The jargon washed over me like a tidal wave. Doctors spoke of clinical trials, blending six-cylinder pharmacological and scientific terms with detailed statistical descriptions regarding the effectiveness of something called Fidaxomicin. At points, they may as well been speaking Swahili.
Other than one aside about a unique case where the patient in the trial died of complications with quintuplets in her womb, mundane and esoteric details carried the day. It might have been extremely boring if my brain wasn’t frantically racing to keep pace.
There wasn’t much of a story at the relatively routine approval by the Food and Drug Administration. I just needed to get out of the newsroom during my second week in D.C. and went story-fishing. But it captured the quintessential “journalist completely in over his head” regarding his subject matter.
That’s life as a journalist, especially in Washington.
It’s a balancing act, one integral to performing the core functions of the job. Know enough about the subject to ask good questions and develop understanding. But get stories done: It’s journalism, not a research paper. To borrow two relevant clichés to sum up the problem: the journalist “knows a little about a lot,” but “someone who knows a little about a lot knows a lot about nothing.”
Knowing too little can obviously render journalism completely worthless. It is impossible, though, for a journalist to know a subject as well as the people entrenched in it, at least not without specializing for many years. Experts have spent a considerable part of their lives mastering the minutia of their craft, particularly in a city where people come to work precisely because they are recognized leaders in their field.
The health and science beat – I focused on the health side – epitomizes the dilemma. The complexity of not only the science of health care but its bureaucracy leave myriad variables to consider on any issue. Health, in general, occupies a critical place in burgeoning budget and entitlement reform debates. To wit: The health care reform bill passed with 906 pages and more than 320,000 words. If you are getting tired of this article already, keep in mind you’re just more than 0.1 percent to that word count.
Truth is, most experts are happy to clear up your misconceptions. They know they know more than you. If you try to position yourself as more knowledgeable by asking pretentious questions showing off your (limited) knowledge, it stands to reason the person getting paid to know his/her stuff might get a bit testy, even standoffish. Better to be respectful and acknowledge your deficit where appropriate if you want an open, flowing conversation. I love hearing “that’s a great/important question.” But learning on the fly does require questions that make the reporter sound like a complete idiot. I have done this as well. As such, I occasionally spend too much time researching to avoid this embarrassing situation. But it’s ok to have it happen, especially as the interviewee brings up issues you don’t know as much about.
This does not mean the expert gets to guide an interview. You don’t have to know enough to win a debate with sources. You do have to know enough to ask intelligent questions and sense when smoke is being blown. Background research before the interview to minimize questions that can easily be answered with a Google search is critical (Journalism 101).
No one wants to be a dumb reporter taking notes on a lecture from an expert; aside from feeling belittled it makes for crappy, he-said she-said journalism. If journalism was just a PR aggregate, we could simply take opposing press-releases, cut them up, and paste them together into a zebra pattern. See? Both sides: It’s balanced!
If interviewing an analyst who is anti-health care reform, you better have the best arguments for the reform and arguments against the current system, ready to challenge their views. If the subject wants a single-payer system, you had better know the most credible refutations of single-payer systems from countries that have them. Again, the basics of the craft remain indispensable.
Experts often respect this ability to intelligently question views, even if implicitly critical. And if not, even better. One interviewee said she was glad I had asked a question about the potential for the quality of nursing to decline as the industry expanded and took on greater roles. She was the dean of a nursing school and an advocate for the profession her school trained. But she knew it was an important issue, and was happy to address it. And had she become combative over the issue, it would have meant I touched a nerve, and when a journalist touches a nerve with a fair question, it generally means a good story, the kind that gives journalists their purpose, is lurking nearby.
So after a quarter on the beat, what can I tell you about, say, health care reform? Basically: it’s messy, and according to everyone from policy analysts to professional organizations to a hospital chief of medicine, anyone that thinks they know how the chips will fall is lying, delusional or stupid. And that’s kind of comforting from the standpoint of a journalist unsure of what to make of a complicated industry – even if it’s not as comforting from the standpoint of a health care consumer.
The biggest downside of any beat in J-School is that next week, I will be off it. By the time you get grounded in a beat and develop sources, the term is over. But the lesson – one of balancing the buttressing of my own knowledge with dogged pursuit of experts that already learned more than a journalist can hope to – will serve me well in the future.