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.