There are some things that they just don’t teach you in journalism school.
They cover the basics of the profession, including the rules of the game of reporting including always taking a fair and balanced approach to every topic and issue that is covered.
However, much of what you need to be good reporter you have to figure out on your own as you go, like exactly what questions you should be asking in each individual case and how to treat people in asking them.
That’s more than obvious to me now after many decades at the job, but it wasn’t so clear to me when I was a young cub reporter.
I recall one Remembrance Day when my editor sent me out to a couple of local Royal Canadian Legions to talk to some veterans and collect a number of war stories for the next edition of the newspaper.
I sauntered up to one veteran of the Second World War who was standing at the bar in one legion that was packed to the rafters with some of his veteran buddies (there were certainly a lot more veterans around many years ago than there is today, it’s sad to say) and began to talk with with him about his war experiences.
The conversation was going well until I asked what turned out to be a very stupid and unwise question:
“Were you drafted?” I innocently asked and understood immediately that I just made a big mistake.
The man’s eyes started to bulge out and his face went blood red while his buddies just stared at me with their mouths wide open in disbelief that I would ask such a question.
“OF COURSE I WASN’T DRAFTED!!!” he yelled.
“HOW DARE YOU COME IN HERE AND ASK ME THAT!?”
The whole place, which was crowded with veterans from a number of wars, went dead quiet and that pretty much ended the conversation as I was abruptly shown the door by some rather ungentle vets.
I reviewed what I had done as I rushed to another Legion hall to get some stories before the Legion I had just been tossed out of could call other Legions and tell them to deny the ignorant and arrogant young reporter access.
I had figured that asking a war vet if they were drafted was a pretty benign question to ask, but I was a young pup at the time with little experience in dealing with people and their issues.
I understand now that the wars these people fought in became the defining moments in many of their lives. Their experiences on the battlefield trying their best to look after their colleagues and themselves changed most of them dramatically, and they are proud of the roles they played.
They put their lives on the line for their country and each other, and for some impudent young journalist who had never experienced anything worse than being banged up in a motorcycle accident to walk up to them in their own bar and ask if they were drafted was insulting beyond belief.
A few may very well have been drafted because there was limited conscription in Canada in the Second World War, particularly after the country started experiencing heavy losses in 1942.
But that only accounted for about 47,000 of the more than 1.1-million Canadian troops who served in that war.
Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with being drafted and I’m sure many vets who were had good reasons for not running immediately to a recruiting station when the war broke out to sign up, but I expect even those that were drafted would not bring that up in a Legion hall decades later among men who dropped everything right away when their nation called.
They were just as brave as the rest when they were needed, so who wants to remember how they got there?
It was one of the first big lessons I learned as a reporter and I made it a point ever since to think about the questions I meant to ask anyone that I was interviewing before they come out of my mouth.
You learn as you go….I just consider myself lucky that those vets didn’t tar and feather me.
