Djelloul Marbrook

(Note: Many of today’s biggest stories go unreported or under-reported. This is partly because news organizations have been decimated by predatory media bosses. But it’s also because the toughest stories call for uncommon skills. I address this issue in this recent podcast for young journalists).

If you think of the people who read what you write or listen to what you have to say as an audience, you shouldn’t be a journalist. Journalism is not about you. If you want to play god, be a surgeon or a banker. If you want to get rich, play the market. If you want attention, study theater.

Journalism is about getting as close to the truth as you can and then finding a way to get it across to others. A byline is as much a blameline as it is anything else. You get the blame if you distort the story, if you misinterpret the facts, if you fail to get them in the first place. A byline puts responsibility for the story on your shoulders.

If you’re not a big reader, forget about investigative journalism. If you can’t wait to get a word in during a conversation, forget about journalism, period. It’s not about what you have to say, it’s not about you being clever.

I can teach you how to be an investigative reporter, but I sure don’t want to try doing it in a classroom. It‘s best learned by doing. But while you’re still in a classroom there are some things you should be doing. You should be reading everything you can find about I.F. Stone, the dogged muckraker who closed his famous weekly in 1971.

The term muckraking comes from Teddy Roosevelt, who coined it from John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It has a long tradition in British and American journalism. You should read everything you can find about Ida Tarbell (inset), Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker.

I think I hear some of you say, Okay, Del, tell us which books to read. But I hope none of you really do say it, for this reason: Investigative reporting is about independent and diligent research. It’s not hard to find out who these people are, what they wrote, and what has been written about them. So if you want me or your professors to hand out reading assignments, maybe you should think twice about being journalists. Journalism is not about handouts. It’s about rigorous independence of mind.

It’s true that investigative reporters, like detectives, have a bag of tricks they use to get the job done. But it’s even more true that depending on the same tired old tricks every day won’t get the job done. You have to think out of the box. You have to follow lead after lead down dead-end alleys. But, above all, you have to read. If you’re not a reader, why would you think you deserve readers?

Okay, so what do you read? The hawkers who sold newspapers on the streets in the old days, including myself, used to shout, Whuddya read, hey, hey, whuddya read? It’s still a good question. It’s still the operative question. Here’s the deal.

We live in a society obsessed with putting everything down on paper, in microfiche or on a disk or in a memory stick. One reason for this is that our society is so complex we need lawyers to help us navigate it. This is why we have so many lawyer-politicians, for better or worse. And lawyers generate documents, mountains of them. And most of them are boring, mind-bendingly boring. And if you want to be a good investigative reporter you better get used to mining those boring mountains, every last sentence of them, because nine times out of ten the truth you’re looking for is hidden in those documents.

That’s the most important thing I.F. Stone’s life teaches us. Read, read, read. Especially the fine print. Especially page 999 in a 3,000-page document. The fact is government, whether it’s a small town, New York City or the federal government, usually points the finger to its own dirty work in legalistic documents that lawyers and their staffs got paid to produce. They can always say it’s all on the record, but they’re hoping like hell neither you nor anybody else will read the record. We are a society of records, and one of the great debates of our time is just how much of our personal lives should be put on the record by the government.

At this point—before I give you any more pointers on how to become an investigative reporter or how to decide you’re not suited for it—let me lay out a tragedy for you. You remember that I said that reporting is about getting as close to the truth as you can and then finding a way to tell it? Well, the tragedy, as you will learn all too soon, is that most readers and most television viewers don’t give a hoot and a holler about the truth. You could shout it from the rooftops, you could ram it down their throats, you could make it a requirement for a passport, and they still wouldn’t love it, because lies taste good, they sound good, they look good, while the truth is The Big Nasty. Lies are the fast food of the mind. Bad for you, but well nigh irresistible. This is the lesson of Nazi Germany and Iraq: the public that prefers simpleminded lies to the complex truth ends up selling itself out to the bad guys.

