In the film “Spotlight” an actress playing reporter Sacha Pfeiffer knocks on the door of a former priest. She confronts him with questions about whether he molested boys in two Boston parishes more than a decade earlier.
The scene depicts the toughest moment in any investigative reporter’s work, and perhaps the most important.
Unfortunately, not all journalists are as skilled and sensitive as the Pfeiffer character in their interactions with those accused of wrongdoing.
I was so glad to see in the movie that she did not mislead him with softball questions to try to get in the door, or describe some vague storyline such as saying that she was looking into the ways priests were moved from parish to parish.
We can’t build trust with story subjects or audiences if we are not upfront about what we are investigating. Finding out the truth demands a rigorous and empathetic effort to understand the motivations and actions of anyone accused of wrongdoing. That means fully disclosing what we are investigating early enough in the process to give the truth the best shot of emerging.
In our newsroom, I’m a passionate advocate of not surprising anyone who becomes the subject of our investigative reporting. This “No Surprises” guideline means, as much as possible in a deadline-driven news world, people we are writing about should know precisely what they are accused of — even if they don’t want to talk to us about it. No one should be confronted right before deadline with a story we’ve been working on for weeks. And certainly no one should learn that he or she is accused of serious wrongdoing, or what those allegations are, by reading the newspaper.
As a long-time investigations editor, I’ve encountered plenty of resistance to this idea. I know all the arguments — chiefly, that showing our cards can allow someone to shape the story more favorably by taking preemptive steps before publication.
I think most newsrooms make that argument less frequently these days. We’ve become more attuned to fairness as we have worked to earn the public’s trust. But too often in other newsrooms, and occasionally in ours, I see journalists give only lip-service or a cursory embrace to “No Surprises.”
What’s cursory embrace look like? I can think of at least four practices:
- Waiting until very late in a lengthy reporting process to contact key players in a story.
- Accepting a "no comment" from someone facing serious allegations without doing the extensive work needed to familiarize him or her with the allegations.
- Assuming un-named bit players in a story don't need to be contacted for a response, because they are not named.
- Holding back tough questions to the end of an interview or being vague about the nature of a story.
These tactics are rarely effective.
Instead, we should attempt to engage deeply with anyone who can illuminate the story — including the story’s least sympathetic characters. We should reveal what we are investigating and why. (A corollary to that is we should avoid “locking in” on a specific story line until the reporting is complete. So describing what we are investigating takes some care and caution.)
Some journalists believe that a “decline to comment” absolves us of our responsibility to detail our findings before publishing. I disagree. Whenever possible, we should let subjects of our stories know that we will pursue and possibly publish a story regardless of whether they cooperate, and we should outline the allegations even if they won’t agree to go on the record.
Is it tricky and difficult? Of course. What if the story subject says some facts in the story are wrong but won’t agree to be quoted?
That’s a dilemma I’d rather face before publication.
I tell reporters that if a person featured in a story is going to criticize the story, dispute the facts or argue that we used material incorrectly, I’d rather find that out before the story is published. That’s why we do extensive callbacks and fact-checking on major investigative projects prior to publication. We’ll even read back quotes to describe the context in which they are used.
All of this is in pursuit of accuracy. It has a side benefit of building trust in our profession. After all, we require transparency every day. Why would we be less-than-transparent about our own questions and findings before we publish?
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