Gavin MacFadyen: Truth needs to Survive Information Overload

Having a professional career in investigative journalism for over 30 years, MacFaydyen states that technology deeply affects the way investigative journalists work. What used to take two weeks of editing time and transmission time can now be done in an hour.

As result the time to consider the events that are described is much less. People get a less substantial, but faster account of events around them. Simply telling what happens in the world is important, but it doesn't explain why it happens. Complimentary to the technology changes, the press agencies also demand an increase of productivity. Because the camera is faster, the demand is to produce twice as many stories with that camera to make more money for the press agency. The quality of reporting has effectively changed without reporters or the audiences being aware of it. Time for thorough research, time for consideration and time to contextualize events is no longer granted. As a result important stories cannot be made anymore. The process from being witness to bearing witness has imploded in investigative journalism today.
For example, a report on killing people is transmitted and broadcast very fast. But it may take a while to know the history and to know that the government responsible for the killings has in fact doing this for twenty years. One has to be able to give dates and times of previous killings. If the government admitted these previous crimes in court, the report has to give the date and time of that court session. Possibly there are other testimonies that prove that they have done all these other killings. Good journalism will build a historical case to show the context of the event.
Another example shows that some stories are not told anymore because of the speed of reporting today. Many reports have been made about this tsunami in the Indian Ocean, but only thorough research reveals that a US navy research station, somewhere nearby, knew all about this tsunami five hours before. Then the question is why didn't they warn anybody. That's a very different piece of film than the reports about the terrible destruction caused by this event in the Indian Ocean.

Given current technology the Internet facilitates millions of bloggers offering stories that could be used as witness accounts. However, states MacFadyen, one has to know whether a particular blogger has a history of telling the truth.

Bloggers who report from great dictatorships and censored environments, especially deserve great respect and their reports can contribute to investigative reports, if one has reason to believe them. One can only discover that by knowing the history. The blogger may have a right-wing agenda or left-wing agenda, some kind of agenda. One does not know whether it was a clever broadcast by a government official pretending to be this blogger. In the meantime one can say “an unknown blogger, an anonymous blogger, unknown to this reporter, has said the following, had presented the following description of these events, which may well be accurate.” By emailing with a blogger one can get an impression of whether the blogger is truthful or not by finding out what they feel and think about the world, and that's something. But a skillful government propagandist would be very hard to find in a couple of emails. Security services are very good at planting false stories that deliberately mislead for agenda's that are unclear. Investigative journalists have this duty of care to present material that they consider to be truthful. A lot of the best stories are presented by anonymous people in strange cities who are government employees.

Nation states now control much more than they did before. In the last century the state could not, in a large measure, control one’s ability to go places to the degree to which they do it now. Today states have the ability to stop the work of investigative journalists.

For example in the Vietnam War, in World War II, in the Korean War journalists saw the whole thing; they had free access to cover the war. Because of the effect that journalists had in the Vietnam War, this right has been abrogated and eroded consistently since then, states MacFaydyen.
“As we speak, the war in Iraq is not being covered. Simply not being covered. There are tens of thousands of troops fighting, bombs going off, but there are very few journalists there covering because the military and the terrorists, or whatever they are, on the other side are unhappy about journalists being there, so they simply prescribe that they can't be there. Journalists get ‘embedded’ with and the generals and accept their instructions, otherwise access is denied. Similar in Afghanistan, there is almost no reporting. That's why we, as investigating journalists, find that the real story isn't being told. About what a soldier in a village did, that could be awful, that should be seen. But, but what has happened with the money and the power in the seats of governments where these decision really are being taken? So the real story of Iraq and Afghanistan is going to be told from Washington and London, more than anywhere else, much more so than from the war itself.”

Where a judge has to evaluate evidence, an investigative journalist also has to assemble and convey evidence. Next to this, the gravity of the question has to be addressed. The gravity is either implied or emerges through the context.

