Why can't people stop talking about The Trojan Horse Affair?
Years after Serial moved from niche to mainstream, its producers have created another water-cooler affair
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The Trojan Horse Affair podcast dropped six weeks ago. The audio series on the Birmingham schools scandal of 2014 dropped all its episodes on February 3, which is basically a lifetime ago in the current breakneck cycle that’s true crime. But while other properties that debuted back then have already faded from our memories, the discussion-slash-debate about TTHA continues. I’d love to know why you might think that is…
And I’d also like to leave you with some of the most compelling back-and-forth on the podcast, which is available on all the usual podcast platforms. Let’s get into it.
I liked the Trojan Horse Affair (from here on out, “THA”). I reviewed it when it first came out, dropping all its episodes at once.
It wasn’t a story I knew about before the show, so I wasn’t aware of the factual dispute that would result. I also wasn’t bothered by its inconclusiveness, which I attributed to my background as a reporter. Vary rarely are real life stories resolved as conclusively as an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent (that is, a completely clear and non-coerced confession). I figured most reporters would be in my camp. Boy oh boy, was I wrong!
I’m Fed Up With Investigative Podcasts That Fail To Find Answers [Gawker]
This piece about THA by Caleb Pershan, my colleague twice over and longtime friend, hit my day job Slack with a muffled boom on Friday. The folks I work with are fairly straight-laced, serious journalists, and they got as heated as residents of Berkeley, CA, get when debating the merits of an argument presented on Gawker dot com.
My suggestions that Caleb often presents things…not trollingly exactly, but provocatively and with humor to elicit a response didn’t slow things down. Maybe passages like this are why:
If a podcast isn’t going to shave anything off its shaggy dog story, then it should at least deliver a satisfying conclusion. Otherwise, to the audience, it feels like a bait-and-switch, spending hours suffering through ponderous side-quests, expertly timed cliffhangers — and the direct-to-consumer ads that inevitably dangle after them — only to be left hanging. The whole undertaking can feel pointless, a violation of the implicit agreement between hosts and listeners: If a story promises a mystery, then it better solve it. That’s just basic dramatic structure etiquette.
Cynically, I wonder whether the choice to turn inward, or “go meta,” is purely a defensive maneuver on the part of podcast investigations that ultimately can’t deliver the goods. “It was actually about the journey all along,” they seem to say to listeners; “the story is really about storytelling.”
I completely agree with Caleb that the red herring and side-quest bullshit of so many podcasts needs to go, especially on shows that only drop one episode at a time. Imagine being one of the potential suspects “explored by the show,” walking around that week in between when you’re raised and exonerated under that cloud. It’s unconscionable.
That’s apparently one of the reasons THA’s Brian Reed and Hamza Syed opted to release all eight episodes at the same time. I suspect, business-wise (and especially as part of the New York Times machine - remember, the paper bought Serial Productions in 2020 ) there were a lot of arguments for running like a traditional series, a drip and drab at the time. This gleaned from…
The Trojan Horse Affair’s Hamza Syed Has Some Regrets [Slate]
Hard to think of a headline clickier than that, huh? He is very transparent about the show’s final episode and his frustration about a lot of the same things that upset Caleb so:
I was deeply, deeply disappointed by what happened. I felt a sense of failure. I felt that it genuinely was our last chance because by that point there weren’t many other people left for us to speak to or try to get some evidence from, and Mark Walters was our last shot at it. So, I went into that trip fully expecting if we don’t speak to this person, we’re going to leave this series as open-ended, where we detail a convincing theory of where the letter came from, but nothing beyond that. And when that moment happened, when we were in Perth, I remember being in the car and just realizing that this is it. We have failed, essentially, as reporters. In Perth, I felt like a failure—I still feel a failure, I’m still very disappointed with where we took this podcast. But that’s OK.
(Though I guess Caleb would be arguing, “no, that’s not OK!”)
And to the release all at once/one a week question:
Although (one episode a week) does create the opportunity for information to shake loose, what it also means is that the way you write the series has to pay attention to the fact that you might leave an allegation hanging over someone for a week before you release the next episode or develop the story further. You create a circus.
Syed’s conversation with Slate ran just a few days after his Times Insider interview, which was much more circumspect. I’ve never been a fan of that series (or their counterparts in other publications), though I think the intentions are good. Yes, I do want “behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at [news org name goes here],” but I’d prefer that they approach themselves with the same journalistic rigor that they approach subjects outside themselves.
The Making of ‘The Trojan Horse Affair’ [New York Times[
One thing that did leap out to me is that the 1,000 hours of recordings of Syed and Reed’s musings and interviews were compiled long before the NYT bought Serial productions, so in the backstory, the company was presumably going through a lot of changes, itself.
Ms. Laks and her team at Serial began shaping the podcast’s episodes at the end of 2019. “We all got into a room and spent days writing out all possible beats of the episodes on a whiteboard,” Ms. Laks said. “It was like a humongous, complex puzzle.”
In the end, the podcast takes listeners behind the scenes of the investigative process and explores the journalists’ different approaches to reporting as they follow the mystery of the letter.
Mr. Syed said they tried to situate their discoveries “in a way that makes you realize the importance and implications of them.” (To find out if they ever learned who wrote the letter, it’s all in the podcast.)
