Question Everything

Lying is the force that is most diametrically opposed to journalism. So why has it been so hard for journalists to combat it?

Earlier this month, Brian was asked to deliver a treatise on this question to an audience of journalists, and writing it took him in a bunch of directions he didn’t expect: from a school playground to ancient religious texts to Alex Jones. Afterwards, people kept saying that we had to run it on Question Everything. Here it is.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

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Voting in this year’s midterms is already underway. And for the past year leading up to this election, the Trump administration has been pushing to get its hands on every state’s unredacted voter rolls, saying it wants to check for noncitizens who are illegally registered.

Those rolls include personal information like driver’s license numbers, full birth dates, and partial Social Security numbers. Some state election officials agreed to hand their lists over to the federal government, but Utah’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson refused.

Then the Justice Department sued her and threatened her with criminal charges.

She told Question Everything producer Zach St. Louis the story.

Also this week, The Signal Awards honored Question Everything with eight awards, including two listener choice awards. Thanks to all who voted for us! Here are two of the winning episodes you can check out: The Talented Ms. Goldiee and I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• Deidre Henderson, Lieutenant Governor of Utah

Midterm elections are around the corner, and AI is obviously an issue that’s getting a ton of attention from candidates. There are so many thorny questions around this technology, but what do politicians intend to do about it? Today, we are sharing an interview with Texas Congressman Greg Casar from Slate's podcast, "What Next," where Casar talks about his concerns with AI and why he sees the anger that people feel about it as an opportunity to build a political movement that brings people together.

You can hear Slate’s What Next wherever you get your podcasts.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• Lizzie O’Leary, from Slate’s What Next
• Greg Casar, US Representative for Texas’s 35th Congressional District.

Just a few weeks ago, David Ellison and Paramount were staring down the barrel of a $7 million dollar per day fine for every day their merger with Warner Bros was not finalized, with a 12 state class-action antitrust lawsuit standing in the way. The states, led by California attorney general Rob Bonta, seemed to have Ellison backed into a corner.

But then, at what seemed like the 11th hour, Bonta announced a settlement with Paramount that would allow the merger to go through. The deal closed this week, officially giving Trump allies David and his father Larry Ellison control over vast swaths of the entertainment industry, as well CBS News and CNN.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is mad they didn’t fight harder. In an unusually frank interview, he reflects with Brian on what went wrong with their case, and what the new mega-company Skydance will mean for independent news in America.

Also, check out our previous stories on media capture and the Ellison bromance with Trump.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• William Tong, Attorney General of Connecticut

Flock Safety’s license plate cameras are in about 6,000 towns across the U.S. But lately, towns have been pulling out of their contracts after all sorts of creepy stories about cops using the cameras to spy on people in their personal lives.

But in Tewksbury, Mass., residents have a different concern: they can’t get Flock to tell them what their town originally agreed to. For months, residents and town officials have been asking the company a simple question, which the company will not answer. That sends two residents down a Kafkaesque rabbit hole to figure out what Flock might be hiding.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• Dustin Weir, Tewksbury resident
• James Mackey, Tewksbury Select Board member

A few weeks ago, Meta was in trouble. 47 states plus several U.S. territories were suing the company in federal court for knowingly harming kids with its apps, Instagram and Facebook. Several of the states were in the middle of a trial in California; damaging information was coming out about Meta; execs were being grilled on the stand; there was talk of CEO Mark Zuckerberg having to testify, and damages as high as $1.4 trillion. The company had already lost two major trials over child safety this year. The wind seemed to be at the states’ backs.

And then they settled. Without even finishing their case in court. Meta didn’t have to admit any wrongdoing.

Why? Why did the states give in? The evidence against Meta was damning. Why didn’t the states take the company to task and force a verdict?

Brian calls up the man who led the negotiations with Meta for the states, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, to ask him why he and his colleagues gave in.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• Jonathan Skrmetti, Attorney General of Tennessee

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Today we’re excited to share a special episode of Reaching Out, a new podcast from Futuro and KCRW.

Hailed by Ira Glass as the “best new show I’ve heard in years,” Reaching Out is a story about fathers, sons, and the distance between. The story begins on the eve of twin brothers’ Sayre and Connor’s 30th birthday, when they set out to find the biological father who abandoned them before they were born.

Their search pulls them through desert raves, drunken nightclubs, and across borders of time and language, forcing the brothers to confront the truths they’ve hidden from each other and themselves. And it’s not long before the twins discover that their birth father is closer than they ever could have imagined.

Follow Reaching Out on your favorite podcast app. New episodes drop every week.

When Florida reporter Kate Payne stumbled across a local news site called The South Florida Standard, something about it felt off. She’d never heard of the outlet before and didn’t know any of the journalists who were listed on its staff, even though their bios touted long careers in Florida journalism. The articles the site was publishing seemed like very normal local news stories, but they were often plagiarizing the reporting of other Florida news outlets. The coverage didn’t have any obvious political agenda or bias. And Kate couldn’t see a way the site was making any money; there were no ads or ways to subscribe.

What was going on here?

After Kate told Question Everything producer Zach St. Louis about this, he got sucked into the mystery – and ended up solving it. A bizarre whodunnit for our AI age.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And subscribe to our newsletter please!

Kate Payne reported a version of this story for The Florida Trib, which you can read here.

Jeremy Carrasco is director of Riddance and the creator of JeremyFindsAI.

Guests:

• Kate Payne, State Government Reporter at The Florida Trib
• Jeremy Carrasco, Director of Riddance and Creator of JeremyFindsAI
• Joe Alouf, Turnaround Executive

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What would it take to actually fix America’s broken journalism industry? Using rural North Carolina as a petri dish, the podcast Scene on Radio spent their latest season, called “The News”, diagnosing how American journalism is failing the public: collapsing local newsrooms, corporate consolidation, an information crisis nobody seems able to solve.

In the final episode of “The News”, host John Biewen and co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika turn to solutions: how can good journalism survive, and what is the vision for a new age of robust, public interest journalism?

You can hear the full season of Scene on Radio wherever you get your podcasts.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• John Biewen, co-host of Scene on Radio
• Chenjerai Kumanyika , co-host of Scene on Radio
• Les High, Founder and publisher of The Border Belt Independent
• Victor Pickard, co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication

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Local reporters from around the country tell stories of using the experiences of their neighbors to confront people in power.

Guests:

• Anna Wolfe with Mississippi Today
• Lisa Halverstadt with Voice of San Diego
• Alissa Zhu with The Baltimore Banner
• Tony Plohetski with The Austin American-Statesman and KVUE Austin

Lisa is a part of the Homelessness Beat Reporters Collective, which recently produced a guide on how to responsibly cover homelessness. That guide can be found here.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

This episode was originally published on June 26th, 2024.

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How one of the most accomplished reporters of our time, Barton Gellman, lost his confidence in journalism.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

This episode was originally published on September 26th, 2024. You can listen to our follow up episode with Barton Gellman - He Quit Journalism to Fight Authoritarianism. How’s That Going?

Guests:

• Barton Gellman

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Over the past few months, we’ve been closely covering the major lawsuits against Meta over the ways its apps have hurt young people.

This week, we’re sharing a special episode of "Left To Their Own Devices", a Peabody-nominated series hosted by Gen Z reporter and tech-safety advocate Ava Smithing.

Recorded live on stage shortly after the recent jury verdicts against Meta and YouTube, Ava interviews NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the wildly influential "The Anxious Generation", about his ideas for how to keep kids safe from social media -- some of which Ava doesn't buy into.

It’s a timely conversation as courts and policymakers continue to grapple with how to hold tech companies accountable, and force them to make their products safer for young people.

Guests:

• Ava Smithing, Left to Their Own Devices host
• Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation

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Just hours after we dropped last week’s episode on New Mexico’s landmark trial against Meta, Judge Bryan Biedsheid issued his ruling on what changes the company would have to make to Facebook and Instagram to better protect kids.

He ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $567 million, on top of the earlier $375 million jury penalty. He also mandated that Meta make unprecedented changes to its platforms, including limiting how long teens can use its apps and preventing their accounts from being recommended to adult strangers. This decision could become a blueprint for other states as they bring their own suits against Meta.

But the judge rejected some of the state’s biggest demands, forcing him to wade into a thicket of questions about privacy, free speech, child safety, and the limits of what one court can do. Brian talks to Question Everything producer Zach St. Louis, one of the only reporters at phase two of the trial in Santa Fe, about the ruling.

If you haven’t already, listen first to our other episodes about the New Mexico v Meta case, which led to this consequential decision – The Sting That Exposed How Meta Endangers Kids and We Went to the Trial That Could Force Meta to Change its Ways

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

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Back in 2023, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a historic lawsuit against Meta, arguing that the tech giant has enabled the exploitation of children on its apps for years.

This year, that case finally went to trial in a Santa Fe courthouse. The state argued that Meta has knowingly harmed kids and should be forced, through a court order, to change how they operate. Meta says that these changes are unnecessary and, in some cases, an overreach of the law.

Now, one man, Judge Bryan Biedscheid, is deciding what, if any, changes he will force Meta to make to Facebook and Instagram with the aim of protecting kids. It’ll be the first decision of its kind against a major social media company in the United States.

We went to this phase of the trial in New Mexico, to see the testimony, evidence, and cross-examinations the judge is weighing right now as he makes his decision – and also to try and convince someone from Meta’s gigantic legal team to talk to us.

If you haven’t already, listen first to our initial dispatch from the New Mexico v Meta case – The Sting That Exposed How Meta Endangers Kids.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

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Wall Street Journal reporter Emily Glazer investigates the rich and powerful, and recently, she got a tip that she couldn’t get out of her head: sources told her that Donald Trump and billionaire Larry Ellison are genuine friends. She found it hard to believe – in all her experience reporting on the wealthy, she’s used to hearing about transactional relationships, not people who truly like each other. It seemed especially important to understand because in Trump’s second term, Larry Ellison has amassed enormous power over American media organizations – including CBS News, 60 Minutes, Paramount, and TikTok – often with the Trump administration’s help.

Are Ellison and Trump really friends? Emily and her colleagues set out to investigate and found out way more that was going on behind the scenes between these two men than anyone in the public knew.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• Emily Glazer, Wall Street Journal Enterprise Reporter, covering the rich and powerful. Read Emily's reporting on Larry Ellison and Donald Trump. We first heard Emily talk about her reporting on The Town with Matthew Belloni.

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In June, disgraced former Florida Congressman turned right-wing One America News Network anchor Matt Gaetz peddled a novel and dangerous conspiracy to his audience: that using sunscreen causes skin cancer. Gaetz’s guest was Nicholas Hulscher, a prominent voice in the COVID anti-vaccination movement and co-author of one of the most prolific medical disinformation newsletters in America. Within days, this false claim had reached millions of viewers and dozens of countries – and was popping up in the comments of innocuous mommy blogger videos about applying suntan lotion to kids.

NewsGuard health editor John Gregory explains how Hulscher’s false claim metastasized throughout the internet, and how he sold it to the world by twisting the surprising findings of a legitimate scientific study.

If you're new to our show and liked this episode, let us suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might like "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life"and "The Talented Ms. Goldiee".

Guests:

• John Gregory, Health Editor at NewsGuard

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If you're new to our show and liked this episode, let us suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might enjoy -- check out "How Meta Is Making Billions from Scam Advertising", "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life", "The Talented Ms. Goldiee" and "Why Did ICE Lock Up This Pro-Trump Reporter?"

In a windowless room in Albuquerque, a small team of New Mexico investigators created a fake Facebook account for a 13-year-old girl to target a child predator. They made posts of her losing her last baby tooth and starting her first day of 7th grade. To their surprise, Facebook funnelled adults to the account by the thousands – men who began trying to groom, solicit, and sexually harass a person they believed was an underage girl.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says this was the moment when he realized “there is a very, very serious problem inside of this company and on these platforms.” He launched a lawsuit against Meta, which led to the first successful verdict for child safety against a social media company. Question Everything executive producer Robyn Semien visited New Mexico to attend parts of the trial and hear from AG Torrez and his team how they took on Mark Zuckerberg, and what this victory, along with a second decision still to come, could mean for the future of social media.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questioneverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez

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If you're new to our show and liked this episode, let us suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might enjoy -- check out "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life", "The Talented Ms. Goldiee" and "Why Did ICE Lock Up This Pro-Trump Reporter?"

Last week, host Brian Reed interviewed former MAGA influencer and the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, Ashley St. Clair, in front of a live audience in New York. After they walked off stage, St. Clair laid into Brian over the questions he asked. She then demanded that we not release the interview publicly and asked to speak to our lawyers.

Here is that interview, uncut.

In it, St. Clair talks to Brian about her landmark lawsuit against xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind Grok, which generated millions of sexually explicit deep fake images of her and other women. xAI is owned by St. Clair’s ex, Elon Musk, and Brian asks her to share stories and insights from her relationship with Musk to help people understand his erratic and offensive behavior. Brian also asks St. Clair about her years as a major figure inside the right-wing propaganda machine. It's those questions that seemed to bother her most.

Find video highlights of the live interview on our new Instagram account – @questionverything.podcast. The full video is available at our Substack.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. The live taping was presented by OnAirFest.

Our fact-checker reviewed this live, unedited conversation. We were not able to independently verify St. Clair’s remark that Musk’s devices were seized during French authorities’ search of X’s offices. Likewise with St. Clair’s recollection that she saw a Grok-generated image of a 4-year-old girl in a Bluey microprint bikini, and her claim that immigrants were getting on planes with boarding passes that didn’t have any name on them. We reached out to Musk and xAI for comment, but they did not reply.

Guests:

• Ashley St. Clair

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Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian grip on Hungary became a model for the American right. He hollowed out the country’s democracy and turned much of the media into a government megaphone. Then a small newsroom called Direkt36 exposed a plot against the opposition party involving a mysterious political operative, a young IT worker, a raid on a boat in the Danube and a whistleblowing police captain. A few weeks later, Orbán was ousted from power in a landslide election.

Sean Cole reports on the investigation, called the Hungarian Watergate, and what it shows about why an independent press still matters.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• ZsuzsannaWirth, Direkt36 investigative reporter
• AndrásPethő, Direkt36 editor
• Marius Dragomir, Director of the Media and Journalism Research Center

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While we’re heads down working on a bunch of great new episodes, we’re sharing the first episode of the new season of Drilled.

In it, award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt exposes how Republican corn ethanol mogul Bruce Rastetter sold "sustainable aviation fuel" to world leaders from North Dakota to Brazil. The problem is, his “clean energy” project does nothing to help climate change.

Drilled: Carbon Cowboys follows the land grabs, pipelines, and political power stopping real progress from being made.

Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts, or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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