By conveying the gravity of the case and what it means, it's historical consequences in context, people understand the significance of what is reported about. Sometimes investigative journalists can be misled, and think something is more powerful than it is. But mostly they are not.
An investigative journalist is successful when a lot of people are affected and understand it is a matter of public interest that has a place in history. People can be affected negatively or positively, depending on what the event is. Somebody discovers for example a new kind of medicine, which is fine until we discover that the pharmaceutical company is cheating the public by charging too much for it and the government and all their allies are supporting them in that wonderful quest for more money.
“People find out about the truth by discovering themselves, through journals, through academics, through novelists, painters, anybody who tells the truth about the life they see around them will help other people see what that truth is. There are a lot of different truths. But the truth that investigative journalists are concerned with is the factual one affecting the public interest. Anything that affects people that impacts upon the larger society is a matter of public interest.” And most people will agree this is important in MacFaydyen’s experience.
For MacFaydyen facts are real, whether he was present or not. “Even if you are not there, you could have been there, anybody could have been there. If somebody is suffering, then you're suffering. If people are subjected to bad things, they might as well be happening to you. There is a saying of Eugene Victor Debs who said that “if there is a person in prison, I'm in prison, if somebody is hungry, I'm hungry” and I believe that. Because without that identity, we don't act in anybody’s interest except our own and that can be quite narrow. One on six people on the earth is mal nourished. I think that is a matter of public interest. Without investigative journalists people wouldn't hear this in London, New York, or Amsterdam. In fact, they might not even believe in this truth. How can you? The purpose is to change things for the better. You cannot change things by lying. We can only affect change by telling the truth as best as we can. Truth is the best agency of consciousness anyway”.

In addition to being a producer of investigative documentaries MacFaydyen is also director of fiction films. He emphasizes the importance of making a clear distinction between them.

Investigative journalism conveys facts to change things for the better, where fiction films mostly raises consciousness. When making an investigative documentary, however, dramatizing facts is considered compromising the integrity of evidence. In for example a court case, where every word spoken is from a transcript, actors can read those and that can be effective. But to reconstruct events, is often extremely difficult, and to illustrate them is often very difficult. A classic example is the reporter in front of a building saying, “In this building behind me, terrible things happened on October xx”. This is boring, but conveys the truth also because the building is real.” Also, once one starts to reconstruct, it is very easy to keep on reconstructing and this seriously weakens the weight of the facts one tries to communicate, according to MacFaydyen. “It is the weight of what the evidence presents, that is going to carry the argument. What's not going to carry the argument, are actors telling you what you have told them to say. Because people will sense, that's not the reality, that's not what actually happened. You have to be very careful, because society largely operates on lies, on a succession and interconnected web of lies. To justify the way society works and to tell the truth about how society treats the vulnerable, it is often difficult to do because the wealthy and powerful are threatened by these disclosures. There is a famous story that if you give a poor man on the street a dollar, you're considered a good Christian. But if you ask, why is that man poor? You will go to prison. And I want to tell the truth about why that man is poor, for example”.

For MacFaydyen a good witness is critical to investigating or reporting. A good witness is someone who bears a truthful account of something they witnessed, something they saw, and can describe it with the same accuracy, hopefully, as they saw it.

A witness is truthful, if you can cooperate what he/she said. One needs to find an independent, additional source of the same information, which can confirm the basic details. That is the obligation of an investigative journalist; he/she needs to meet the conventional standards of evidence. Unless, you are someone of such an impeccable reputation, people will not believe you without a second source. MacFaydyen can think of only one investigative reporter, who has a sufficiently strong reputation that he can get away with saying “an anonymous source told me A”, and you'll believe him, without saying, this story was confirmed by an independent discussion with B, or C.
Lots of people are observers and very few who are witnesses, because a witness is someone who comes forth with what they have observed rather than keeping it to themselves. To be a witness a person needs to have a notion of the future that determines how you regard the past and certainly how you act in the present. To do so, it requires a sense of the future. “Because if you don't believe in the future, why would you ever be a witness?” according to MacFadyen.

How to meet a witness, depends on what the witness is witness to. If it's to the destruction of their own family, or the murder of all their closest friends, you approach the witness very differently than when it is a chemical engineer talking about a fraudulent misrepresentation of a product he or she may have worked on. The professional difficulty is to sustain scepticsim towards your witness testimony in ordet o be able to be certain of the facts. The most dangerous circomstance for an investigator is to discover that the evidence upon whic his story is based, is flood, incomplete or misrepresents the reality.

The latter is a clinical informational attempt to secure the information and the other is a more emotionally sympathetic attempt to find the information. But fundamentally, the goal is to secure the most accurate description possible, of what they witnessed. This also counts in a situation where a witness reveals stories that the investigative journalist does not like because of his own principles.

