Read this recent piece from The Guardian: “How Technology Disrupted the Truth” … In this piece, among much else, one writer is quoted thusly: “Nowadays it’s not important if a story’s real … The only thing that really matters is whether people click on it… If a person is not sharing a news story, it is, at its core, not news.”
Which takes me back to a very old school way of looking at things …
When I was an audit manager in GAO in the 60s and 70s, the highest tech we used involved electric typewriters (mostly for clerical staff; we field investigators almost always used pencil and paper) and photocopy machines (only having recently supplanted mimeograph). The core record for any of our research and investigations was a series of bundles of 8.5 x 14 sheets of paper to which were affixed copies of individual source documents, written transcripts of interviews, photographs, pre-excel handwritten spreadsheets and smoking guns, if possible. Each page had its own index number, traceable back to a master guiding document, the audit program, a detailed step-by-step outline of the job to be undertaken, with questions to be asked under various categories and topics under review.
(The audit program development was usually preceded by a careful review of the Congressional Record to get a feel for the Congressional “intent” in developing whatever part of the law that was germane to the matter at hand, plus some “preliminary surveys” and visits with Government officials responsible for that particular area.)
Each page also was required to specify in its footer its “source” (which might be a reference to a passage in the law, regulations or in an agency manual, or could be the name and title of an interviewed official or other individual), and its “purpose” (usually would need to be tied into the audit program to explain its relevance). As individual portions of the audit program were completed, a “workpaper summary” would be drawn up, usually first drafted by the staff member(s) who was primarily involved with the particular research matter, then reviewed by other staff members and by the supervising auditor.
As the execution of the audit program progressed, more and more workpaper bundles were created and by the end of fieldwork, a master summation would be drafted in anticipation of the end stage. For some issues of regional or otherwise limited scope, the culmination might be a letter of conclusions and recommendations drawn up for the consideration of our counterparts in the Washington,DC headquarters or might also be sent to local or regional officials of the agency under review. For jobs of national or global scope and implications, we would make an initial draft of a formal report to The Congress of the United States (just being formal). Before that draft left our local office*, it underwent strict and rigorous review.
(* I worked for the Los Angeles Regional Office, responsible generally for southern California, southwest US, Pacific Rim and much of South America — but increasingly was then becoming the “lead” region for nationwide reviews, sometimes superseding responsibilities normally taken up by the DC HQ central offices.)
Before the final typewritten draft report was sent off to Washington over the Regional Manager’s signature, a copy was marked up with EVERY LINE indicating in the margin a reference back to at least one of the individual workpapers in the field review bundles. Middle-level staffers would be pulled away from their normal rotation among field reviews to work in the “referencing” pool. Their job was to sit with the stack of workpapers on, around and under their desks — some jobs had workpapers that filled entire rooms — and dispassionately read every word and track every line and statement back to the supporting workpaper source. Of course, the referencers had to be cold, un-involved individuals who had never previously worked on that program or that review. And that was only part of the process. A referencer was also expected to test for proper spelling and grammar and style conventions (including familiarity with the Strunk style manual and its official US Government adaptation). But most importantly, you were to weigh in on the extent to which conclusions followed from the facts, whether the facts were sufficient to make the case, whether the work called for in the audit program was adequate to address the issue, and so on. Sometimes you could discover that the work performed was uncovering evidence of issues not really under consideration. I must admit that it was often rather enjoyable to question the assumptions and conclusions of those at one or two or three grade levels above me. It was not entirely unusual for the work of a referencer to trigger return visits to the audit site for more and better information, and occasionally even launch the generation of a whole new program or approach for a look at underlying or side or spinoff issues that had not been adequately considered.
Oh, perhaps I should mention that one of the fastest ways to get into trouble, perhaps to the point of dismissal, as a staff member with GAO and its management was for your personal political beliefs and preferences to be reflected in your work.
This description is actually quite simplified, as in reality, many meetings and work sessions at all levels, often in concert with legal staff and consultants and our Washington counterparts, took place on an ongoing basis to craft the programs, question the approaches and results, and finetune anything going out of the office. Compared to investigative or straight news journalism, time for GAO was a special advantage. The entire process might take anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years. Or more. The fastest job I ever undertook was a special get-it-done-yesterday Congressional request for a solo observation to accompany an investigating physician doing a JCAH (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals) review at VA and UCLA government-funded hospitals; one day for each visit and one day to write up and report my observations. But for my work under Ted Kennedy to visit VietNam and study the refugee and civilian health programs the stint was nearly a year, and my supervision of investigative crews in several major cities across the company to evaluate some aspects of Medicare took a couple of years. Perhaps the total duration of my Arizona Indian reservation study took at least that long as well.
While I from to time visit the GAO site to see what’s up, or hear about a GAO study in a nightly news story, I have largely lost touch with that old workplace and my former colleagues (heck, many of them are deceased now). My last direct contact was in the 90s when I did consulting work with a spinoff group of my old contemporaries. But I’m sure that GAO has to be keeping with its rigor for facts, and hopefully truth, and to be striving to do so in an impartial, apolitical way. (AN ASIDE: Did you know that the “Gingrich congress” in Bill Clinton’s second term tried to significantly curtail GAO’s funding and nonpartison influence because GAO review results and findings were so embarrassing to its members?)
Anyway, we are living in a different era now, but facts still need to be facts, and they should lead to truth. And now back to our regular programming …