One of the most frustrating things to hear back as an intrepid reporter from an editor is that, ‘we’ve already done a story on [fill in the blank], so we’re going to pass on this.’ This is a situation that I’m sure very many reporters have heard from editors – both staffers in newsrooms and freelancers alike.

For freelancers, especially, this can be a deadly stopgap while trying to get a story out. Generally speaking, a freelancer will need to identify what types of stories a publication or outlet runs? Determine whether they’ve done stories like the one the reporter is proposing? What’s the tone? Will their story fit?

The idea is that generally you’ll approach an editor because they have done stories like yours before – the idea is to offer something unique in order to advance what we know about a topic.

There are a lot of pressures on editors. They juggle deadlines (theirs and others), competitive pressures, egos (theirs and others), and budgets.  That’s a lot to juggle. And they have to make many of these decisions very quickly. This is simply a reality of the news biz. But news is not a blunt force instrument (well it doesn’t have to be), and I think it’s in everyone’s interest that we look for more nuance in what we do, and the stories we mean to tell.

I don’t mean that innuendo or inference should take the place of fact. I mean never losing sight of  how events don’t typically exist in a vacuum, and so, chances are, if your news organization has done four months of stories on a general topic, it doesn’t mean that you’ve done every possible story on that topic.

News, by definition, is about chronicling unfolding or noteworthy events, and so when a reporter hears back that a news outlet is going to pass on a story because the outlet has already done stories on that topic – unless the reporter is simply rehashing already covered material – what is likely happening is that one of the other pressures is in play; more than likely it’s a mercenary decision about resources – having too few resources to take a chance on something by someone new. But it can also be about what an editor feels deep down about a subject’s worth. It’s that imprecise.

What’s the Deal with OSAP?

It seems that OSAP (the Ontario Student Assistance Program), the funds that many students in Ontario are dependent on in order to continue with their post-secondary education, may be harder to qualify for, and provides less than it used to in basic living costs than it has historically. There is even some anecdotal evidence that it is no longer providing the entire cost of tuition in some cases. If true, this strikes me as incredible! Am I overselling it editors? Okay, if not incredible, than it’s definitely newsworthy.

What’s the use of a program meant to lift disadvantaged would-be students into educational opportunities if it doesn’t even cover the base costs of that education? If this is the case, when did this start happening?

Student debt load has the potential to become a major issuein the years ahead. So a story about the success or failure of the student loan   program in Canada’s most populace province (with the most post-secondary institutions) would go a long way to explaining a phenomenon that tens of thousands go through every year.

Smack Story Comes Back

There has been a steady trickle of stories recently about how heroin is starting to replace OxyContin as the drug of choice in several communities in Ontario, and elsewhere in recent weeks. This is the predicted fallout from the decision to discontinue the easy to break or crush OxyContins in Canada. The CCIR, which I co-founded with investigative reporter Alex Roslin, did several stories tracking the flow of heroin from the fields of Afghanistan to the streets of Europe and ultimately North America, made possible by the war in Afghanistan. We had a hunch that heroin would start to flow more readily here, and were able to demonstrate that, in fact, since 2007, it’s been steadily climbing. So when OxyContin was discontinued earlier this year, it seemed certain that smack would be back. Alex, though, pointed out how, so far, none of the mostly local accounts have ventured where the heroin is coming from.

Noam Chomsky once wrote in Manufacturing Consent that people don’t know that they don’t know what’s going on; such is the illusory effect, but real power, of institutions such as the mainstream media. Chomsky says that this works on a massive scale through the concentrated ownership of the media by multinational corporations involved in the war economy and resource extraction, which then set the agenda about what we think of as news (think “trickle down” reporting).

It’s a theme picked up in the rousing second act speech by the Al Pacino character in the 1999 movie the Insider. Pacino was playing Al Pacino playing the real-life investigative journalist Lowell Bergman, then a senior producer with 60 Minutes. Bergman (in the film at least) brings to light how the possibility of being sued by Big Tobacco company Brown and Williamson, then the subject of a 60 Minutes investigation that hadn’t aired yet, while the multi-billion dollar sale of CBS to multinational Westinghouse was in the works influenced the news department senior management – who themselves stood to financially benefit from the sale – to kill the story. Bergman (the real one) would in fact leave CBS soon after, in part due to the chain-of-events depicted in the movie.

