(I first published a different version of this column in May 2006. It still feels relevant.)
There's an old story about Bob Woodward from his childhood. After his parents' divorce, he suspected that his step-siblings would receive more Christmas presents than he would, so he went downstairs early one Christmas morning and carefully counted them all before anyone else woke up.
It's a familiar refrain to anyone who has ever worked as an investigative reporter. The way we pursue subjects is by following our hunches. Academics would call it chasing a hypothesis. Either way, the key to doing the work well is being able to adjust your hypothesis when the facts don't bear it out.
I was reminded of this recently while talking to a fellow investigative reporter of my vintage. We agreed that the best stories often come from surprises -- when we find out we were wrong about a key assumption, but the real story is even better.
These days, the tools at our disposal are more powerful than in the past. It has become easy to trace unlisted cell phone numbers, for example. Just the other day, I ran a check on one in another case and got a surprise result that directly challenged a hunch of mine. I'm still trying to assimilate this new information into my view of how things work in that particular case.
Underneath the investigator's urge is the desire to always know more. The hardest thing for us is to know when to back away. Sometimes, the appropriate next step is to stop. Not every story can be told right away, at least until more data is available.
And things don't always add up. Plus operating under a false set of assumptions is a sure way to convince yourself someone is guilty when they are not, or something is unjust when there's a more complex explanation hidden in the data.
Personally, I kind of like surprises in stories. I don't mind finding out I am wrong, since my worst fears or assumptions can be replaced with more innocent explanations. After all, the most likely explanation for how two events are connected is always a straight line -- i.e., the shortest distance -- between them.
Pattern recognition, whether you like the pattern or not, is the investigator's best friend.
Besides, sometimes your hunches will be spot-on. Back to that childhood story of Woodward’s —it turned out he was right, his step-siblings did get more presents that year than he did.
Later on, he would employ that same sense of skepticism to more weighty matters.
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Large swaths of Russians rushed to book one-way tickets out of the country while they still could after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a mobilization of military reservists for his war in Ukraine. President Joe Biden rebuked Russia for violating “core tenets” of the U.N. charter with its aggression. Meanwhile, two U.S. veterans held for months by Russian-backed forces in Ukraine were freed as part of a prisoner swap brokered by Saudi Arabia. [AP]
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