So you’re confronted, as a journalist, with the task of not only finding the truth but convincing people that it’s important enough to confront. And that’s not always easy. It’s a lot like finding out Pete Rose broke baseball’s betting rules or Barry Bonds used steroids. It’s not something we usually want to hear. And lawyers and politicians know this, and accordingly they often tell the lies they know people want to hear. I did not have sex with that woman. I am not a crook. I did not lie to the FBI. I did not cook the books. Etc. Etc. Very often a good journalist is confronted with having to say the gods have clay feet. And very often the messenger gets shot for saying it, which is why guys like our erstwhile vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, made careers out of blaming the press for everything under the sun, especially the things he was trying to hide from the sun. Every generation of politicians comes with two kinds of liars: those who blame the civil servants for all the ills of the country and those who blame the press, and sometimes they both get blamed.

Jimmy Carter, a man with an impeccable reputation as our most revered former president, came to Washington with a clique of provincials blaming the civil service for most of the ills of the country. It was a despicable lie. This was the very civil service he and his cronies needed to get things done, and it happened to be the best civil service in the world. And it still is, in spite of the current administration’s heroic efforts to turn it into a Soviet-style apparatus. In other words, President Carter came to town with a formula for failure on his lips, and sure enough he couldn’t get much done, badmouthing the people he needed most to do it. This lie was his weapons of mass destruction gambit. It enabled him and his associates to distract the public from the real issues that needed to be confronted.

(And by the way, before some of you Democrats get too het up about Al Gore joining the race you might wish to recall that he damned near destroyed the civil service with his demoralizing and nitwitted Reinventing the Government nonsense. If you don’t believe me, just ask the people who endured that folly.)

So you see that being an investigative reporter isn’t going to be a bed of roses, in spite of the deserved fame and fortune heaped upon guys like Bob Woodward, which brings me to the subject of role models. Woodward’s career is a great model to follow. It’s not the I.F. Stone model. In some ways it’s the antithesis of it, but it’s a great model because here is a man who is so adept at listening, so skilled at drawing people out and putting them at ease that year after year he produces insights into the way government works that help us understand our own lives and the events that shape them.

In part this comes of Woodward’s nature. He’s the consummate listener. His demeanor instills trust and integrity. But it’s not just his nature. He was a beat reporter. He taught himself, and others taught him how to interview, how to listen, how to sort facts out, how to interpret what people confide in you in the context of the facts as you gather them. Of course, he’s a reader. Of course he endlessly reads documents. Of course he goes down blind alleys and gets frustrated. He’s one kind of model. The cultivator of sources, the man who apprehends the big picture.

But in the same newsroom at The Washington Post is another very different kind kind of model, Walter Pincus. He’s not as visible or celebrated as his colleague, but among journalists he is just as highly regarded. Pincus is a reader. He is more in the I.F. Stone mold. He reads and reads until he thinks he understands where to look next, and then he reads some more, and then he goes out and pokes around, and ends up in obscure archives reading some more. Then he makes a thousand telephone calls and does dozens of interviews, and the chances are the people he is interviewing are stunned and probably a little scared at how much he already knows. Pincus is a bit like a CSI or a research scientist. He’s reading the ink off the paper trail, and that trail more often than not leads him to scandals, big stories, public donnybrooks. He has his sources too, like Woodward, but the two colleagues at what is arguably the nation’s most famous newspaper represent different styles, different approaches to the same task, getting at the truth.

I once worked at The National Press Building in Washington. I was doing my own kind of digging. I had started a biweekly newsletter with a colleague and we were telling school districts how to deal with the federal government and its propensity to speak bafflegab and bury people in boilerplate. We were looking for obscure aid programs and explaining them in English which we hoped the educators would grasp. It was fun, but it wasn’t big-time journalism. It was merely helpful journalism, as a lot of journalism is. Down the hall was a guy named Seymour Hersh. He was already famous for having broken the My Lai massacre story in Vietnam. I don’t know what Hersh was working on at the time, but I had an opportunity, because he kept his door open and always waved at fellow journalists, to watch him operate. His little office was a catastrophe of papers. They were everywhere. On the floor, on chairs, on top of files, on window sills, in boxes, and Hersh wore the telephone like a part in his hair. I can’t remember him being off the phone, but the funny thing is I can’t remember him ever talking on the phone. He was listening, listening and reading papers at the same time. And his face usually bore a look of wry amusement.

