The politics of politics

You have no idea what goes on behind the iron curtain. You only see the final product splashed across the front page of the newspaper in the morning. You don't hear the ethical decision making discussions that take place each time we are confronted with a life changing story, one we know is going to turn the subject's world upside down. You don't watch as we lose sleep each night contemplating and hypothesizing what could happen, what will happen, inevitably, as a direct result of the story.

You don't know the steps we take to get there. The 25 meetings, lunches, coffees, extracting, fishing, listening, digging, exacerbating, exhausting. You don't feel your own shoulders bunch up when you learn another reporter is onto you, onto the issue. You don't take the heat from everyone in your newsroom who tries relentlesslsy to convince you that yours is a trivial pursuit.

My investigative reporting class has really got me thinking.

It's the first class I've taken in awhile that I know will be directly applicable to what I want to do when I get out of school. Though, I'm not sure I have the stomach for exactly the kind of investigating we're learning about. We've heard from two amazing guest speakers so far (though I had heard them both already at SPJ conferences-- and you learn something new and brilliant every time you hear from people of this nature), and their line of work is much like an FBI agent or criminal investigator. Though as journalists our role is to seek the truth and inform the public, I can only imagine the amount of patience, long hours and dedication such an investigation requires. The Sam Adams story took the reporter nine months to craft. Nine months. That's a long time to let one story brew. But without that dossier, that thick and tattered file filled to the brim with revelaing documents, he wouldn't have nailed him.

We also discussed at length today the notion that there's no such thing as a secret.

Is this true? Can this be true? Because we all value our own secrets more than someone else's, are we always bound to tell, to trade information with someone else, a third party, in the unconscious attempt to know more? I certainly hope not. But journalistic integrity proves otherwise. No politician in the state of Oregon seems like he or she will be able to walk away untouched. With the spotlight on you, so comes the harsh realization that every reporter in the region is going to be holding you accountable for your past and present actions. When a rising political figure lets even bits and parts of his skeletons out of the closet, it's enough for any reporter to bite. To take the bait and run with it. And they always do.

Beware of your secrets. There's no such thing. A secret is always relative, and someone always tells.

There's a song I like by the Pierce's called "Secret" that goes something like this: "got a secret can you keep it/ swear this one you'll save/better lock it in your pocket/taking this one to the grave; If I show you then I know you/won't tell what I said/'cause two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.