I’m at the stage in my career where perhaps I’m allowed to look backwards once in a while.
I’ve been a journalist for decades, covering stories sensitive enough that people have called me to tell me they knew where I lived — told me my address — and threatened to come and break out all the windows in my house. My wife and I told the children what to do if they heard glass breaking: “Just get under your bed and wait for us.”
It’s been my entire career, and one I have always taken seriously, even when a premier said I should be thrown out of a province, and even when my publisher was told provincial government advertising would be a lot easier to come by if I was fired.
I started at a weekly newspaper, where I did a lot of records retrieval and Freedom of Information work long before data journalism was a recognized skill. I’d gather huge amounts of data on topics ranging from discretionary spending by cabinet ministers to program expenditures that always — somehow magically — skewed their way to the districts and ridings belonging to members of the government of the day.
I’d ask for the raw research documents — the lists done by civil servants who analyzed the actual needs of different ridings, lists based on demonstrable data, not on political expediency.
For years, I was denied access to those documents. It was almost a standing joke. They were deemed to be cabinet documents, exempt from review by a lowly reporter. The smoking gun was always well hidden.
But I persevered. Sometimes, at great personal risk, someone would leak them to me. Other times, I’d do what I considered to be, in bridge terms, a play known as a cross ruff. I’d make access to information requests across multiple levels of government — municipal, provincial, federal — and see what matched up and what didn’t, drawing a more complete picture out of scraps. And I uncovered some astounding stories, won big awards, got stories to light that should have been public long before I dug them out.
Some of it was exciting: a lot of it was sheer drudgery, going back over numbers again and again to make sure that things were right.
But in all of it, my work was tempered by my first real professional editor, a columnist now with the Hill Times in Ottawa, named Michael Harris.
Michael had a very simple saying that, unfortunately today in the world of social media “research”, is completely ignored.
I’d prepare my work, my careful analysis of hundreds of pages of documents and reams of spreadsheets and take them to Michael, and he’d always have the same two-word complaint: “Paper lies.”
What did he mean?
He meant, don’t take anything at face value. Not even when it looks obvious.
You line up numbers on a page, make your lists in Excel, get all your data in lines, and it’s very convincing. But there’s also a real risk that your own desire to see things line up a certain way will make exactly that happen. You put them in an order, because you want to believe that order exists.
You are lining them up, without realizing you’re doing it. You may reach a conclusion that something as simple as an interview with the civil servants or politicians involved will blow completely to pieces. Everything may point to a single cabinet decision — and then you can be told that the minister you thought was involved in making that decision was actually having his appendix taken out that day.
I was, and am, an introvert. I have always preferred numbers and lists and paper research to interviewing people — though I’m getting better at that now.
But you can make horrendous mistakes when you interpret things in isolation, whether that’s in a newsroom or at computer terminal in your mother’s basement, crafting that perfect Tweet. And, over years in journalism, with tough, fair editors, I learned that lesson.
Sometimes, the hard way.
It started with Michael.
He was, quite simply, right. There’s more to a hunt for the facts than grabbing the first thing that supports what you already believe.
Paper does lie. Studies lie. Statistics lie more, I think, than any other thing in the entire world.
You can sample them in a hurry, decide they support what you already think, and go to town. The wrong town, the wrong province, the wrong country.
Michael had another saying as well: it was, “Watch out for the GO train.”
It requires a little more explanation.
Years ago, Michael was listening to a set of tapes of interviews involving an unravelling scandal in the Mulroney government. He was walking along a railway, intent on what he was listening to, his ears full of sound, when an engine and cars of an Ontario GO train almost ran him over.
The message there?
Watch for things completely outside what you’re working on to crash into your work from directions you’d never expect.
For the last few years, I’ve done for other journalists what Michael did for me — I’ve pointed out that the job is not just picking the low-hanging fruit, but doing the hard, thorough, detailed work that is boring as hell and most people wouldn’t ever bother to do.
But it has to be done.
It’s not enough to think you’re right.
You actually have to be right.
I’m, what, three decades into making sure that things don’t run in print or online until they’re right.
You can understand why I might be pissed off when someone launches the easy slap of “lying mainstream media.”
Because I’ve paid my dues. I’ve done the hard, fair work — and I’ve asked tough questions that I would have preferred not to ask. I’ve asked them in person, faced the rage that sometimes brings, taken that all home with me at the end of the day.
Because of that, I can stand behind the things I’ve written. Everything.
They have my name on them.
My real name. And if I make a mistake, I point it out right away, the next time I write about it.
What a concept.
Thanks Bruce: I agree a lot will never see it. But I am enjoying the opportunity to write to a smaller, perhaps more discerning audience.
Well said Russell. A fabulous and spot-on piece of truth-telling. Not sure if the people who need to read & absorb it will ever do so. They're on FB reading crap. But at least you put it out there & that's something. Thank you for doing it.