When something smells fishy ...

In an increasingly polarized world, it’s important to keep digging and asking ‘annoying’ questions

Above all, journalists are skeptics.

We don’t believe everything we hear, and when something’s not quite right, when things are not transparent, when something sounds fishy, we keep digging, we keep asking annoying questions.

In an increasingly polarized world, with information sources expanding all around us, you should too, especially when any kind of election is in the offing.

Let’s take two current political scandals: one in the United States and one in Canada.

How did the story of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s blackface photograph, for example, come to be? It is odd, if not necessarily fishy, that a story of such importance to Canada should come from Time magazine in the United States.

Reporters across the country are seeking out Michael Adamson, the Vancouver man who shared the photo with Time, to ask him why Time and why now? And presumably dozens of other questions: when, how, who, etc.? It’s probably a good story. But Adamson has been unavailable for comment.

The connection to Time may have been through Adamson’s son, who may be acquainted with a Time reporter, according to some reports. That is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Journalists tend to favour the most reasonable or logical explanations and we shun conspiracy theories, but odd stories like this can sound fishy even if they aren’t. So we continue to fish.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s apology was appropriate and his explanation reasonable, I guess, but some voters are correct to wonder “how could he not have known, even two decades ago?” How could a man like Trudeau, with his upbringing and his world view, not have known? It may not be fishy, but it’s puzzling.

Then there is the entire affair engulfing the U.S White House this week. President Donald Trump’s telephone call with the Ukrainian president last summer is fishy.

Ukraine is fishy — period. Trump’s alleged attempt to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of presidential candidate Joe Biden is fishy.

Notwithstanding that, there was nothing fishy about Joe Biden’s efforts despite what Trump has implied, and there is no indication that Biden’s son did anything fishy.

Still, that Biden’s son was on the board of a fishy Ukrainian company is itself fishy.

The fact the White House initially sought to hide and suppress the story before relenting was fishy. The fact the White House tried to remove the transcript from the usual place where such material is stored is fishy.

Trump’s usual attempt to fight back and blame the messengers and tweet excessively is not fishy; it’s just Trump as usual. But the Republican Party’s lack of comment on yet another shocking alleged trespass by the president is certainly fishy.

But so is the response from Trump’s critics, who, lacking confidence that the actual facts are damning enough, are embellishing the story, thereby eroding the strengths of their own arguments, and rendering even the plain, cold, hard fact fishy to some observers.

Meanwhile, too many media organizations, many more interested in opinion than fact, some more interested in promoting one party over another, are themselves indulging in fishy behaviour.

Such is the polarized, juiced-up, internet-bot, social-media world we live in. Beware.