Chomsky’s general points, and Pacino-Bergman’s specific one are, perhaps,  both at play when we consider the effect money has on shaping the news, and yet the trick is knowing when corporate dollars directly pull the strings, and when self-regulating behavior and status quo attitudes pervade newsroom thinking ultimately determining what we see, read, and hear.

Think about this: most of Canada’s wealth comes from resource extraction. Canada’s homegrown corporate elites come from businesses that take minerals out of the ground, make paper from the trees and so on. They also grow and look for opportunities elsewhere.  These companies sponsor our events and cultural institutions, place full page ads in Canadian magazines and bring us our business news segments on TV.

So, it was not your average company press release when Vancouver-based Radius Gold released a statement distancing themselves from the shooting of Guatemalan anti-gold mine crusader Yolanda Soquel Velez in June. The statement went over Marketwire, which is widely seen by editors and market watchers for all of the major news organizations, but the only article in the Canadian media that I’ve seen about the targeted shooting was in the Vancouver weekly, the Georgia Straight. And yet the bitter and at times deadly struggles to stop Canadian-owned mining and logging projects from going forward in remote and indigenous populated areas in places such as southern Guatemala and Peru hasn’t really penetrated our national media. Why is that?

The company’s release calls online articles linking them to the shooting “inflammatory” and “ridiculous” – so is it too much for national news organization to ask Radius what they know about a situation that is directly connected to their business interests and is clearly escalating into violence? Canadian mining companies are heavily invested in foreign projects. It’s a global industry dominated by Canadian companies, worth billions each year. And yet the only dedicated coverage of the mining industry in Canada comes by way of trade publications.

I’d like to see more stories on the role the private medical industry (clinics, pharmaceuticals, medical supply) is having – if any – in driving health policy in Canada? An obvious place to look is to what extent the industry may be lobbying government? PostMedia reported last year that healthcare wasn’t one of the main issues lobbied for in Ottawa – but what about the provinces?  How has private medical delivery grown in Canada? And over what timespan?  The Canadian Medical Association suggests the growth of private medical services has mushroomed in recent years, but this growth isn’t being tracked by anyone in Canada. Now a provincial government audit of two private clinics in British Columbia found evidence of double billing – charging patients fees covered under Medicare – at the clinics and now there are fresh calls to audit all of the private clinics in B.C..

We tend to think that because healthcare in the U.S. is a market-driven industry, worth billions, that any pressure to open up health care delivery to private interests in Canada must be coming from south of the border; but there is a homegrown industry that spans the spectrum of for-profit health services.  Maybe we should start with what exactly defines private health delivery in Canada anyway? Does contracted out laundry services in the hospitals count? A surgical clinic? What about a members-only health centre geared toward executives?

This seems to me to be particularly relevant as we get closer to the negotiation of a new health accord between the feds and the provinces, and the private industry is once again challenging the constitutionality of the Act before the courts.

My favourite type of investigative reporting is the kind that also explains a process or phenomenon that many people experience—or perhaps better put, withstand—without realizing its newsworthiness. As Thoreau famously wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

This takes imagination on the part of the journalist-witness to realize the news worthiness of a common experience. Within a typical newsroom environment this initiates a sequence of events where the idea gets kicked up the chain to be scrutinized by successive news managers (“filters”) before it can be pursued, let alone produced. Each time up it’s getting further away from the common experience, and less likely to see the light of day. Think of the example of pushing pennies up a hill—only you start out with the million-dollar idea and at the top you’re left with the pennies.

When this does get done it can be incisive explanatory journalism at its best. My ready example is New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin’s “The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez”.  In it, Breslin tells the story of Gutierrez, a 21-year-old undocumented worker, after he dies on a construction site in Brooklyn. Breslin follows Gutierrez’s path from Mexico to that construction site, and what role the city, state, and even global politics played in his life and untimely death. It’s a refreshing offering from shelves crowded with volumes on great men, great men at war, great men in repose, and so on.

Breslin also won a Pulitzer-Prize for his coverage of the Kennedy assassination. When the national press corps zigged Breslin zagged by finding the gravedigger at the cemetary alone at the hole that would soon be filled with the president. He asked the gravedigger how he felt.

I’d like to see more stories like these in Canada.