In some ways Hersh is a third kind of model. He does the reading, he does the listening, he does the walking and the poking around, but his sensibility is different, and that’s why he’s a staff writer for The New Yorker and not working on one of the great daily newspapers. Not that he hasn’t worked on a great daily. He was a New York Times reporter. But Hersh has an independent streak a mile wide and more than a mile deep. He tends to see stories, or he tends to want to explore stories, that reflect the Zeitgeist, the spirit of our times. He has an overarching historical sense that prompts him not to run with the story of the day or the week or even the year, but the story of the decade. My Lai was such a story. This kind of sensibility doesn’t bend easily to newsroom pressures or to the ideas of assignment editors who may not be as attuned to the Zeitgeist as Hersh is. On the other hand, The New Yorker loves such stories, and that’s why Hersh is there.

So here’s what you should be doing about Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus and Seymour Hersh: you should be reading their work, you should be reading their books, and you should be reading books about them. You should examine how they string their findings together, how they organize their stories. You should parse their sentences.

You may become a great investigative reporter and not be anything like these men, but you’ll get there a lot sooner if know all about them. You may write better than they do or not as well. Not all good investigative reporters are good writers.

I’ve had a few role models, too. My first model was the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle. I even wrote him a fan letter when I was a kid, and he wrote back. I admired Walter Lippmann for the clarity of his thought and prose. I admire Pete Hammill for his compassion and warmhearted insight. And I admired a rewrite man at The Providence Journal named Wilbur Doctor. I think of Wilbur after all these years as an alchemist. He took the awful junk we called or teletyped in and turned it into crystal-clear prose. From him I learned to admire clarity, precision, terseness. I once covered a train wreck in Warwick, Rhode Island. It was a bad wreck and we were on deadline for the morning paper. I felt I’d done a great job. I’d even gotten the names of victims, which is often hard to do because the authorities want to notify next of kin first. To top off what I thought was a bravura performance on my part, I shouted into the telephone, Oh yeah, and Wilbur, the engineer was eating a sandwich just before the wreck. Wilbur tapped out a few words and then asked laconically, What was in the sandwich? I won’t tell you what I said, but I sure was deflated, and I’m sure Wilbur was smiling at the other end of the phone. I owe some of my skill as a poet to this wonderful rewrite man.

Wilbur’s boss was an equally laconic city editor named Al Johnson. The best thing that ever happened to me as a newspaperman happened when I was leaving The Providence Journal for another job. Al called me up and said, You’re a good reporter. It was better than the Congressional Medal of Honor, coming from him. My first week on the paper he had called
to the Cranston bureau where I was working and said, If you can’t spell cemetery, I don’t think you’re gonna last here very long. I had written an obituary and misspelled cemetery. It was like a death sentence. I was still in the Navy and I was trying out for a summer job. My competitors for the job were all journalism school graduates, most of them Columbia graduates, because The Providence Journal liked Columbia. I went home with a heavy heart and told my wife I had blown it. I got the job and stayed with the Journal six or seven years. They were the best in my career, because of the idealistic and talented people I met. But I never once thought I had passed muster with Wilbur Doctor or Al Johnson, until I was leaving, and then knowing that I’d somehow earned their approval made me weep going out the door.

Let’s get back to those mountains of paper. Human beings generated them. Lawyers, clerks, assistants of every stripe, interns, researchers, statisticians, you name it. Doing this work meant something to them. They became attached to the data they were generating, to the findings they reached, to the goals they were trying to achieve, and even to the lies they hid in all the small type. So you have to cultivate these people. You have to become their confidante. You have to encourage them to tell you their stories, no matter how boring they may seem, because they know where the truth has been buried. They have their own ideas about the story, the big story, and there is always a small part of them, even when they’re part of a conspiracy to conceal the truth, that wants people to know what they’ve concealed. You will find these people in every small town in the country, every county seat, every state capital. They make the government run. They know what was done right and what was done wrong. They’re attached to the good and the bad. It’s part of their lives, part of what they do. If you care about these people, they will eventually confide in you and lead you to the goods.

