A journalist pulled out a notebook in a bar in a tiny town in Alaska and started to write down the stories the bullshitter on the next stool was feeding him. This writer came from out of state—from a different culture, a different social class, a babe in the woods—and lying to him was probably just good fun on a Friday night.
At least, that’s the scene I imagined when I picked up the journalist’s book a year later and read the absurd howlers that he reported as fact about that rural community.
This happened decades ago, but the incident stuck with me as a lesson about extracting accurate information from an interview.
Bullshitting is an artform in many communities, especially in rural Alaska. Everyone knows it. Sometimes it’s a game to see how far you can take a story. Maybe the guy fooling that journalist didn’t know his words were going into print.
We often play with facts in social situations, subtly signaling exaggerations. In our family we say, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
But a skilled interviewer knows how to get the real story, not the fun version.
As the interviewer, be serious yourself. Ask follow-up questions or a smiling, “Did that really happen?” Make clear that you plan to quote the person by name. Verify facts when possible (that was the cardinal sin of the credulous author above).
Sometimes you have only one source.
As a young newspaper reporter covering police in the Anchorage suburb of Palmer, I interviewed a young mother with a baby who had been pulled over by a cop in subzero weather. He took her keys and left her to freeze. She told a frightening tale.
The officer wouldn’t talk to me, but his coworker claimed the woman had not been left for long. He also said the accused officer had recently arrested the woman’s boyfriend, who was still in jail. She had a motive to lie.
I wrote my article, but I was uneasy. That evening, before the press ran, I called the woman again and asked her the same questions in a different way. Some key parts of her account changed. I told my editor, and we spiked the story, killing it.
But she called other reporters, and pretty soon her story was top news in every outlet in town except ours. The cop was pilloried all week on talk radio.
A broadcast reporter asked why I had ignored the story—what did I know that they didn’t?
Nothing. I just didn’t believe her. And now it was too late to know for sure. Only in the first couple of tellings can you size up a story’s truthfulness.
I think I got that one right, but I’ve also made plenty of mistakes as a journalist. In total, my career taught me to be skeptical—not automatically disbelieving, but always cautious.
Unless I’m listening to a story over drinks. Then I just laugh and don’t write anything down.
Photo by Helen Cook, Creative Commons license.
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