Question Everything

When a promising young freelancer pitched a good story to his magazine, editor Nicholas Hune-Brown was ready to assign it. But as he looked more closely at the pitch and the writer’s bylines across the internet, Nicholas began to realize maybe this writer wasn’t who she seemed. This episode recently won Gold and the Listener's Choice Winner in the 2026 Signal Awards for Best Writing. A...

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 kep...

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...

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 t...

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,...

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 mon...

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 d...

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...

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, bu...

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 “...

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, wh...

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 Gel...

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 YouT...

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...

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 sa...

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...

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. Withi...

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 p...

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. Clai...

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 po...

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 t...

The Freedom of the Press Foundation just filed an ethics complaint against Florida Judge Jeffrey Kuntz, who has been nominated by President Trump for a lifetime federal court appointment. They want him stripped of his gavel and his law license. Why? Judge Kuntz was one of the judges who ruled in Trump’s favor in his peculiar defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board. The Freedom of...

Like millions of others, Gordon Pennycook’s older brother has leapt down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and Gordon says he’s tried to change his brother’s mind, without success. Which tracks, if you’ve ever debated a conspiracy theorist — it can feel impossible to pull them back to reality.  If anyone was qualified to convince his brother, though, it&rsq...

According to the fact-checking company NewsGuard, Claude has been a very reliable and accurate chatbot. But in the last month or so, users have started complaining that it seemed to be getting slower, stupider, and less trustworthy. So NewsGuard AI analyst Isis Blachez ran a test on Claude, to see if it is actually getting worse. And running this test revealed a whole new iteration of Russian disi...

The first episode of a special series from On The Media ’s Micah Loewinger about how a seemingly benign and important agency, FEMA, has become the subject of some of the wildest conspiracy theories. FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is supposed to keep Americans safe from wildfires, hurricanes, and nuclear disasters. So why has it become so profoundly distrusted and maligned, to...