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.