It’s hard not to get pissed at the NYT for that parenthetical, there — and it sure does shore up Caleb’s argument that this show isn’t really journalism, it’s entertainment in a reporter costume. Otherwise, how does the Times justify failing to provide the answer to this allegedly important question to readers…instead, crying, “no spoilers, you gotta listen to the end of eight hours to know what we know!”
And that brings us to the UK press reaction to the podcast, which includes similar suggestions that the show — which leans so hard into being an inside journalism baseball production — isn’t journalism at all.
The Trojan Horse Affair vs. the British Press [Vulture]
This piece from Hot Pod creator Nicholas Quah is a very solid aggregation and analysis of reactions to THA, some of which were pretty aggro!
History seems to be repeating itself, with the British press treating the podcast in much the same way it did the original scandal. In recent weeks, there has been a shift in the tenor of the response to the podcast. In The Guardian, Sonia Sodha, a British columnist and former political adviser, wrote an opinion piece criticizing it as “a one-sided account that minimizes child protection concerns, misogyny and homophobia.” The column is a peculiar piece of whataboutism, at various points mischaracterizing the podcast’s actual findings and arguments and what it set out to investigate. It appears to be one-sided itself. A spokesperson for Serial Productions told Vulture that, before the column’s publication, it had sent a right-to-reply letter systematically rebutting the major points of Sodha’s argument. That response, which Vulture has reviewed, was largely ignored.
Since then, similar opinion pieces have appeared in other publications. Khalid Mahmood, a Birmingham politician who during the scandal helped push the focus away from the question of the letter’s authenticity, wrote a column in the conservative magazine The Spectator that evoked the specter of the Caliphate controversy to discredit the podcast. (It’s probably worth noting at this point that Serial Productions and NYT Audio, which produced Caliphate, are separate, independent units.) Elsewhere, The Times ran a piece rampantly speculating that Reed and Syed’s reporting may have broken the law, which the New York Times disputes.
We mentioned Sodha’s op-ed in our pages previously. It’s an odd fit for the Guardian, even for its opinion pages, but the paper also published a couple of letters that seem to indirectly refer to the podcast as they explain the impact the actual scandal had on British schools. Even before the podcast dropped, the paper said that THA threatened to “reopen old wounds,” which is kind of an odd way to approach a report on an event of national importance, isn’t it?
Kasim Ali is one of the folks whose memories were reignited by the show, it appears. The novelist penned an interesting first-person piece on his experience as a student at the time.
I went to one of the schools named in the Trojan Horse scandal [The Independent]
(Damn you, Ted Lasso, for making my brain say :Trent Crimm” as I typed that publication name.) Ali attended Birmingham’s Park View School from 2005 and 2010, and says that the podcast gave him a chance to think about his school experience.
I also remember our teachers being a little too personal with us; they knew our families and often, we would be threatened with something finding its way back to our parents. Not through a phone call home but a whispered comment at someone’s house. A few of the teachers knew my uncles, had gone to school with them, and would say that they would let them know should I misbehave.
What I remember most, though, is the quality of the education I was given, being pushed to do better, and my classmates and I being told over and over again that we mattered. It wasn’t important that our fathers and mothers were immigrants from Pakistan, that they worked as taxi drivers or in corner shops or restaurants. We were going to transcend British ideas of what Muslims could be. Surrounded by that kind of positivity empowered me; I never felt like there was anything I couldn’t accomplish. For a while, I even harboured ideas about going to Oxford, simply because the teachers at Park View made me feel like I could.
He also has some pointed words for other local publications:
Seeing members of the British media attempt to dismiss the validity of The Trojan Horse Affair podcast, by accusing it of reopening “old wounds” (before the podcast was even released, I might add) or of ignoring child abuse, or of not having journalistic integrity, is, at best, untrue, and at worst, symptomatic of a wider sentiment towards Muslims in Britain.
Oh, snap.
I thought I had this newsletter all wrapped up, then the freakin New Yorker had to weigh in. Isn’t that always how it goes?
“The Trojan Horse Affair” Works Best When Studying Itself [New Yorker]
This one’s from the mag’s culture writer/podcast ranker Sarah Larson, who approaches THA as one might a Netflix docuseries or dramatic adaptation. “The story of how Muslim staff helped Birmingham schools is a vivid, fascinating narrative,” for example, or “The series begins to feel like a cross between All the President’s Men and The Thick of It.” And unlike Caleb, she’s satisfied with how it all plays out:
But, as in the first season of “Serial,” the series ends in lightly poetic writing and investigative frustration. We spend some time in a car outside houses, and make a polite foray into a school; the final image is of a man on the other side of an office door, “refusing to come out.” It leaves listeners with a very thoroughly implied idea of what happened with the letter, to combine with hours’ worth of scrutiny of what happened in the schools—and plenty of room for our own perspective to fill in the rest.
My end for this issue is similar dissatisfying. I think when I started writing this up that I’d have a better idea of if THA was good journalism or bad, and/or good entertainment or bad. I don’t feel like things went specifically more into focus for me after reading everything out there on the podcast.
But I do know this: As I noted when I started, this show has generated more analysis, commentary, and discussion (not to be confused with clickbait reblog) than any true crime property in years. If the show just flat out sucked or was even just mediocre, we would have forgotten about it already. But that commentators of note are still tackling it months later means something — and I think a lot of that something is the show’s clearly divisive approach.
Wednesday on Best Evidence: Bad Vegan doesn’t have a lock on food-related true crime.
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