A couple of years ago The Hamilton Spectator began to examine, over two series, poverty in the steel city. They examined, with the help of a health mapping expert, life outcomes based on different areas of the city. Code Red was able to demonstrate that if you lived in affluent areas of the city you were likely to have graduated university and not rely on the health care system as much for preventable ailments related to poverty and stress (such as hyper tension and low-birth weights), while these outcomes were pervasive in poor areas. Well duh, right? Thing is, there are many news managers who would never have given the green light to this, but the result was to prove—in fact—that this was the case, and that this materially shaped your life in the city depending on where you lived. We are, after all, in the fact business, and hopefully, the solution-seeking business. It’s not enough to dismiss the newsworthiness of a story simply because we feel everyone knows it’s true.

I’m always amazed at how many reports treat poverty issues like a tour guide treats the orangutans at the zoo, when increasingly the reporters themselves are in precarious work.

There is a lot of talk these days of sovereign debt, debt default and household debt, but what I’d like to see is a thorough examination of the credit trap many Canadians find themselves in. And I don’t mean people in Toronto lakeshore condos who’ve maxed out their credit cards; I mean the vast number of people who can’t get out from under unpaid bills because they’re out of options. Marketplace did look at the rules governing the debt collection industry. As the piece pointed out, government is one of the biggest users of these agencies—so how can they be relied on to oversee its practises? How much does the federal government, for instance, make a year selling off our debts to the collection agencies? Do they record a loss? How do they enforce the rules that govern collection agencies?

The PostMedia chain ran a single article in March on how the federal government was considering writing off $300-million in student loans. This seems huge, and in light of recent events in Montreal, topical. But I haven’t seen anything on this since. I know at the time the Canadian Federation of Students didn’t know anything about it, or the Opposition NDP.

Does anyone know anything more about this, or any of the topics mentioned here? Get at me @StoriesUndone.

Consider this disquietingly funny moment from a May 30th Standing Committee on Finance hearing on the dense but important topic of proposed changes to the Investment Canada Act.

Shortly after Steelworker economist Erin Weir began his presentation Saskatchewan Conservative MP Randy Hoback actually launched into – and this is a quote – “Have you, or have you ever been a member of the NDP Party?” in a line straight out of the red-baiting McCarthy hearings of the 1950’s, only substitute “‘NDP Party” for “Communist Party”. And just like the McCarthy hearings (whatever Hoback’s intention) the effect was to get far off track from the issue of changes to the Investment Act.

And these changes to the Act are important. According to the law firm Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg (hardly a bastion of pot-banging communards) the “apparent intention” of amending the threshold for direct acquisitions of Canadian companies by foreign investors is to, “to reduce the number of foreign investments subject to a general net benefit review under the Investment Canada Act.”

While committee hearings do get broadcast by CPAC, and there are sources of consistent news about all things Ottawa – the Hill Times, for instance – it all still can feel a little too “inside baseball”. And if you were in government and trying to push through controversial legislation this might be a state of affairs you would welcome. Hoback’s run at Weir, noteworthy at least because he was backed by the other members of the government on the committee, only got picked up that I can see by his Prince Albert riding’s local news site, while the changes to the Investment Act, making it easier for foreign companies to buy Canadian assets, has gone virtually uncovered by the media.

Angola rodeo or Angola 3?

The National’s Paul Hunter recently went to the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, or “Angola” prison. His reason for going? To cover the prison’s rodeo. Now it’s true the prisoners of Angola do stage a rodeo every year – and that’s interesting as it goes – but the whole time I was watching I was thinking that only a month before Hunter’s report human rights campaigners were marking an anniversary that also takes place at Angola.

Two of three men known as the “Angola 3” have now been in solitary confinement for forty years – the longest known stretch spent in prison isolation in the U.S.. Found guilty of killing a prison guard during an inmate uprising against conditions in the former slave plantation in the early seventies, the Angola 3 have filed a civil lawsuit against the state for prolonged, “cruel and unusual punishment” to be heard by the courts in 2013.

They couldn’t have been very far away from where the rodeo was being staged, and it wasn’t very hard to find information about their case. For me it was four or five items into a Google search for “Angola prison”, right after the official prison page, a page about the religiosity of the prison’s warden, and pages pumping the rodeo – which gave me the uneasy feeling that a message was being crafted here (Both the story of the Angola 3 and the rebranding of the prison were taken on by Jim Hightower in a Mother Jones article in 2011 – also available through the Google search.)

And the only CanCon I could pick-up in the National piece was a throwaway line about how Canadian officials are contemplating bringing the idea of a prison rodeo this way. But again, in light of the massive changes expected by the passage of Bill C-10 the more important question, seems to me, is should we expect prolonged solitary confinement in Canadian prisons of the type experienced by the Angola 3?

