A brief story sums up my theory of journalism:
In 1991 I was trying to work as a freelance reporter in newly ex-communist St. Petersburg, Russia. I heard a hot rumor. After decades of deprivation, gorillas at the city zoo were to be given bananas.
I thought Western editors would go crazy. I’d been rejected for more negative stories about the arrival of heroin, or gun violence. Bananas were positive!
I went to the zoo, and interviewed a zookeeper. Then I did what journalists do: I hovered around the gorilla cage looking creepy before mustering the courage to ask a few strangers in broken Russian what they thought about gorillas and bananas. (The newly ex-Soviet Russians had funny answers, like, “How come nobody’s given me bananas?”) When this man on the street portion was done, I stood wondering what to do next. I remember having the thought, “Well, I can’t interview the gorilla.”
I shrugged, went home, wrote it up, and got rejected, but that’s not the point. The point is, journalism isn’t rocket science. You show up, talk to a few people, give your best guess at what you’re looking at, and when you get to the “there’s no one left to interview but the gorilla” moment, you move on.
Thirty years later — at the end of last year — I was in San Francisco looking at content moderation requests sent to Twitter by the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Obviously, the degree of difficulty had gone up a bit, but the job was more or less the same: “Tech Company Gets Unpleasant Bananas.”