisis Line to get their jobs back, and not employees solely from her state, Illinois. 

We reached out to V’s father to confirm their conversation about the possible effects of cuts to the Department of Education, but he didn’t want to comment.

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As billionaires hoard more control over our politics, it seems more important than ever to ask: What makes them tick? Four reporters gather after hours at a wine shop to discuss – over drinks – what they’ve learned from covering billionaires for years, and how it can help us hoi polloi make sense of what the ultra-rich are doing right now.

Featuring Vicky Ward, who has covered the Kushner family and Trump, and who, in 2002, was the first journalist to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s finances in a profile for Vanity Fair; John Hyatt, who covers billionaires, with a focus on Elon Musk, for Forbes; Douglas Rushkoff, who's written about tech billionaires preparing for the end of the world; and Edward Ongweso, Jr., who covers the impact of the exponential growth of large tech companies for outlets like Vice and The Nation. 

(Douglas Rushkoff said in our conversation that his trip to a hedge fund conference in the desert happened in 2018, but the trip was actually in 2017.)

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Ben Smith tells the story of the strange controversy over a journalism award that’s been going down in a Florida courthouse.

Ben is Editor-in-Chief of Semafor and co-host of the Mixed Signals podcast. He used to be The New York Times media columnist and was founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News.

Sign up for our newsletter to read the lengthy listener criticism that helped inspire Brian to do this episode: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

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Locked up, alone, accused of being a spy, reporter Jeremy Loffredo has to defend the fact that he’s a journalist. To the Israeli courts. And then…to our reporter. 

Part two of our special series about Jeremy Loffredo, who in October became the first American journalist arrested by Israel. If you haven't listened to part one, check that out first in your feed: "Blindfolded And Arrested On Assignment In Israel."

This week in our newsletter, we'll bring you inside some disagreements we had on staff, about how to tell this story. Sign up at: kcrw.com/questioneverything

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Just a few months ago, Israel did something it has never done before. It arrested an American journalist. His name is Jeremy Loffredo.

This is his story. 

Part one of a special, two-part series. 

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Four Hollywood directors gather after hours at a wine shop to drink and commiserate about the perils – and power – that come when you’re straddling fact and fiction. With behind the scenes stories about documentary romance, regret, and pirates.

Featuring Tom McCarthy, who won an Oscar for Spotlight; Antonio Campos, creator of The Staircase for HBO; Tina Satter, who directed and co-wrote Reality starring Sydney Sweeney; and Tobias Lindholm, director and writer of HBO’s The Investigation.

As we know alcohol is not always conducive to factual precision, so here are some corrections and clarifications from our fact-checker, Maggie. Though honestly the crew this time did impressively well! All we have is that the name of the New York Magazine story that inspired Tina Satter to dramatize Reality Winner is called “The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread" (not “America’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread”). And it was a National Security Agency contractor, not a former FBI agent, who alerted the FBI about Reality’s leak.

Here’s the NY Mag story. And here’s a Vanity Fair interview with Sophie, the editor of The Staircase documentary.

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

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Our team at Question Everything has been playing around with a new technology that sucks up tons of social media posts, and then uses AI to figure out what ideas are forming in the shadows of the internet before they hit the mainstream.

Brian interviews a journalist who uses this tech, to see what conversations are brewing right now that we might want to keep an eye out for in the coming weeks.

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We hire a freelancer to research every comment Donald Trump has made about the press. He ends up telling his wrestling buddy about the assignment, and using it to see if he can get him to trust in journalism.

You can find more work by Sam Eagan here.

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