The Trojan Horse Affair is a shocking and sometimes depressing podcast, but above all an ode to journalism ★★★★☆

It’s 2018 when Birmingham budding journalist Hamza Syed has a few minutes backstage with his journalistic hero Brian Reed. The American podcast maker is touring England to give lectures on S-Townhis 2017 award-winning podcast about a tormented eccentric in the Deep South.

Syed tells Reed an intriguing investigative story about a mysterious letter. Its content has had far-reaching implications for English Muslims. But there is no word of the letter, and it is completely unclear who the sender is.

Four years later there is The Trojan Horse Affairan eight-part podcast series by The New York Times and production house Serial, created by Brian Reed and Hamza Syed. The podcast appeared online in its entirety last Friday. It’s a mind-boggling and regularly outrageous exposé about individuals and institutions—media and politics—who, without a shred of evidence, branded an entire community as dangerous to the state.

The story begins at the end of 2013. A anonymous Birmingham City Council passes a disturbing letter. The epistle appears to have been written by Muslim educators from the city. In explicit terms, they talk about their nefarious plan to quietly – like a Trojan horse – infiltrate schools to introduce an extremist version of Islam. The letter arrives at a time of heightened terrorism threat. Across Europe, in England in particular, hundreds of young Muslim men and women have traveled to Syria to join the jihadist group Islamic State.

If the letter leaks out to the press, it will immediately consequences, sometimes to this day. Several teachers and other teaching staff are losing their jobs, schools that were previously regarded as excellent are being labeled in the press as breeding grounds for terrorists and a new counter-terrorism strategy is being launched against ‘extremist infiltration’ in the civil service.

What also quickly becomes clear is that there is probably nothing wrong with the letter. City officials and police quickly agree that the letter is a transparent attempt to discredit innocent people. Yet the press and politicians remain convinced that ‘something’ must be going on. A mist of rumors and half-truths descends that will haunt the English Muslim community for a long time to come.

One of the most baffling aspects of the case is that it took very little research to identify the suspected sender. Reed and Syed discover after one conversation with a person involved and an afternoon close reading that leads the main lead to a resentful school principal. The probable scenario: This woman, who is also a Muslim herself and possibly the author of several fake letters, deliberately wrote a letter full of Islamophobic clichés to get rid of some colleagues.

Because neither the woman nor her environment wanted to cooperate, Reed and Syed are unable to complete the story one hundred percent. They do, however, gradually make other shocking revelations. For example, they expose an administrative apparatus, from municipal officials to ministers, which, thanks to internal and external research, knew full well that the letter was incorrect, but still perpetuated the story that bad things are going on in schools with mainly Muslim students. Those allegations were further fueled by a press that blindly printed the worst suspicions about Muslims out of an Islamophobic reflex.

The downside to the podcast is that it is a bit too long. Syed and Reed craft a labyrinth of characters and intrigue. For clarity, the series could have done with an episode or two less. That does not detract from the impressive piece of investigative journalism. Patiently, the makers reduce the scandal to its banal proportions – a staff conflict that has gotten out of hand – and show how the press and politicians, in their thirst for a scary ‘Muslim conspiracy’, deliberately ignored the facts.

An extra layer on the story is the way Syed and Reed explore their own role as journalists in the story. Syed, a young Muslim, makes no bones about it: for him, journalism is a means of righting an obvious wrong that affects him personally. Reed is more reserved, more of the “I’m going where the facts lead me” type. That’s a recipe for friction and discomfort, but for Reed – white, non-Muslim – it also leads to the insight that he occupies a privileged position, one in which you don’t have to fight all the time against stigmatizing lies from the press and politics.

The podcast is sometimes depressing, but above all an ode to journalism. The same subject that can sometimes do so much harm can – provided it is used with integrity as in The Trojan Horse Affair – also cut down all the lies and distortions that block the view of the truth.