A Rant or a Slant: When Should Reporters Speak From the Heart?
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 soundbyte 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
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You ever get frustrated with that charade reporters are supposed to keep up where we pretend we don't have opinions or feelings or any kind of human thoughts about a story we're working on? |
| 0:09.6 | And then the charade that you're supposed to keep up as a listener or viewer or reader or whatever where you're supposed to pretend that you believe us. |
| 0:18.1 | You're supposed to pretend that you believe that we're basically like |
| 0:21.3 | emotionally vacant fact vessels. Plenty of reporters are frustrated with it and sick of it and have |
| 0:27.0 | been breaking out of that charade for a while now, which I think is exciting. But what you may not |
| 0:31.2 | know is that the decision to do that, it's often pretty fraught and personal when you're deciding as a reporter whether to reveal your feelings or not. |
| 0:40.4 | And the choice you make about whether you share your point of view or not while reporting a story, it can have a real impact. |
| 0:47.0 | It can affect the people you're reporting on. |
| 0:49.1 | It can affect whether they're seen as guilty or innocent, trustworthy, or not. |
| 0:52.9 | It can have an impact on the policies you're covering, |
| 0:55.1 | how people think about them, and it can affect you as the reporter, your credibility, your career. |
| 1:00.4 | This is what we're going to explore today. We're going to go inside this decision, which is both |
| 1:05.3 | personal and journalistic, and we're going to do it with this new podcast series that was |
| 1:10.0 | recommended to me called The Copernic Affair. |
| 1:13.7 | The Copernic Affair is about an unassuming sociology professor in Canada who gets accused of carrying out a bomb attack on a Paris synagogue some 40 years after it happened. |
| 1:24.6 | It's from the Canada Land Network. |
| 1:26.7 | Copernic is the name of the synagogue that was attacked. |
| 1:30.0 | Poor people were killed. Dozens were injured. The sociology professor is named Hassan Diab. He's |
| 1:37.3 | originally from Lebanon. Hassan has always claimed that he's completely innocent of this crime. |
| 1:43.0 | He says he wasn't in France when it happened, |
| 1:44.9 | that he never associated with the militant group from Lebanon that's suspected of being behind it. |
| 1:49.9 | Still, Hassan's life is turned upside down while French investigators try to get him extradited from |
... |
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