The Story She Reported, the View She Buried
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 41 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 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:
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- Listen to our supporter More Muslim wherever you get podcasts.
This episode originally aired on March 27th, 2025.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I want to tell you about a podcast that's been really interesting to me. |
| 0:04.0 | More Muslim is a new narrative audio documentary series from a group of Muslim reporters who've worked for the New York Times, Radio Lab, and More Perfect. |
| 0:13.0 | One of those reporters, a foreign correspondent who covered conflict zones for the Guardian and Al Jazeera, |
| 0:19.0 | got so burnt out after Gaza that she packed her life into a storage locker and moved to Cape Town after learning about South Africa's oldest Muslim community. |
| 0:28.1 | The reporter had no idea that there was a group of Indonesians who'd survived 400 years of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid through a form of resistance so subtle, the oppressors never even |
| 0:40.3 | recognized it as resistance. Here's a clip from the episode. |
| 0:46.5 | Before I traveled to Cape Town, I knew about the UK's role in the transatlantic slave trade |
| 0:52.3 | that enslaved black Africans in the 1600s, |
| 0:55.4 | but I had absolutely no idea that just around the same time, Dutch colonizers were deporting |
| 1:03.0 | and enslaving Indonesians and had brought them all the way to South Africa. |
| 1:10.9 | That was a preview of the podcast, More Muslim. |
| 1:14.0 | Listen to More Muslim, wherever you get podcasts. |
| 1:20.1 | You ever get frustrated with that charade? |
| 1:27.4 | 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? |
| 1:34.9 | And then the charade that you're supposed to keep up as a listener or viewer or a reader or whatever, where you're supposed to pretend that you believe us. |
| 1:43.8 | You're supposed to pretend that you believe that we're basically like emotionally vacant fact vessels. |
| 1:49.7 | Plenty of reporters are frustrated with it and sick of it and have been breaking out of that charade for a while now, which I think is exciting. |
| 1:55.8 | But what you may not know is that the decision to do that, it's often pretty fraught and personal when you're deciding |
| 2:02.9 | as a reporter whether to reveal your feelings or not. And the choice you make about whether you |
| 2:08.0 | share your point of view or not while reporting a story, it can have a real impact. It can affect |
| 2:12.7 | the people you're reporting on. It can affect whether they're seen as guilty or innocent, |
| 2:16.9 | trustworthy, or not. It can have an impact on the as guilty or innocent, trustworthy, or not. |
... |
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