Serial: a new kind of journalism

Shortly before Thanksgiving, my daughter told me about Serial, a podcast exploring a nonfiction story over multiple episodes (thus the name). It’s a spinoff of the radio program This American Life. First released last October, the episodes ran weekly for 12 weeks. The final episode was released on Dec. 18.

In early December, I went online and listened to the podcasts, and I was hooked. I understood why it ranked number one on iTunes for several weeks.

Sarah Koenig, who created and hosts the series, investigates the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old student at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore. Lee’s ex-boyfriend, Adnan Musud Syed, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. After a six-week trial, Syed was found guilty on Feb. 25, 2000, and given a life sentence, despite pleading his innocence.

Koenig’s journalism is not especially new. She does what other journalists do in newspaper articles or TV “newsmagazines” that explore a topic in detail in order to get at the truth.

But what makes Koenig’s reporting in Serial unique, besides the format, is her transparency. As Joyce Barnathan notes in “Why Serial Is Important for Journalism” (Columbia Journalism Review, cjr.org), Koenig shares her thoughts and views as she researches the story. She talks about her anxieties, her soul searching, as she ponders whether or not Syed is guilty.

This openness, writes Barnathan, “adds tremendous credibility to our field.” We identify with Koenig because she’s expressing what we also feel.

The podcasts move us emotionally. At times we believe, or want to believe, that Syed is innocent. At other times we wonder if he’s playing us.

Koenig not only tells a gripping story, however. She raises interesting questions that connect to our lives and help us understand how complex situations are. For example, she asks people, “Do you remember the details of a day six weeks ago?”

Serial also teaches us about how journalists or lawyers or detectives investigate a murder. And we learn about the criminal justice system, how fickle it can seem. We learn how imprecise people’s memories are, how events get interpreted in multiple ways.

When we watch a fictional murder investigation on TV, it usually is tied up neatly in an hour. In real life, it doesn’t work that way.

Koenig works hard to find people more than a decade later who were involved in the case, people who knew Syed or Lee. She also interviews experts in various fields.

Serial is more than entertaining and educational. It has uncovered evidence that the prosecution and the defense in this case failed to produce. People connected to the case have contacted Koenig and provided their perspectives.

Before the final episode aired, some criticized it for being produced if it wasn’t going to reach a clear conclusion about Syed’s innocence or guilt. But this is not a Dickens novel with a clear, melodramatic ending.

As a result of the podcast, however, there is some movement toward possibly solving the murder. The UVA Innocence Project is poised to ask a court to test an old physical evidence recovery kit that was used on Lee’s body to test for possible sexual assault in 1999 but was never tested for DNA. This could provide evidence showing Syed’s guilt or innocence, but the courts need to allow it.

 Like life, the story is ongoing. Meanwhile, journalists can draw lessons from Serial about reporting with transparency.  

Health-care disaster in Mississippi

Access to affordable health care in the United States has been a major problem for years. Perhaps nowhere has it been worse than in Mississippi. And the Affordable Care Act (ACA), often referred to as Obamacare, has not made health care more accessible or affordable in Mississippi, according to two journalists there.

Writing for Columbia Journalism Review, Trudy Lieberman praises Sarah Varney, a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, and  Jeffrey Hess of Mississippi Public Broadcasting, who contributed research and reporting, for a “Letter from Mississippi,” which thoroughly and poignantly details “how the poorest, sickest state got left behind by Obamacare.”

Their account, published in the November/December issue of Politico Magazine and on the Kaiser Health News website, analyzed “Obamacare’s year-long struggle for respectability and viability in the poorest state in the union,” writes Lieberman.

They asked the following question: Can a private system of health insurance and subsidies for buying coverage work in a state with very poor people who have high rates of disease, lack education, and for whom buying insurance is like learning Turkish? “Add to that an uncooperative political infrastructure,” writes Lieberman, “and the answer at this point seems to be no.”

Given that Mississippi suffers from a high incidence of diabetes, heart disease, obesity and the highest mortality rate in the nation, Obamacare barely registered there. In fact, according to one analysis Varney cites, “Mississippi would be the only state in the union where the percentage of uninsured residents has gone up, not down.”

Varney blames many factors on this failure, including “political infighting, an overwhelmed federal agency and a surprise decision from the Supreme Court.” Only about 20 percent of the state’s residents eligible for Obamacare coverage have signed up. The “most significant drag on sign-ups,” Varney writes, “was Mississippi’s decision not to expand Medicaid,” which left some 138,000 low-income residents, most of whom are black, without insurance options.

Varney also points out inequalities that are part of the ACA, such as high deductibles and other high cost-sharing requirements. A 54-year old waitress got a policy for $129, Varney writes, only to discover she first had to pay $6,350 out of pocket. She cancelled the policy.

These articles focus on Mississippi, which also has the highest rate of leg amputations in the country (for African Americans, this number is particularly “startling,” Varney writes) and a high rate of breast cancer deaths despite a low incidence rate. However, many of the problems with health care apply as well to many other states.

Lieberman makes the point that this story is not being told many places. She writes: “Several of the issues Varney details—like inequality, the loss of federal funds for safety-net hospitals, and the continuing political hostility to health insurance for the uninsured—are not unique to Mississippi and merit attention from reporters around the country.”

In my own state of Kansas, for example, where Medicaid is not being expanded, health care is not being addressed adequately.

While politicians play political football with Obamacare, health-care costs continue to rise.

One culprit (of many), according to an article in Pacific Standard (July/August) notes the overuse of CT scans, often done before doing a simple physical exam. When one patient whose problem was already identified objected to having a scan done because of the exorbitant cost, the doctor said, “Why do you care? Your insurance will cover it.”

The trouble is, too many of us don’t care. And those making the decisions seem to care even less about these costs.