The seven-part hit podcast S-Town profiled the life of a man named John B. Mclemore before he died by suicide. Brian Reed, the host of that 2017 podcast, was contacted by Mclemore years earlier asking him to look into what he believed was moral rot in his rural Alabama town.
KPBS’s Public Matters Reporter Amita Sharma spoke to Reed about how the podcast’s aftermath changed his views on journalism.
Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
So Brian, S-Town was a smash hit in 2017, but it also sparked a lawsuit from McLemore's estate and criticism from fellow journalists who claimed you exploited a private man's distress to tell a good story. You say the experience made you rethink journalism. Why? And what conclusions did you draw from that rethinking?
Brian Reed: I rethought journalism because the lawsuit, the people who were suing me, who are not related to John B. McLemore in any way, were claiming in court that S-Town, this thing that I'd poured years into as a journalist, was not journalism legally, and that put me in a position of having to suddenly really think about, ‘wait, what is journalism exactly?’ And try to prove that and explain it in a legal case, you know, to a judge, to an opposing side. And just having to go through that exercise, I don't know if anyone has had to do that before about their own profession, whatever you do, you know, it kind of felt like, oh, I'm a baker having to explain, like, this is what bread is made of, and I don't know, it was a very kind of elemental exercise and a way of thinking that I hadn't, you know, you kind of, I think you go through and do your job and kind of just take for granted that it is what it is. And then that got me looking at all the fights we're in so often as a society, politically, culturally, and I just started noticing a lot of those boiled down to, disagreements over what journalism is, you know. Who should get to be a journalist? What story should be told? What stories should be emphasized? How we should check the truth or not?
So you now have a new podcast on journalism called Question Everything. So let me pick your brain on some recent journalism controversies. I'm not going to hit them all, but the owners of both the Washington Post and the LA Times nixed editorials endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president and today Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company will stop fact checking and use community notes instead. What do these moves say about the media in today's political environment?
Reed: I think, you know, from a high level, it looks bad. It looks like powerful companies are doing things in abeyance of an incoming presidential administration, which is never, you know, a good feeling, especially from newspapers like the LA Times and The Washington Post. So it just looks like cowardice a bit, you know, which is not what you want to see from people putting out the news. But I don't know, when I heard the news today about Meta — this is a very wonky answer — but I would encourage, you know, I think that a conversation about something called Section 230 is warranted again, this is something we've been exploring on our show. It's this regulation that basically makes it so that social media platforms like Facebook and others are not liable for defamation, for instance, for the things that people say on their platforms, they have special immunity, and I think that that's something that should be revisited.
So, I have to ask you this question. Has Truth lost its value in American society?
Reed: It's interesting. I think the idea of truth has not, I mean, what's the name of President-elect Trump's social media platform? It's Truth Social. So the idea is very powerful actually. The idea that the truth is being told, it's just that you know, a confluence of forces, including bad actors, have made it so that truth, you know, truth and and the ability to figure out what it actually is and trust the people telling it to us, has been corrupted.
Locally here in San Diego County we have seen the paper of record, the San Diego Union Tribune, go from 400 journalists in the 1990s to fewer than 100 now. Given this level of downsizing and general public distrust of the media, can journalists still make a difference?
Reed: Local journalists can, yeah. I mean, it's definitely an overwhelming and dispiriting moment, but I do think some of the most exciting and impactful journalism does come out of local outlets. But, I also think there needs to be bigger thinking and more innovative thinking, you know, just about what journalism looks like. You know, how to marshal the principles behind journalism and other venues, you know, ideas of accuracy and accountability and transparency. And how to take those values and kind of bring them to other forums.
So along those lines, Brian, what can journalists do in the future to prepare for covering the Trump administration?
Reed: Get E&O (errors and omissions) insurance for lawsuits. No, seriously, I mean like fact checkers, investigative — I think what I would say is, don't just chase everything everyone else is covering, you know, whatever kind of scandal of the day or kind of outlandish policy proposal or idea. Try to pick some priorities, questions you have, things you want to dig into, or uncover and really stick to those. You can you can address things as they come up, but instead of just like letting the administration dictate what the focus is every day, make your own priorities or source them from your audience and get a sense of what people want to know and really stick to that amidst the noise, because really getting at difficult truths takes time.
