Silent Subjects

By Alec Klein
December 16, 2008

Sometimes, people are just not going to talk to you. It’s a fact of journalistic life, particularly for business reporters dealing with the vicissitudes of corporate America. It’s even more of a truism for investigative business reporters who are seeking to discover the truth of the matter. Suddenly, people you want to interview get all clammed up.

Such was the case in the summer of 2000 when Bridgestone/Firestone recalled about 6.5 million tires in the United States amid a roiling controversy involving customer complaints, lawsuits and a federal investigation into several deaths and injuries in accidents involving the tires.

My editors gave me the daunting task of persuading Bridgestone/Firestone’s chief executive to sit down for an interview. At the time I was a new reporter at The Washington Post fresh from The Wall Street Journal.I accepted the assignment, no questions asked. And Bridgestone/Firestone officials, in classic circle-the-wagon mode, promptly declined to talk. They weren’t talking to anybody.

Which left me with one choice: On nothing more than a hunch, I boarded a plane for Nashville, rented a car and knocked on the front door of the tire company’s U.S. headquarters. I should add that I didn’t have an appointment, and Bridgestone/Firestone wasn’t expecting me. That might explain why the company’s top PR official was more than a tad perturbed when she came down to the lobby to tell me to go away. I didn’t. Instead, I drove to a nearby mall, bought a couple of boxes of fancy chocolate, returned to the headquarters and sent up the gifts, with little notes, to the PR official and the CEO. I then fell asleep on the couch in the lobby. A short while later, the PR official returned to the lobby. By the time I left Nashville that afternoon, the company agreed to make the CEO available for an interview, which turned into a page one story. The story had the executive’s first major public remarks on the controversy since the recall had begun.

Flash forward to today: I’m working on another in-depth business piece for a major publication about a big public company that refuses to talk. No problem. I boarded another airplane, this time from Chicago to Washington, D.C., where I planned to listen to the speech of the CEO of the company I’m profiling. Afterwards, as the CEO moved to leave, I stopped him long enough to introduce myself and give my photographer the time to take the CEO’s photo for the article. The piece was beginning to take shape.

Flying to meet your subject, of course, is only one way to get the story when the subject isn’t talking. For business reporters—and especially investigative business reporters—the list of those who can be interviewed includes:

--Wall Street analysts
--professors who study the issues
--rival companies
--merchants and other business partners
--customers and consumer groups
--congressional and regulatory officials
--lobbyists
--unions
--major institutional shareholders
--headhunters
--management consultants
--the company’s board of directors
--senior executives of the company
--former company employees
--current company employees
--family, friends and associates of the CEO

I tried all of the above for the story I’m working on now. But that’s only a partial list. It doesn’t include the multitude of public documents at the reporter’s disposal, all of which I also used in my article. They include:

--Securities and Exchange filings about the company
--Transcripts of the company’s quarterly earnings conference calls
--Speeches of the CEO and other company executives
--Congressional testimony
--Reports of the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm
--Lawsuits

Then, of course, there are those other documents, which can shed even more light on a company and industry: confidential documents.

But perhaps the most important resource is the question that you have to ask yourself when your subject won’t talk: How badly do you not want to fail? In the end, it often comes down to a question of whether you are willing to take no for an answer when you are trying to get the story.

I wasn’t willing to accept defeat a decade ago when I was completing an investigation for The Baltimore Sun about the U.S. cigar industry. My investigation used confidential documents to show how tobacco makers had targeted young smokers and manipulated the media and Hollywood to glamorize the tobacco product despite the known health risks. The then-U.S. surgeon general declined my repeated requests for an interview. So on a weekend day, I drove down to Washington, D.C., where I knew that the surgeon general would be marching in a parade. The downtown streets of the nation’s capital were cordoned off. I positioned myself in the middle of one of those deserted streets, knowing that the surgeon general would eventually come my way. Indeed, there he was, marching toward me. I stopped him in the middle of the parade to repeat my request for an interview. Perhaps he was startled by my appearance; this time, he agreed. In the subsequent interview about my investigation, he said for the first time that cigars were “very dangerous” and that he would support a move to impose a warning label on the tobacco product. Today, if you happen to stop at a convenience store and pick up a box of cigars, you will see that warning label.

Alec Klein is a bestselling author, award-winning investigative business reporter formerly of The Washington Post and now professor of journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism