Question Everything with Brian Reed

Back in December, we did an episode about Pyrra, an AI-powered software that tracks sifts through the far corners of the internet – in some places you probably haven’t even heard of – to see what narratives are emerging from the people who post there. A lot of these are conspiracy theories, and also violent threats. This week, we check back in with the creator of that software, Dr. Welton Chang, about what narratives he’s seeing, right now, that might soon make the jump from fringe shitposts to actually having an impact in the real world.  Welton’s especially worried about the violent rhetoric aimed at one particular group of people, which has been topping the charts in recent weeks. Welton is the creator of Pyrra Technologies, and Vice President for Digital Intelligence Solutions at AlertMedia.  A listener asked us to clarify that the Romanian presidential elections we refer to in the beginning of this episode are first-round elections, meaning the winning candidate still had to win another round before becoming president. Sign up for our newsletter: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where better to huddle up and discuss what to do about Rümeysa Öztürk and the chilling effect that is happening in journalism than on campus at Tufts University with the student journalists at The Tufts Daily? This week Brian and Question Everything co-host a live event with the editor-in-chief and associate editor from The Tufts Daily – Arghya Thallapragada and Ellora Onion-De. Together they interview journalists and attorneys, including Carol Rose, part of Rümeysa's legal team and executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU, to learn what all happened to Rümeysa and why. What did her abduction by federal agents a month ago have to do with her immigration status as a Turkish graduate student studying child development, here on a student visa? Why did Secretary of State Marco Rubio say her Op-ed was cause for incarceration? Why is she still in ICE’s custody? And what happened to the constitutional protections around free speech and a free press that we depend on in a free society?  Joined by former editor-in-chief of both the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, Marty Baron; First Amendment lawyer Robert Bertsche; and senior politics reporter at The Intercept Akela Lacey; the group wrestles in real time with the gravity of this moment, not just for Rümeysa Öztürk, but for all of us. Read the Op-ed Rümeysa and others wrote that ran in The Tufts Daily a year ago in March. Watch the video of federal agents in plainclothes, forcing Rümeysa Öztürk into an SUV on March 25, 2025. Quick thing: In our discussion Carol Rose says the ACLU has filed 100 legal actions in President Trump’s first 100 days. The specific count on those is actually higher: the ACLU filed 110 legal actions in the Trump administration’s first 100 days. Sign up for our newsletter: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 gives the first amendment teeth and sets our country apart, as a place that prizes free speech. But recently, right under our noses, some of the same people who once sang Times v Sullivan's praises have turned against it.  The story of the growing movement that is trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn perhaps the strongest protection 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 won't be released. No one will ever see it. In his first sit-down interview about this scandal, the filmmaker Ezra Edelman seeks catharsis – if not closure – in the fight for truth and control over the life story of Prince. Thanks to “Pablo Torre Finds Out” for this incredible interview. “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 phrase 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have questions for us? If so, we want to talk to you! If you have thoughts about Question Everything, critiques of our episodes, or anything you're curious about, that we're covering, or not covering…please tell us. We want to set up some conversations between listeners and Brian and our staff for an upcoming episode. Write to us at hey@placementtheory.com and someone from our staff may reach out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalists jailed for an article they published. In America. How did this happen? Brian tells the story of a reporting trip he took to Alabama, where two small-town journalists had been locked up, which 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. In on of the Under the Desk News TikTok videos we played, when V's talking about possible effects on taxes as a result of cutting the Department of Education, they said "I don't know a whole lot of people who can afford for their mortgage to go up 20%." However, we'd like to clarify that a 20% rise in property tax does not necessarily mean a 20% rise in mortgage. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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's 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.  (Douglas Rushkoff said in our conversation 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Smith tells the story of the strange controversy over a journalism award that’s been going down in a Florida courthouse. Ben is Editor-in-Chief of Semafor and co-host of the Mixed Signals podcast. He used to be The New York Times media columnist and was founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News. Sign up for our newsletter to read the lengthy listener criticism that helped inspire Brian to do this episode: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Locked up, alone, accused of being a spy, reporter Jeremy Loffredo has to defend the fact that he’s a journalist. To the Israeli courts. And then…to our reporter.  Part two of our special series about Jeremy Loffredo, who in October became the first American journalist arrested by Israel. If you haven't listened to part one, check that out first in your feed: "Blindfolded And Arrested On Assignment In Israel." This week in our newsletter, we'll bring you inside some disagreements we had on staff, about how to tell this story. Sign up at: kcrw.com/questioneverything “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just a few months ago, Israel did something it has never done before. It arrested an American journalist. His name is Jeremy Loffredo. This is his story.  Part one of a special, two-part series.  “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Four Hollywood directors gather after hours at a wine shop to drink and commiserate about the perils – and power – that come when you’re straddling fact and fiction. With behind the scenes stories about documentary romance, regret, and pirates. Featuring Tom McCarthy, who won an Oscar for Spotlight; Antonio Campos, creator of The Staircase for HBO; Tina Satter, who directed and co-wrote Reality starring Sydney Sweeney; and Tobias Lindholm, director and writer of HBO’s The Investigation. As we know alcohol is not always conducive to factual precision, so here are some corrections and clarifications from our fact-checker, Maggie. Though honestly the crew this time did impressively well! All we have is that the name of the New York Magazine story that inspired Tina Satter to dramatize Reality Winner is called “The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread" (not “America’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread”). And it was a National Security Agency contractor, not a former FBI agent, who alerted the FBI about Reality’s leak. Here’s the NY Mag story. And here’s a Vanity Fair interview with Sophie, the editor of The Staircase documentary. “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our team at Question Everything has been playing around with a new technology that sucks up tons of social media posts, and then uses AI to figure out what ideas are forming in the shadows of the internet before they hit the mainstream. Brian interviews a journalist who uses this tech, to see what conversations are brewing right now that we might want to keep an eye out for in the coming weeks. “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We hire a freelancer to research every comment Donald Trump has made about the press. He ends up telling his wrestling buddy about the assignment, and using it to see if he can get him to trust in journalism. You can find more work by Sam Eagan here. “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special election-eve episode from Brian: Ruminations on a story that never was, and a late night conversation with the source he was supposed to make it about.  “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you hear us on This American Life? Keep listening as Brian stops doomscrolling and starts doom-living. He brings two journalists he saw duking it out on Twitter into a studio, where they debate how to report on lies and racism in the Trump era. Then he finds a journalist who’s putting their big theoretical questions into practice – at a personal cost – as she covers one of the most messed up stories of the election cycle.  Watch the unedited conversation between Jeff Jarvis and David Folkenflik. Subscribe to the Question Everything newsletter: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/question-everything “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A married couple finds themselves fighting miserably over the news. So they set out on a quest for the seemingly impossible: to find a news source that both a self-admitted “bleeding heart liberal” and a Trump supporter can trust. Check out Tangle News here.  “Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices