After ‘S-Town’ Lawsuit, Brian Reed Investigates the State of Journalism in New Show
In 2018, journalist Brian Reed faced a lawsuit over his most celebrated project. S-Town, a podcast he had hosted and executive produced, had become a near-instant sensation the previous year, breaking listenership records, earning lofty praise and sparking debate around issues of consent and privacy for its deceased subject. Then the Peabody Award-winning series was hit with a claim from the estate of the podcast’s subject that alleged a violation of Alabama’s right of publicity law.
“In order to win their case, [the complainants] had to argue that S-Town wasn’t journalism, legally,” says Reed. “And it put me in a position of having to think about what journalism is in a very elemental way that I had never done before.”
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The lawsuit eventually settled in 2020, with the executor stating the estate no longer had any issues with the podcast. But Reed kept pondering questions that arose during the saga. The experience helped spark his latest project, a deep excavation of the state — and flaws — of journalism today. Question Everything, debuting Thursday from KCRW and Placement Theory, leans into the gray areas of the craft: the ethical dilemmas, the pressures facing journalists, the individual codes of conduct and whether this kind of nonfiction storytelling can make a difference at a time when trust in the media is at a historic low.
Reed starts the podcast by turning its scrutiny on himself and his best-known work. In the pilot episode, Reed talks to one of S-Town’s harshest critics, Australian journalist Gay Alcorn, who called his podcast “morally indefensible” in a 2017 Guardian piece. The two discuss Alcorn’s concern with consent after S-Town’s subject, John B. McLemore, committed suicide in the early stages of reporting, the behind-the-scenes decisions to discuss intimate details of McLemore’s life and why this story of a private citizen felt like a worthy one to tell.
“It’s not a mea culpa for S-Town,” Reed says of the conversation, adding that he still feels “comfortable and proud” of the work he and his team did. “That said, it was enlightening to see how two journalists who have done this a while could see a story and the approach to it so differently.”
Subsequent episodes tackle how prominent reporters are doing their jobs in a landscape marked by political partisanship, a lack of trust and a prevalence of misinformation. In a journalist roundtable over drinks at a Brooklyn wine store in one episode, This American Life host Ira Glass remembers that when he entered journalism, he felt that if he presented news consumers with facts, he could persuade them one way or another and spark change. Now, “I feel like what I’ve seen is that’s not true,” he says.
In another episode, Reed interviews Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman, who famously helped break the story of widespread NSA surveillance based on Edward Snowden’s leaked documents in 2013. Gellman left journalism earlier this year to take a position at NYU Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “He basically had at least a minor crisis of confidence in the efficacy of truth in our times and the ability of journalists to make a difference,” says Reed. Future reporting will focus on Tangle News founder Isaac Saul, whose newsletter Reed says has helped American families bridge political divides and two Alabama newspaper staffers who were arrested over a story they published in 2023.
So far in his conversations and reporting, Reed has found that certain guiding principles of journalism are widely agreed upon, including accuracy, transparency, accountability and minimizing harm. But other values are more controversial, such as objectivity and impartiality: “At some places those are sacrosanct and at other places they’re seen as laughable or actually harmful, certainly counterproductive.”
Reed ultimately wants to create a space where journalists “are able to be introspective about their own work, open to criticism and self-evaluation,” as he states in the first episode of Question Everything. Asked how getting journalists to agree to this kind of self-reflection have been going so far, Reed answers, “jury’s still out.” He adds, “We’ve had enough wins that I feel heartened.”
One group Reed has been reaching out to in particular is journalists he admires. He’s been surprised by the feelings he’s encountered as a result. “There’s something very real and kind of momentous happening right now in the field of journalism, but the depth of it is deeper than I even thought,” he says. There are some sources that he’s long considered “high priest[s] of journalism” who are telling him they have no idea what to think about the current moment. Says Reed, “It’s both perversely reassuring, I guess, to know that people who I respect who thought about this longer than I have are also really concerned and lost, but also troubling.”
The podcast is set to release biweekly, with 26 episodes in its first year, and Reed hopes it will become a long-running show with many more episodes to come. It’s the first title from his new company Placement Theory, co-founded with fellow This American Life veteran Robyn Semien. Its mission is to incubate innovative, forward-thinking audio stories. One way it aims to do so: “Every story that we’re working on is being told by a reporter or a host who are the only ones that can tell that story — or certainly that version of it,” Reed says.
So, why was Reed the right person to tell this story, to question what is ailing journalism today? “This show is driven by my own mid-life, mid-career existential crisis over what my profession is,” Reed answers. “It comes out of genuine uncertainty and fear and confusion that I have about this career that I’ve dedicated my life to.” He adds, “This show, the way it will be told, the lens it has on the world, is coming from, in many cases, my experience.”
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