Question Everything
Question Everything is a weekly investigation into how the truth gets buried, distorted, and denied -- and the ways people are fighting to make it matter again.
Hosted by Brian Reed, of S-Town and This American Life.
Winner of the Webby Award, Ambie Award, and a Signal Special Achievement Award for pushing "the boundaries of the medium."
Most Recent Episode
A Pitch for Why Journalists Need to Fight
What would it take to actually fix America’s broken journalism industry? Using rural North Carolina as a petri dish, the podcast Scene on Radio spent their latest season, called “The News”, diagnosing how American journalism is failing the public: collapsing local newsrooms, corporate consolidation, an information crisis nobody seems able to solve.
In the final episode of “The News”, host John Biewen and co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika turn to solutions: how can good journalism survive, and what is the vision for a new age of robust, public interest journalism?
You can hear the full season of Scene on Radio wherever you get your podcasts.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- John Biewen, co-host of Scene on Radio
- Chenjerai Kumanyika , co-host of Scene on Radio
- Les High, Founder and publisher of The Border Belt Independent
- Victor Pickard, co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication
Please support the companies that support this show:
More Episodes
Badass Local Journalists on How to Fight Corruption
Local reporters from around the country tell stories of using the experiences of their neighbors to confront people in power.
Guests:
- Anna Wolfe with Mississippi Today
- Lisa Halverstadt with Voice of San Diego
- Alissa Zhu with The Baltimore Banner
- Tony Plohetski with The Austin American-Statesman and KVUE Austin
Lisa is a part of the Homelessness Beat Reporters Collective, which recently produced a guide on how to responsibly cover homelessness. That guide can be found here.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
This episode was originally published on June 26th, 2024.
Please support the companies that support this show:
The Journalist and the Firefighter
How one of the most accomplished reporters of our time, Barton Gellman, lost his confidence in journalism.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
This episode was originally published on September 26th, 2024. You can listen to our follow up episode with Barton Gellman - He Quit Journalism to Fight Authoritarianism. How’s That Going?
Guests:
- Barton Gellman
Please support the companies that support this show:
Judge Compares Meta to a Factory Emitting ‘Noxious Pollution’ in a Landmark Ruling
Just hours after we dropped last week’s episode on New Mexico’s landmark trial against Meta, Judge Bryan Biedsheid issued his ruling on what changes the company would have to make to Facebook and Instagram to better protect kids.
He ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $567 million, on top of the earlier $375 million jury penalty. He also mandated that Meta make unprecedented changes to its platforms, including limiting how long teens can use its apps and preventing their accounts from being recommended to adult strangers. This decision could become a blueprint for other states as they bring their own suits against Meta.
But the judge rejected some of the state’s biggest demands, forcing him to wade into a thicket of questions about privacy, free speech, child safety, and the limits of what one court can do. Brian talks to Question Everything producer Zach St. Louis, one of the only reporters at phase two of the trial in Santa Fe, about the ruling.
If you haven’t already, listen first to our other episodes about the New Mexico v Meta case, which led to this consequential decision – The Sting That Exposed How Meta Endangers Kids and We Went to the Trial That Could Force Meta to Change its Ways
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Please support the organizations that support this show:
We Went to the Trial That Could Force Meta to Change its Ways
Back in 2023, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a historic lawsuit against Meta, arguing that the tech giant has enabled the exploitation of children on its apps for years.
This year, that case finally went to trial in a Santa Fe courthouse. The state argued that Meta has knowingly harmed kids and should be forced, through a court order, to change how they operate. Meta says that these changes are unnecessary and, in some cases, an overreach of the law.
Now, one man, Judge Bryan Biedscheid, is deciding what, if any, changes he will force Meta to make to Facebook and Instagram with the aim of protecting kids. It’ll be the first decision of its kind against a major social media company in the United States.
We went to this phase of the trial in New Mexico, to see the testimony, evidence, and cross-examinations the judge is weighing right now as he makes his decision – and also to try and convince someone from Meta’s gigantic legal team to talk to us.
If you haven’t already, listen first to our initial dispatch from the New Mexico v Meta case – The Sting That Exposed How Meta Endangers Kids.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Please support the organizations that support this show:
Is A Billionaire Bromance Capturing Our Media?
Wall Street Journal reporter Emily Glazer investigates the rich and powerful, and recently, she got a tip that she couldn’t get out of her head: sources told her that Donald Trump and billionaire Larry Ellison are genuine friends. She found it hard to believe – in all her experience reporting on the wealthy, she’s used to hearing about transactional relationships, not people who truly like each other. It seemed especially important to understand because in Trump’s second term, Larry Ellison has amassed enormous power over American media organizations – including CBS News, 60 Minutes, Paramount, and TikTok – often with the Trump administration’s help.
