A Rant or a Slant: When Should Reporters Speak From the Heart?
A reporter questions whether to drop the veneer of neutrality.
Question Everything · Brian Reed
March 27, 202539m 0s
Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (mgln.ai) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
<p dir="ltr">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. </p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">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. </p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">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. </p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">You can check out The Copernic Affair wherever you get your podcasts or at <a href="https://www.canadaland.com/shows/the-copernic-affair/">https://www.canadaland.com/shows/the-copernic-affair/</a>.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">Same with The Trojan Horse Affair: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair.html">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair.html</a></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">To get the soundbyte from Hamza’s interview that we’re asking people to remix into something danceable, sign up for Brian’s newsletter here:<a href="http://www.kcrw.com/questioneverything"> www.kcrw.com/questioneverything</a></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">“Question Everything” is a production of<a href="http://www.kcrw.org/"> KCRW</a> and<a href="http://www.placementtheory.com/"> Placement Theory</a>.</p>