Here’s an example. Once in a mid-sized town in Rhode Island I decided I needed to know what an ad valorem tax is, how land, buildings and boats are taxed, and why. So I started talking to tax assessors and tax review committees and appeal boards and disgruntled taxpayers and tax lawyers. I talked, but mostly I listened. And because it’s a dry subject, albeit a political hot button, I found that the people who deal in taxation were grateful to have someone trying to understand what they do and why they do it. I found out that when you buy a house in a town for a high price, it does two things right off: it worries the other taxpayers because it prompts a review and sometimes a revaluation of other people’s properties, and it usually raises the taxes of the property you just bought. This fascinated me, so I decided to follow the appeals process. It worked this way. A guy bought a property for more than it had previously been sold for. His taxes were raised the next year, and he then appealed to a committee. By the time all this had winded its way through the prescribed process I had become pretty familiar with several different tax assessors in several towns. They trusted me to understand their job, at least its broad outlines and slowly and cautiously they began to confide certain facts, one of them being that there is a tendency in most growing communities to overtax the newcomers in order to spare the old-timers whom the tax assessors know. It’s not fair, it’s not even legal, but it’s damned hard to prove, because you have to actually show evidence of it. How do you prove it? I wondered. Well, you go out and you study comparables—properties that resemble your own but are not being taxed as much, and then you find out who owns them. Then you take pictures and make profiles of these properties. It’s time-consuming. The town is hoping you won’t do it. And very often when you do do it, you win the day and get a slight reduction in your taxes, but next year they come back and slam you again, because they’re mad at you. That’s small-town America. And I could spent a lifetime reporting in those towns and not known this if I hadn’t befriended a few tax assessors who really wanted to talk about their jobs.

Here’s another instance. I know an assistant town clerk who was one of those idealistic women of a certain age who had had to go out into the workplace unexpectedly when her marriage failed. She knew I was investigating a local cemetery fund managed by someone appointed by the town. She liked me because we both shared a kind of compulsion to do the right thing even when it was risky. One day, after she had listened to me being frustrated by a bunch of stonewalling town officers, I was about to leave town hall when I passed her desk. She smiled and directed her eyes to an open file drawer, one she had left open. Well, Rhode Island had some sunshine laws on the books, which meant I had a right to look at those records. But that building was crammed with records and I could have spent a lifetime looking for the right documents and never finding them. But there in that drawer was exactly what I was looking for, proof that the cemetery fund was not only being mismanaged but also proof that the town knew about it, because its own auditors had complained about it. The audit was right there in that drawer. And nobody could ever say how I found it, because nobody had told me. She just smiled and stared at the drawer.

That’s often how investigative reporting works. You don’t have to be handsome or beautiful. But you have to listen, listen because you care about these people and their jobs. And that’s why Jimmy Carter’s presidency went badly, because his folks didn’t care about those little people. In fact, they wrongly blamed them for what the politicians had fouled up.

And that brings up another issue. Don’t think all the people who work in these many offices around the country are all in cahoots with the politicians. It may be they got their jobs through the politicians. They certainly have to serve the politicians. But they also serve us, the public, and they don’t always approve of the bad things the people we elect do. After all, they’re citizens too. There is a lot of heroism in these thousands and thousands of public offices. Not just the whistle blowers who get their names in the papers and get fired and then sue everybody for their jobs, but everyday highway workers, clerks, assistants, people who want to see things run well. They can’t always tell you the absolute truth, but they can often point you in the right direction. So don’t ever make the Jimmy Carter mistake. The bureaucrats are American citizens and voters. They’re not all stooges and fall guys. And, by the way, Jimmy Carter just happened to be a rather notorious example of this pin-the-tail-on-donkey game. Almost all the big-shot candidates do it. Don’t believe them. The bureaucrats didn’t create the mess, the politicians did. They’d have you believe that all our precious tax money is going to pay these lazy, devious bureaucrats, whereas in truth everything would grind to a half without these bureaucrats, and the real tax money is usually going to the corrupt supporters of the politicians.

If you want to be a good investigative reporter you have to be savvy about this blame game. In fact, and as a general rule, whenever someone blames someone else, especially if that someone else is a lower-level person, you should take a harder look at the person doing the blaming.

—DM