Are Ellison and Trump really friends? Emily and her colleagues set out to investigate and found out way more that was going on behind the scenes between these two men than anyone in the public knew.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- Emily Glazer, Wall Street Journal Enterprise Reporter, covering the rich and powerful. Read Emily's reporting on Larry Ellison and Donald Trump. We first heard Emily talk about her reporting on The Town with Matthew Belloni.
Please support the organizations that support this show:
The Sunscreen Paradox
In June, disgraced former Florida Congressman turned right-wing One America News Network anchor Matt Gaetz peddled a novel and dangerous conspiracy to his audience: that using sunscreen causes skin cancer. Gaetz’s guest was Nicholas Hulscher, a prominent voice in the COVID anti-vaccination movement and co-author of one of the most prolific medical disinformation newsletters in America. Within days, this false claim had reached millions of viewers and dozens of countries – and was popping up in the comments of innocuous mommy blogger videos about applying suntan lotion to kids.
NewsGuard health editor John Gregory explains how Hulscher’s false claim metastasized throughout the internet, and how he sold it to the world by twisting the surprising findings of a legitimate scientific study.
If you're new to our show and liked this episode, let us suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might like "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life" and "The Talented Ms. Goldiee".
Guests:
- John Gregory, Health Editor at NewsGuard
Please support the organizations that support this show:
The Sting That Exposed How Meta Endangers Kids
If you're new to our show and liked this episode, let us suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might enjoy -- check out "How Meta Is Making Billions from Scam Advertising", "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life", "The Talented Ms. Goldiee" and "Why Did ICE Lock Up This Pro-Trump Reporter?"
In a windowless room in Albuquerque, a small team of New Mexico investigators created a fake Facebook account for a 13-year-old girl to target a child predator. They made posts of her losing her last baby tooth and starting her first day of 7th grade. To their surprise, Facebook funnelled adults to the account by the thousands – men who began trying to groom, solicit, and sexually harass a person they believed was an underage girl.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says this was the moment when he realized “there is a very, very serious problem inside of this company and on these platforms.” He launched a lawsuit against Meta, which led to the first successful verdict for child safety against a social media company. Question Everything executive producer Robyn Semien visited New Mexico to attend parts of the trial and hear from AG Torrez and his team how they took on Mark Zuckerberg, and what this victory, along with a second decision still to come, could mean for the future of social media.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questioneverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez
Please support the organizations that support this show:
Ashley St. Clair is Fighting X – And Tried To Stop This Episode
If you're new to our show and liked this episode, let us suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might enjoy -- check out "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life", "The Talented Ms. Goldiee" and "Why Did ICE Lock Up This Pro-Trump Reporter?"
Last week, host Brian Reed interviewed former MAGA influencer and the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, Ashley St. Clair, in front of a live audience in New York. After they walked off stage, St. Clair laid into Brian over the questions he asked. She then demanded that we not release the interview publicly and asked to speak to our lawyers.
Here is that interview, uncut.
In it, St. Clair talks to Brian about her landmark lawsuit against xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind Grok, which generated millions of sexually explicit deep fake images of her and other women. xAI is owned by St. Clair’s ex, Elon Musk, and Brian asks her to share stories and insights from her relationship with Musk to help people understand his erratic and offensive behavior. Brian also asks St. Clair about her years as a major figure inside the right-wing propaganda machine. It's those questions that seemed to bother her most.
Find video highlights of the live interview on our new Instagram account – @questionverything.podcast. The full video is available at our Substack.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. The live taping was presented by OnAirFest.
Our fact-checker reviewed this live, unedited conversation. We were not able to independently verify St. Clair’s remark that Musk’s devices were seized during French authorities’ search of X’s offices. Likewise with St. Clair’s recollection that she saw a Grok-generated image of a 4-year-old girl in a Bluey microprint bikini, and her claim that immigrants were getting on planes with boarding passes that didn’t have any name on them. We reached out to Musk and xAI for comment, but they did not reply.
Guests:
- Ashley St. Clair
Please support the organizations that support this show:
How a Tiny Newsroom Helped Bring Down Hungary’s Authoritarian Leader
Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian grip on Hungary became a model for the American right. He hollowed out the country’s democracy and turned much of the media into a government megaphone. Then a small newsroom called Direkt36 exposed a plot against the opposition party involving a mysterious political operative, a young IT worker, a raid on a boat in the Danube and a whistleblowing police captain. A few weeks later, Orbán was ousted from power in a landslide election.
Sean Cole reports on the investigation, called the Hungarian Watergate, and what it shows about why an independent press still matters.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- Zsuzsanna Wirth, Direkt36 investigative reporter
- András Pethő, Direkt36 editor
- Marius Dragomir, Director of the Media and Journalism Research Center
Please support the organizations that support this show:
From Drilled: Carbon Cowboys
While we’re heads down working on a bunch of great new episodes, we’re sharing the first episode of the new season of Drilled.
In it, award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt exposes how Republican corn ethanol mogul Bruce Rastetter sold "sustainable aviation fuel" to world leaders from North Dakota to Brazil. The problem is, his “clean energy” project does nothing to help climate change.
Drilled: Carbon Cowboys follows the land grabs, pipelines, and political power stopping real progress from being made.
Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts, or at pushkin.fm/plus.
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Go to https://zbiotics.com/QUESTION and use QUESTION at checkout for 15% off any first-time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
- DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout.
‘Kick Him Off The Bench.’ A Judge in Trump’s Pulitzer Case Gets a Prize
The Freedom of the Press Foundation just filed an ethics complaint against Florida Judge Jeffrey Kuntz, who has been nominated by President Trump for a lifetime federal court appointment. They want him stripped of his gavel and his law license.
Why? Judge Kuntz was one of the judges who ruled in Trump’s favor in his peculiar defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board. The Freedom of the Press Foundation claims the judge handed Trump this victory while, behind the scenes, he was seeking a nomination from the Trump administration for a federal judgeship.
While Judge Kuntz’s nomination is being considered by the Senate, we revisit an episode we first aired in February 2025 about this strange lawsuit against the organization behind journalism’s most prestigious award.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor and co-host of the Mixed Signals podcast
Please support the organizations that support this show:
Can a Chatbot Convince Conspiracy Theorists of the Truth?
If you're new to our show and liked this episode, may we suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might enjoy? Check out "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life", "The Talented Ms. Goldiee" and "Why Did ICE Lock Up This Pro-Trump Reporter?"
Like millions of others, Gordon Pennycook’s older brother has leapt down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and Gordon says he’s tried to change his brother’s mind, without success. Which tracks, if you’ve ever debated a conspiracy theorist — it can feel impossible to pull them back to reality.
If anyone was qualified to convince his brother, though, it’s Gordon, who’s a psychology professor at Cornell University where he studies why people believe things that aren’t true. So Gordon wanted to put this question to the test: Is it actually the case that conspiracy theorists rarely change their minds? He and a team of researchers ran an experiment using an AI chatbot to rebut people’s theories. And the results were very surprising. In fact, they ended up changing Gordon’s mind about conspiracy theories, and the people who believe them.
Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll share the Debunkbot from Gordon’s study, where you can test out your own beliefs.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.
Guests:
-
Gordon Pennycook, Cornell University, Associate Professor, Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow
Please support the organizations that support this show:
Claude’s Russian Propaganda Problem
According to the fact-checking company NewsGuard, Claude has been a very reliable and accurate chatbot. But in the last month or so, users have started complaining that it seemed to be getting slower, stupider, and less trustworthy. So NewsGuard AI analyst Isis Blachez ran a test on Claude, to see if it is actually getting worse. And running this test revealed a whole new iteration of Russian disinformation campaigns, designed for the AI-era, that are evolving by the second specifically to coerce chatbots into deceiving us.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
-
Isis Blachez, analyst for AI and France at NewsGuard
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Go to https://zbiotics.com/QUESTION and use QUESTION at checkout for 15% off any first-time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.
- Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.com/QUESTION for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
- DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout.
Did FEMA Really Build a Secret Lair in a Mountain?
The first episode of a special series from On The Media’s Micah Loewinger about how a seemingly benign and important agency, FEMA, has become the subject of some of the wildest conspiracy theories.
FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is supposed to keep Americans safe from wildfires, hurricanes, and nuclear disasters. So why has it become so profoundly distrusted and maligned, to the point that President Trump has now threatened to totally dismantle the agency?
It turns out the agency has kept a number of secrets from the public over the course of its history – and that has led to the paranoia that’s proving an existential threat to FEMA today.
Thanks to “On The Media” for sharing this episode with us. You can listen to the rest of this series, “American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA”, over the next several weeks on the radio show or on podcast apps.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Go to https://zbiotics.com/QUESTION and use QUESTION at checkout for 15% off any first-time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.
- Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.com/QUESTION for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
- DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout.
- Listen to our supporter More Muslim, a narrative audio series telling deeply reported stories about the Muslim experience, wherever you get podcasts.
ICE Jailed a Student for an Op-Ed, Now She’s Left America
In recent days, we learned that Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University grad student who was snatched off the street by masked ICE agents last year and locked up for more than a month, has had enough of America, and moved home to Turkey. The U.S. government had continued to threaten her with legal proceedings and deportation, even after releasing her from detention.
Dr. Öztürk’s “crime?” Co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper advocating for Palestinian rights.
A year ago this week, while Rümeysa Öztürk was being held without charge in a Louisiana ICE facility and her case was drawing national condemnation, Question Everything co-hosted an urgent live event at Tufts with The Tufts Daily, which had published Dr. Öztürk’s op-ed. That episode has just received a Webby Award for Best News & Politics podcast episode.
Student journalists Arghya Thallapragada and Ellora Onion-De and Question Everything host Brian Reed were joined by former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post and Boston Globe Marty Baron, First Amendment lawyer Robert Bertsche, one of Dr. Öztürk’s ACLU attorneys Carol Rose, and senior politics reporter at The Intercept, Akela Lacey, to wrestle in real time with the gravity of what it meant for the U.S. government to jail a student for writing a political opinion in the student newspaper. In the wake of ICE surges in American cities and more retaliation against journalists by the administration, the conversation takes on new, perhaps even more disturbing meaning, a year later.
This episode originally ran on May 1st, 2025.
Read the Op-ed Dr. Öztürk and others wrote that ran in The Tufts Daily a year ago in March, and see the Tufts Daily’s recent retrospective of their coverage of Dr. Öztürk’s case.
Watch the video of federal agents in plainclothes, forcing Rümeysa Öztürk into an SUV on March 25, 2025.
Quick thing: In our discussion Carol Rose says the ACLU has filed 100 legal actions in President Trump’s first 100 days. The specific count on those was actually higher: the ACLU filed 110 legal actions in the Trump administration’s first 100 days.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- Naz Ahmed, Director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project
- Arghya Thallapragada, former editor-in-chief of The Tufts Daily
- Ellora Onion-De, associate editor of The Tufts Daily
- Marty Baron, former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post and Boston Globe
- Robert Bertsche, KLARIS Law
- Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts
- Akela Lacey, Senior Politics Reporter at The Intercept
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
- DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout.
- Get 15% off OneSkin with the code QUESTION at https://www.oneskin.co/QUESTION #oneskinpod
- Listen to our supporter More Muslim, a narrative audio series telling deeply reported stories about the Muslim experience, wherever you get podcasts.
You Can Bet on Everything Now. What Could Go Wrong?
Gambling is infiltrating American life. Ads for online sportsbooks are everywhere. Prediction markets – which are not legally considered gambling – now allow betting on everything from the unemployment numbers, to the war in Iran, to how many times Elon Musk will tweet this week. Lots of news outlets are getting in on the action: CNN, CNBC, the AP, and others are partnering with prediction markets to use their stats in coverage. What could go wrong?
On today’s show, we’re joined by three journalists who cover gambling and prediction markets to answer that question. They tell stories about how gambling has already transformed sports, the unsettling ways betting seems like it’s already influencing the news and politics, and the not-so-crazy arguments for how it could lead to better informed citizens.
Also: hours after we posted this episode, federal authorities charged a soldier -- Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke -- with being the mystery bettor we talk about in the show, who made $400,000 on Polymarket by trading on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. When asked about it, President Trump said, "The whole world unfortunately has become somewhat of a casino."
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- Joon Lee, independent sports journalist and Youtuber. Find his channel here https://www.youtube.com/@iamjoonlee
- Danny Funt, author of Everybody Loses: the Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Betting
- Kate Knibbs, senior writer at Wired
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
- DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout.
- Get 15% off OneSkin with the code QUESTION at https://www.oneskin.co/QUESTION #oneskinpod
- Listen to our supporter More Muslim , a narrative audio series telling deeply reported stories about the Muslim experience, wherever you get podcasts.
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
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms. Go to groundnews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
- DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout.
- Get 15% off OneSkin with the code QUESTION at https://www.oneskin.co/QUESTION #oneskinpod
- Listen to our supporter More Muslim wherever you get podcasts.
This episode originally aired on March 27th, 2025.
I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life
Taylor Little was 11 years old when they lied about their age to sign up for Instagram. Now, 13 years later, they’re one of thousands of people suing the company, accusing Instagram of purposely addicting them as a child and driving them to years of mental health struggles.