Often an investigative journalist has to convince the witness that their testimony is in the public interest and that this is served by disclosure. It may be painful and dangerous for the witness to come forward and tell people what the truth is. The investigative journalist has to be alert to the difficulties the witness is going to face. “I made films in countries where if they were identified in talking to me - I had hidden their identity, but if they were identified - they would be killed. And I'm not going to have that responsibility if I can in any way avoid it. I cannot imagine a situation were I would want to extract information from somebody which will result in them being killed. The object is to stop the killers.”
Another kind of witness that needs the special attention and care of the investigative journalist, are whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are subjected to the worst prosecution, according to MacFadyen’s experience. People, organizations and businesses in which they were a part, often feel betrayed. As result the whistleblower is treated as an outcast and is criminalized him or herself. Often it is a very powerful testimony because the whistleblower has considered the consequences and has come to the conclusion that not speaking up is a worse crime then not doing so despite the risks.
Emotions are not interesting for an investigative journalist. He/she needs facts. The emotions with which people communicate what they say are an important reflection of how they perceive that evidence, but it is not the evidence itself. As human beings the investigative journalist can be sympathetic to the fact that the witness had a bad morning or had major fight at home or is scared to talk. Professionally what matters is what the witness is saying. “On a human level I care that he's had a bad morning, but I really do want to know whether he saw the factory manager ignore the warning and whether he saw the red light or not. That makes it easier to establish whether the manager is culpable for an industrial accident or not”.
The role of emotion is to provide the power of the narrative.

For MacFadyen the process between being witness and bearing witness is defined by gathering other people and other sources, which will confirm his story as well.

He is aware that he will have to report on what he saw through media, so the information has to be formatted anyway. More sources, more witness accounts, to make his perception and truth more believable and the story much stronger. In this formatting, emotions of witnesses help convey the gravity of the situation.

When being witness himself to scenes of killing and people being hurt, for MacFadyen relating to these facts is a very physical thing: “I get upset by it. I'm concerned about it. It is hard to describe what the reaction is. Sometimes when you see terrible things, you want to vomit. You see bodies of dead people, who have been killed by fascists or maniacs of any kind, you get sick. That's been my reaction on occasion. You get deeply angry when you realize that people are treated in such an appalling way”.

But usually such situations affect MacFaydyen later. He tries not to have emotions at the spot and focuses on being the most accurate witness he can be. “A kind of grey, glass vizier comes down over my head, when I see bad things like that. I try not to have any emotions when I'm looking at them at all, if I can help it. Sometimes that is not possible, but I do try to do that, because I want to memorize what I'm seeing. I'm trying to recall, to be able to recall that scene with some accuracy. So I'm looking for details. What time of the day is it? What is happening in the sky? Who might have seen this? What position are they in? I will be asking myself those questions, force myself to do that, to become a witness to be the most accurate witness you can. You are, in a sense, the ears and eyes of some kind of public, there are people depending on you to recount accurately what you have seen. So you have an obligation, you are a trained observer. “

As an investigative journalist you cannot have emotions that get in the way of the accuracy of your perception. It is sometimes very difficult to develop this behaviour. As result MacFadyen explains, “When you watch a terrible event, you are in two minds. It's awful, but truthful. And so sometimes the readers or viewers get angry at the objective observers and their questions but you need to make an accurate historical record of what you have seen. People could ask you, “well what actually happened”? And I don't want to say ‘Well a bunch of bad guys came and killed innocent people’. You want to say ‘Three thirty in the afternoon I visited a site and I saw sixteen bodies, scattered on a hill side, and they were like this and like that. It would appear that they were killed by this method.’ I would try to be as accurate as I could, about what I saw. It's really important I think for people to feel they can trust you. But they are not going to trust you if they have to see everything through a filter of your immediate emotions, which could be entirely different and not sympathetic, even to what you are seeing. They want to know the facts”.

Immediately MacFadyen will write down as many details as he can. “Memory erodes, and therefore the faster you can get to the recounting of the events, the facts from a journalist point of view, the better. You are going to remember a lot more two minutes after an event than you will twenty years later. So speed becomes important in memory. Generally, I mean there are some people that have a fantastic ability to recount things. But most people don't Memory is just a tool for us, a very important tool, it's a transmission built between the event and the reader or the viewer.”

Already on site, MacFadyen will try to find other people to confirm what he saw and ask them to describe it. “Sometimes their description may be better then yours. Often that could be the case. At the same time it has the value of conveying to people the emotions that that person is feeling about having seen something awful. Emotions help to convey the gravity of the situation.”

