The Story She Reported, the View She Buried

April 16, 2026 · 40 min

About this episode

This episode explores the challenges journalists face in balancing personal opinions with professional reporting, featuring Dana Ballout's experience with The Copernic Affair.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Brian Reed

Guests: Dana Ballout, Alex Atack, Hamza Syed

Topics covered

journalism
reporting ethics
personal-professional dilemma
opinion in journalism
investigative reporting
media commentary

Keywords

journalism
Dana Ballout
Alex Atack
Hassan Diab
The Copernic Affair
The Trojan Horse Affair
reporting
media ethics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Copernic Affair, The Trojan Horse Affair, KCRW, Placement Theory, New York Times, Serial