Hey there, everybody. I'm Brian Reed. I used to be a producer at the show This American Life.

I also hosted the podcasts The Trojan Horse Affair and S-Town. This is my new show,

Question Everything. As a journalist, I've been trained to do just that. Question the who, what,

where, why of everything. And you know what? Journalism should be included in that.

With this show, I want to turn the mic around on myself and my colleagues in the industry to ask questions about our work, whether it's achieving what it's meant to, and if it's broken, which so many people believe it is, how we might fix it.

I want to re-examine everything about the career I thought I knew. In that spirit, for our first

episode, we have a conversation between me and a sharp critic of mine, a fellow journalist who

believes that a story I made was morally indefensible. You know, why do you think this is a story

at all? What's your answer to that criticism of mine and others,

even questioning whether or not it's legitimate to do this?

Stick around.

A heads up, this episode discusses suicide and self-harm.

Here's how this all came about. The story this person criticized was S-Town, a podcast series I hosted in 2017 about a man named John B. McClamor who lived in rural Bibb County, Alabama.

John B. was a listener to the radio show I worked for at the time,

who wrote in asking us to do a story about how corrupt and decrepit his area was.

He called it Shetown.

He and I started emailing.

Eventually, our emails turned to phone calls.

We have just an incredible amount of police corruption.

We have the poorest education.

We are one of the child molester capitals of the states.

We talked a bunch.

...