Recently, I was scrolling Twitter X, and someone posted that there was a police incident in their neighbourhood in Victoria, but no media was covering it.
Clear mainstream media bias in favour of the cops, the person said.
My colleague, reporter Alanna Kelly, who used to live and report in Victoria, responded by asking if the person had notified their local media outlet about what they were seeing.
My guess is they had not.
This type of thing has been happening more often in recent years.
The media don’t know what we don’t know.
Of course, reporter Andrew Hughes and I do our darndest to be out and about in town as much as possible with our ears to the ground and eyes peeled for stories.
But — er — we are still human (No AI bots here, folks!) and can’t be everywhere at once.
Journalists have always — ALWAYS — depended on people in their communities to tell them things that then became stories.
Let’s look at the most famous of all reports from the Watergate Scandal in 1972 that helped bring down U.S. president Richard Nixon.
The reporting by The Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward was legendary and led to the book and the must-see movie All the President’s Men.
How did those amazing reporters get their information? Did it fall from the sky into their brains because they were superior beings?
Turns out, no.
For the 50th anniversary of the scandal, The Washington Post delved into the backstory.
“Woodward’s notes show, he learned from police sources that the men came from Miami, wore surgical gloves and carried thousands of dollars in cash. It was, said one source, ‘a professional type operation.’”
And later, “Woodward relied on Mark Felt, a high-ranking official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as a confidential source.”
Another example from here in Canada, the late-Rob Ford scandal, which broke in the Toronto Star.
Reporter Robyn Doolittle got that story after a man called her and said he had a video of the then-mayor smoking crack cocaine. The rest is messy history.
Journalists also find out things from meetings, reports and press releases, or from sitting in a council or school board meeting.
We find out from observation, meaning we literally see a thing and write about it; we sometimes find things on social media, but there is a caveat to this.
Like everyone, we scroll social media, but we cannot see every post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter X, TikTok, YouTube and so on.
We rely most heavily, as journalists have always done, on people to tell us things.
So, if you have a story tip, reach out! You can email us at [email protected] or call 606-892-9161.
Jennifer Thuncher is a journalist and the editor of The Squamish Chief.
