Interviewing extremists is good journalism

Lifting a rock to see what’s crawling underneath isn’t a smear job. It’s shining a light into darkness

I’d known her and her husband since we’d all been in high school. That didn’t stop her.

“How dare you do that to that wonderful man,” she demanded in the middle of the fruits and vegetables section of the grocery store.

People walking by did their best to turn and stare without turning or staring. Her husband froze. His eyes widened as he watched, wordless.

I’m not excitable by nature. I don’t jump when a balloon goes bang right behind me. It’s the same in situations like this. I tend to go cold. I’ve never really understood it. I smiled, upper lip pressing against the lower one as if to contain amusement. She wasn’t amused.

“That lovely man came here and you treated him like that.” (I won’t add an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence. I’m betting you can hear it anyway.)

I knew what she was talking about. I’d sent a reporter to cover a meeting of a group with the forthright name New Brunswick Association of English-speaking Canadians.

Its leader, Len Poore, had caught a wave of anti-French feelings ignited when the legislature decided to fly the Acadian flag on government buildings to mark the flag’s 100th anniversary.

He was in town to spew his invective and I wanted a story. When my reporter, who took shorthand, returned she was shaking her head.

“I can’t make head nor tail out of what he said,” she said. “I took notes, but they don’t make any sense. People yelled and cheered, but there’s nothing here. I can’t figure out what to write.”

I smiled.

“Write a transcript of his speech. We’ll print that,” I said.

His supporters were furious. His ranting and raving made no sense. He spoke in clumps of words that provoked emotion, but weren’t really sentences. The story wasn’t flattering. It was – and is still – one of my proudest moments as a newspaper editor.

So when I watched NBC’s Megyn Kelly interviewing right wing loony Alex Jones recently, I smiled.

If you missed it, Jones claims the massacre of 20 children and six staff at the Sandy Hook school was a hoax. The idea NBC would put him on national TV set off a storm of protest.

The gist: you’re giving this man a chance to spew his hatred where everyone can see it. Exactly. The results were predictable. Jones stammered and stumbled, avoiding direct answers.

He was just playing “devil’s advocate,” he said. He was just repeating what other people had already said. He wasn’t claiming it was true, just that people were saying it.

Yet, he’d made the statements as if they were facts. A first-year journalism student with a working knowledge of a telephone could have found otherwise in five minutes flat.

“I tend to believe that children probably did die there,” he said at one point, backtracking. “But then you look at all the other evidence on the other side.”

No. There is no such evidence. Never was. There is only Jones, known for spouting nonsense to his gullible followers.

Afterwards, Jones called the interview a smear job. Translation: Someone asked him questions and let people see his answers. Lifting a rock to see what’s crawling underneath isn’t a smear job, it’s shining a light into darkness. That’s reporting.