Taylor takes Brian inside their dark and twisted experience with the app. They say it all started with a suggestion Instagram sent them to visit an account they didn’t follow, which they developed a morbid fascination with.
Who bears responsibility for what happened to Taylor? Is it Instagram? The users who posted the content that consumed them? Their mom?
Today’s show deals with issues of self harm and suicide. If you or someone you know are struggling with these issues, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
-
Taylor Little, plaintiff in social media trial
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Loyola Marymount University
- If you’re interested in Fabric by Gerber Life go to https://meetfabric.com/QUESTION and apply today, risk-free.
- Get 15% off OneSkin with the code QUESTION at https://www.oneskin.co/QUESTION #oneskinpod
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms. Go to groundnews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
Meta Knew They Were Addicting Kids. Now They’re Paying for It.
In the span of two days, juries handed down landmark verdicts against Meta and Google. In New Mexico, a jury ordered Meta to pay the state $375 million for failing to protect young people from predators on Instagram. And in Los Angeles, a jury found that Meta and Google knowingly designed social media platforms that addicted a young girl, causing depression, body dysmorphia, and self-harm.
But as listeners to this show might wonder – isn't suing social media companies supposed to be impossible, because of Section 230?
Brian talks to co-lead counsel in LA, Mariana McConnell, about how they pulled off the win, what this huge verdict means for the internet, and the internal Meta document that said, “Young ones are the best ones.”
Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter – we’ll be sharing Brian’s extended interview with Mariana McConnell there.
Guests:
-
Mariana McConnell, plaintiff's co-lead counsel
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Loyola Marymount University
- If you’re interested in Fabric by Gerber Life go to https://meetfabric.com/QUESTION and apply today, risk-free.
- Get 15% off OneSkin with the code QUESTION at https://www.oneskin.co/QUESTION #oneskinpod
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms. Go to groundnews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
A Video So Real It Looks Fake
Brian sits down with expert fact-checker Sofia Rubinson who spends hours every day tracking lies online, and together they dissect a single lie that’s been rocketing around the world to millions of people, affecting the way people think about the war in Iran — including the world’s biggest podcaster.
Sofia says the AI deepfakes she’s seen consume the internet in just the last few weeks make her worried that we’ve entered a dangerous new phase of disinformation.
Watch the video of Benjamin Netanyahu featured in this episode, which NewsGuard confirmed to be real.
You can sign up for NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter here. And here’s our Question Everything newsletter.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.
Guests:
-
Sofia Rubinson, senior editor of Reality Check for NewsGuard
If you’re interested in Fabric by Gerber Life go to https://meetfabric.com/QUESTION and apply today, risk-free.
The Case Against Jeremy Loffredo (Ambie Award-winner for Best Reporting of the Year)
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.
This is part two of our two-part series about Jeremy Loffredo, who in October 2024 became the first American journalist arrested by Israel. This story won Best Reporting at the 2026 Ambie Awards, which is why we’re sharing it again now.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
This episode originally aired January 30th, 2025.
Blindfolded and Arrested on Assignment in Israel (Ambie Award-winner for Best Reporting of the Year)
Part one of a special, two-part series, about Jeremy Loffredo, the first American journalist ever arrested by Israel, and the questions that were raised about not only Israel, but the outlet Jeremy worked for, once our team started looking into his story. We’re re-airing these episodes because they won Best Reporting from the Podcast Academy, at the 2026 Ambie Awards.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
This episode originally aired January 15th, 2025.
Are We Captured Yet? Now Trump’s Pals Are Taking Over CNN
News recently broke that Paramount, which is newly controlled by David Ellison and his billionaire dad Larry Ellison, won the bid to buy Warner-Brothers Discovery, after aggressively squeezing out Netflix.
As Trump himself has said, the Ellisons are “friends of mine…big supporters of mine, and they’ll do the right thing.”
Is the “right thing” squashing critical coverage of the president? Doing stories he’s more inclined to like? The Ellisons already own CBS News, through Paramount; now they’re about to own CNN. Larry Ellison also has a new ownership stake in TikTok, via a deal anointed by Trump.
Is this what experts call “media capture?” Is the U.S. in it, right now?
In this conversation we first ran in October 2025, after the Ellisons took control of Paramount, foreign correspondent Natalia Antelava explains the insidious implications of media capture from her experience living and reporting in captured countries around the world.
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
This episode originally aired October 30th, 2025.
Guests:
- Natalia Antelava, founder of Coda Story