I just finished listening to the new podcast by the team that made Serial. It’s about trying to find the author of a letter that purported to outline a plan by Islamists to take over schools in Birmingham, England. While quickly revealed to be a hoax, it sparked several investigations, new anti-terrorism laws, and the firing of teachers.
Anyone else listening? Thoughts?
I had read an article about the Trojan Horse letter on the BBC web site a while ago; I think it expressed some skepticism about the allegations of a big plot, if I remember correctly.
I thought the podcast was interesting, although the most interesting parts were in the first half of the series and I felt that it kind of petered out towards the end.
Come to think of it, I had similar feelings about the S-Town podcast: intriguing, but it peaked early and kind of petered out at the end.
I agree. One challenge with these long stories that they pour so much time and energy into is that sometimes they don’t really end up as good stories, but the sunk cost means you gotta publish an 8 hour podcast. It was well-told, but ultimately it was disappointing that the obvious interpretation of what happened that was laid out in the early episodes seems overwhelmingly likely to be correct, and the rest of it is a muddle of islamophobia and various institutions at different places on the continuum of incompetence and bad incentives.
I also found the last-two-episodes’ focus on the alleged eye-witnesses to the envelope opening strange and misguided. Even if those teachers really did see the principal open the envelopes, unless they watched her pick them up from the bin on CCTV camera and followed her the whole time, it means nothing. Sure, if they had come out and said it was all made up, that’s the nail in the coffin, but the preponderance of evidence here is all pushing one way, the obvious way that they explained at the beginning.
The thing that makes it absurdly obvious that Darr is the culprit is that any sane and honest person presented with a resignation letter that was immediately disavowed by the purported writer would be to disregard the letter, refer the matter to the police, and establish common-sense policies for securing and verifying mail. It is absurd that the police gave equal (or even substantive!) credit to the the two allegations: 1) that the resignation letters were fraudulent and used to illegally fire people with a known grievance, and 2) that the letters were real and falsely claimed to be fraudulent in order to somehow use that to force out the principal. The latter is very silly and requires the principal to take the ridiculous and unreasonable actions that Darr actually took, instead of the things that a normal reasonable person would do.
I thought the more interesting point of the whole story was how the two reporters, a white American and a Muslim Brit, viewed the story differently. I enjoyed how the two men had different approaches to investigating. Some of the differences were caused by the Muslim man’s inexperience at reporting, but other differences were clearly cultural.
I agree that was interesting, but I have to admit they really played up the mystery aspect of “who wrote the letter?” in the first couple of episodes. Similar to how S-Town played up the “conspiracy in a small town” angle at first vs. “this weird guy in a small town is interesting”.
At least it’s better than season 2 of Serial where they padded the Bowe Bergdahl story out with roughly 8 episodes’ worth of digressions and repetition (in my opinion).