When meeting a witness for the first time, the investigative journalist first has to assess the trustworthiness of the witness. The journalist may know the history and therefore may be able to judge this. But if he/she does not know the witness or the story before, the witness has to be asked many questions to assess his/her trustworthiness.

“It is when somebody comes in to your office with a powerful story, then the first obligation is to test that person. Is that person really telling you the truth or not? So you want to treat that person not as a hostile witness, you want to treat that person as an unapproved witness. You cannot advance the case that this witness is giving you, which may be a matter of public concern. “I witnessed this man murdering three people”, that is what he is come in with and told you. You got to know whether he is ever said that before, whether he is ever been cut out lying to anybody, whether he had every reason to be there or not. What is the evidence that he can produce? Have other people seen the event, etcetera. You are asking him a lot of questions to make sure that what he is telling you is true.”

Even when the witness brings a photograph or a recording that make it easier to believe a story, it is necessary to ask questions because those things can easily be faked. The average citizen is not going to make phony photographs or phony recordings on the whole, but governments can do it.

“Observers are complicated; witnesses are particularly complicated”, says MacFadyen. While observing, while witnessing, human emotions always play a role. As a person, one trusts one person on some specific issues and a/another on others. As an investigative journalist this can create dilemmas. There are situations where to protect one human being on a human level; the observer doesn't become a witness. A witness for journalists is someone who will testify to what he/she has seen. The anonymous observer in less effective and trustworthy because they cannot be identified to say what actually happened and we need to know what actually happened.

“A scientist I know who won the Nobel Prize in microbiology who discovered some facts about genetics that if they were used or put into the market place they would have a terrible effect on some people. Some people would be grossly disadvantaged in their lives and hurt, actually hurt, as a result of his disclosure. As a result of that fear he won't tell anybody what he has discovered. So science is being compromised by him, for the best reasons you can possibly imagine but he doesn't want to be participating in hurting people badly which he knows his discovery could cause. In that case I suppose on a personal level I'm completely sympathetic with that refusal to disclose. In the interest of science, the history of human discovery, it is a potential disaster.”

When watching documentaries or the news on television, people can only sense the truth through the filter of their own experience, argues MacFadyen. Also he himself uses his experience as a tool for processing the overload of information we are confronted with today.

Part of that experience is the history people know, this also provides a context for understanding what you see. Experience gives people a sense of what is possible or not. Things and people that are not part of your own world are hard to understand. To get a sense that something is probably true, emotions are very important. “If somebody bursts into teas because their kid has been killed you' re probably going believe them. If somebody is shrieking in anger because something happened, if there is a huge emotional ingredient in what they say, you'll probably be much more inclined to believe them. If a poor person, standing outside a factory says something about the way he or she was treated in the factory then I'm inclined to probably believe them. I don't think I've ever met any set-ups like that. But if a smooth employer is his PR office told me that there is no truth in what I have just heard I probably won't believe him.”

Today there is so much evidence in the media that nobody pays attention to it, states MacFadyen
There is on the Internet everyday so much material that it is impossible to process it any more. “So what's the truth? That I'm not reading it any more? Or that I am misrepresenting it, because I can't remember it all? A superficial grasp of an immediate event is certainly possible faster now then ever before. The indiscriminate recall of fast amounts of data becomes counterproductive. It takes so much energy to sift through it, to try to provide yourself with the analytic tools to judge that material that you are looking at. Is it relevant? Is it important? Does it have some connection to what I'm doing? Can I use it? Or is it difficult to use because it may not be true, or is it historically incorrect? You've got to ask yourself a lot of questions with everything you read, you can't do that when you are reading fifty-thousand pieces every hour of stuff that's pouring onto your screen. So you have to be selective. You need to find ways to become an editor of all that material, because there is so much of it.”

Fundamentally, MacFadyen’s experience is valuable in dealing with this overload of material. “Experience is the tool through which one can filter a lot of that stuff. What you know, comes from what you've read, what you have understood, what you've seen before. That experience is the means through which you can judge new material.” It is necessary to keep up the effort to make sense of what is happening, according to MacFadyen. Investigation, as opposed to mainstream journalism, is not a passive act. To expose injustice is to suppose injustice can be stopped. To understand these unjust events, not to cry, not to laugh, but to understand them.”

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