It’s not like Hunter doesn’t tackle hard topics – he extensively covered the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Who knows, maybe his crew were shooting b-roll and biding their time before bringing us the story of the Angola 3 at a later date? – I mean they were already down there.

As was mentioned last time, this blog will appear bimonthly, every other Monday, on This.org. I’ve now created a twitter account, follow me @StoriesUndone.

The more obvious question (you’d be right to ask) is: Why I don’t do them? I co-founded the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting in 2009 in order to produce the types of stories that will be highlighted here. The sad fact is there have been many more stories worthy of examination cross my desk than I and the CCIR have been able to do because the resources to do them simply haven’t been there. Sometimes, to paraphrase a Sweet Honey on the Rock song, ‘our stories are not our stories . . . they come through us but they are not from us’. And so, sometimes the CCIR has painfully sought to place good stories in the hands of other news organizations elsewhere – with mixed results.

What I’ve learned during my time as a journalist is that it is not simply a case of a monolithic media keeping information we all need about the powerful at bay. Most, if not all, journalists I’ve met would jump at the chance to expose, for instance, widespread civil rights abuses by the police of demonstrators if they felt the information was there. Why good stories don’t always get picked up is more complicated, and we’ll explore why this is too.

I should be clear though, about two points before going much further: 1. I don’t think the role of the Canadian journalist is to be in the service of, “peace, good order and government,” and 2, the views expressed throughout this column are mine alone, and not those of the CCIR.

So without further ado . . .

I don’t need to tell you that the internet is a great resource for news and information about the world we live in (you are after all reading this online), but with the proliferation of insta-news through social networks and near universal technology it’s also a frequent receptacle for misinformation and opinion dressed up as fact.

A case-in-point is the photo of German riot cops minus their helmets flanking the occupy demo in Frankfurt that went viral last week. It was presented as evidence of police solidarity with the demands of the protestors . . . but I had my doubts. Twenty years ago German riot police routinely fired water cannons from atop armoured vehicles at anti-nuclear and anti-capitalist demonstrators in pitched battles on the streets of Berlin, Bonn, and elsewhere in Germany, reminiscent of what we see today in Montreal.

German attendees to the recent demo have since done their level-best to clarify in message threads that the photo is not as advertised and in fact there were mass arrests and blocked routes by police later that day.

It’s not that this is impossible to contemplate. Historians have pointed to the necessity of the police and military standing down, or standing with the populace in moments of great social upheaval in order for wholesale change to be possible.

So this got me to thinking about a story I haven’t seen yet about the mass protests in Montreal: Have there been any Montreal police/SQ refuse orders to crack down on demonstrators?

As with the German photo, Montreal police refusing orders in the months since the protests began  have become the stuff of rumour, supposedly existing somewhere out there in the French-language twitter sphere. This would be difficult but not impossible for a journalist to verify.

If there are refusals there’ll be disciplinary hearings. A chain-of-events that becomes possible to track—though the Montreal police have been notoriously difficult to pry information from.

Something else that has been noticeably absent from the slow-to-burn national (that is to say, English) press coverage of the tuition hike fight is how Canada, as a signatory to the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, committed to higher education being made, “equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education;” (See s. 13(2)(c))

So what ever became of this commitment?

With national media pundits and editorial pages quick to point out that the students in Montreal are “spoiled and entitled” because they have reportedly the lowest tuition rates in the country, this would invite, you would think, a national discussion about the rights and obligations to a post-secondary education in this country—there have been stories recently in the U.S. press about the likelihood of a school loan debt bubble burst to rival the mortgage loan crash—which got me thinking about  what approach, if any, the Harper government is taking on the issues and events in Montreal? Has there been government-to-government discussion about the widening protest? Are there contingencies in place as this fight spills over into other parts of the country?

Obviously, what’s going on in Montreal is bigger than tuition, and this is certainly no longer a case of the media looking away; this is the biggest story in the country—but what’s the story? It’s this kind of fog that we need to pierce in search of the truth.

Bilbo Poynter is the co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting. His reports have been seen and heard on CBC National Radio News, CBC.ca, As It Happens, the Montreal Gazette, the Global Post, J-Source, and MaximumRockNRoll. Stories Undone will appear on This every second Monday.