Question Everything – Details, episodes & analysis

We're back. September 25th.

A listener weighed in with some criticism on Substack. Brian (our host) got involved. Some advice for journalists ensued. It ended up inspiring an entire segment on KCRW’s show Left, Right & Center, which we’re sharing with you here.

This is the kind of action that’s happening over on our new Substack – which you should subscribe to! If you do, we’ll enter you in a lottery to join us at the next taping we do at Bibber & Bell Wine Shop in Brooklyn. We’re getting together reporters who are all covering the Jeffrey Epstein story as it has burst back into the news and is threatening Donald Trump. A couple of you can eavesdrop on the conversation from the storage area in the back with our sound guy – sign up at questioneverything.substack.com.

Last episode we discussed the campaign to overturn the Supreme Court decision that protects reporters’ ability to criticize and investigate people in power.

But even with that decision still in place, reporter David Enrich has discovered a shocking wave of legal attacks that is being waged on journalists in towns and cities across the country. These are often reporters at tiny, local outlets, trying to hold people accountable in their communities. 

And these legal claims don’t even have to succeed - and they frequently don’t - to shut down reporters.

Plus, Brian waxes poetic about the first amendment, under the night sky. 

This is part two of our series about David Enrich’s reporting from his book “Murder the Truth”. Listen to part one first – it’s called “Freedom of the press is great, until you’re the target.” 

In our newsletter this week – Brian tells a personal story about how his lawyers helped him fend off a legal threat. Check that out at:  www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

For decades, a Supreme Court decision called New York Times vs Sullivan was widely beloved by people across the political spectrum. Hailed as a decision that gave the first amendment teeth and made our country great.

But recently, under our noses, some of the same people who once sang its praises have turned against it. 

The story of the growing movement that is trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn one of the strongest protections for speech and the press in America.

This is part one of a two part series about the book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, by Times investigative editor David Enrich.

Sign up for our newsletter here to hear about one of Brian’s own legal battles: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

The best documentary filmmaker in America spent nearly five years of his life making a nine-hour masterpiece for Netflix. 

It will never see the light of day. 

After a nasty estate battle, the series will not be released. No one will ever see it.

In his first sit-down interview about this catastrophe, the filmmaker, Ezra Edelman seeks catharsis – if not closure – in the fight for truth and control over the life story of one of the biggest control freaks ever. 

Thanks to “Pablo Torre Finds Out” for sharing this interview with us. 

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

Last year, we did an episode with Barton Gellman, who talked about the war games he was running with high-level military leaders and government officials to prepare for a second Trump term. 

A bunch of you have been asking us to have Barton back, to find out what he’s doing, now that the second Trump term is here. So we called him up.

Barton works at the Brennan Center for Justice.

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

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.

Brian tells the story of a reporting trip he took to Alabama, where two small-town journalists had been locked up in jail, that led to one of the most honest - and surprising - conversations about journalism he’s had in a long time. 

Sign up for our newsletter to see some stories and pictures from a recent event Brian held in Alabama about his podcast S-Town. Including a photo of an S-Town inspired tattoo somebody was eager to show him. www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

As trust in traditional journalism plummets, social media content creator V Spehar of Under the Desk News is ascendant, with over 3.4 million TikTok followers. But recently, V found themself in a public dustup with NPR over, in part, how the outlet had classified V in an interview. In this special episode of Question Everything––largely recorded live at On Air Fest––Brian and V take the stage to explore the tensions between traditional and non-traditional journalism, and what the two can learn from each other.

Since talking off the cuff live on stage doesn’t always result in the most precise utterances, here are a few additional corrections and clarifications we didn’t address directly in the episode:

While live on stage, V said that TikTok is owned “mostly by the richest man in Philadelphia, Mr. Jeffrey Yass.” In fact, Yass’ personal share in TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, is 7%, worth roughly $21 billion. 

Regarding the stat in the Under the Desk News video stating “every school in America gets about 20 percent of their total school budget from the federal government,” in reality, public schools may get as little as 0% or as much as 75% of their funding from federal sources, depending on the district. 

The Pew Research referenced in the conversation shows that 1 in 5 Americans get their news from online news influencers, and 54% of Americans get their news at least sometimes from social media.

And lastly: Senator Tammy Duckworth has fought for about a dozen federal employees fired from the Veteran’s Crisis Line to get their jobs back, and not employees solely from her state, Illinois. 

We reached out to V’s father to confirm their conversation about the possible effects of cuts to the Department of Education, but he didn’t want to comment.

Sign up for our newsletter: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

As billionaires hoard more control over our politics, it seems more important than ever to ask: What makes them tick? Four reporters gather after hours at a wine shop to discuss – over drinks – what they’ve learned from covering billionaires for years, and how it can help us hoi polloi make sense of what the ultra-rich are doing right now.

Featuring Vicky Ward, who has covered the Kushner family and Trump, and who, in 2002, was the first journalist to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s finances in a profile for Vanity Fair; John Hyatt, who covers billionaires, with a focus on Elon Musk, for Forbes; Douglas Rushkoff, who has written about tech billionaires preparing for the end of the world; and Edward Ongweso, Jr., who covers the impact of the exponential growth of large tech companies for outlets like Vice and The Nation. 

A small correction: Douglas Rushkoff said that his trip to a hedge fund conference in the desert happened in 2018, but the trip was actually in 2017.

Sign up for our newsletter: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.