The Story She Reported, the View She Buried

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 reporting. 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. 

This week, we’re re-upping a story we first ran last year about journalist Dana Ballout. Dana struggled with this personal-professional dilemma while investigating a story 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. 

This also prompts Brian to revisit his own experience dropping the charade in a previous podcast he made 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.

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

Guests: 

• Dana Ballout and Alex Atack, co-hosts of The Copernic Affair
• Hamza Syed, co-host of The Trojan Horse Affair

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This episode originally aired on March 27th, 2025.

Propagandist? Truth teller? Influencer? Question Everything unravels the contested work of journalists and the moral complexities surrounding the stories that impact us all.