One of the common questions journalists get asked is how we get people to tell us things, especially the things it would be in their best interest not to disclose. Although it rarely satisfies people, I often answer that question in the simplest way possible: “We ask.”
The fact is most people want to talk to you when you are doing a story, even if they probably should not do so. Asking simple, open-ended questions is the easiest way to get information.
That’s because most people most of the time don’t lie. That is something I determined over time — under ordinary circumstances the average person doesn’t lie.
On the other hand, when people are ashamed or feeling guilty about something, they may lie compulsively.
So how do you tell when someone is lying? Well, one way is to ask simple questions you already know the answers to. In investigative stories, people lie to cover up crimes, to avoid accountability and to distract you from the trail of evidence that might lead you to the truth.
And they lie even when they don’t have to.
So as a reporter you devise tests by mixing in questions that should be easy to answer truthfully if the person is being honest. There seems to be a psychological mechanism involved that causes a person to lie about little things when they’re already working hard to cover up the big things.
One lie leads to another, so to speak.
All of this requires a certain amount of discipline on the journalist’s part. So you have to avoid falling into the trap of lying yourself. When I am involved in journalism ethics seminars, one issue that often comes up is whether it is okay to misrepresent yourself in order to get a story.
I don’t think it is okay. Working “undercover,” some journalists have uncovered huge scandals, I realize, but in my opinion that happens at the cost of a greater goal. We are supposed to be about the truth — not just getting big stories — so if we get information by misrepresenting ourselves we are subverting one of the core values that legitimize out work.
It’s not that we have to be squeaky-clean in everything do as journalists, but we have to be able to look a judge and jury in the eye and say we believe the information we gathered is accurate and that we gathered it in legitimate ways, not by subverting the truth ourselves.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t tricks we can’t use ethically, and one of the main ones is the “truth test” that I have described above. Trick someone into a lie and there’s a good chance you’ve discovered a liar.
That’s one step in a process. You still have to discover the truth. So you keep asking questions.
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