If we didn't ask the hard questions

I was thinking about it the other day during a profile interview. One man came into my journalism class and talked about his cocaine addiction, his drug-addicted family, his hopes and dreams, his writing, his body-building.

We sat around the room and asked him questions. We were allowed to ask Jay anything. He was open. He distanced himself enough to recover from his past, and for an hour--maybe less--he answered hard questions.

What were you addicted to?
When did you recover?
How did you recover?
Is it hard being a bartender around alcohol all night?
When did you know you couldn't do drugs anymore?
How long did you know your friend before he fell off a balcony and got brain damage?

Then I wondered to myself: What would news look like if we dared not ask the hard questions?

How old are you?
What do you do for a living?
...

It would be boring. It would be more like an interview where you skim the surface of a person's soul and see if they have usable skills for your story.

Just skim the surface.

 The news would be boring. No one would be able to write biographies of Steve Jobs. No one would be able to write real obituaries. The news would have started as a good idea and slowly faded into nothingness. The same sort of things happen with bias, too. When people share only one side and don't ask about the other side, there's corruption. People stop turning on the evening news and opening the paper because it's just stale opinion.

If we didn't ask the hard questions, we wouldn't have news.