IMC editors are always fussing about reporting and editing, always aspiring to investigative reporting. So when we heard that Robert Dreyfuss was coming to Baltimore, we agreed not only to co-sponsor his appearance, but to talk to him about being an investigative reporter. He had just completed articles for The Nation and Mother Jones on police surveillance. His investigation had included a close look at the revival of “Red Squads,” in locations including Baltimore City and County, as well as the Maryland State Police. A freelance writer, Bob’s work has appeared in almost all of the major progressive magazines, not to mention Rolling Stone.

His formal credentials are long and impressive, but more impressive is his personal bibliography. He has written on the drug “wars,” gun control, the privatization of social security, and Agent Orange and has interviewed politicos and rainmakers across Washington, DC. I interviewed him under rushed circumstances just before he spoke at the Stony Run Friends Meetinghouse on Wednesday, May 7 to a crowd which, by the end of his presentation, had greatly reduced in size, become critical and not the least bit hostile. More of that will follow.

I began by asking him what were the obstacles to investigative reporting. The primary obstacle, he said, was time. “I call myself a semi-investigative reporter because true investigative journalism takes weeks or months to do one story.” As a free-lancer, he went on, “I have to do what I can do in two or three or four weeks.”

Good investigative reporting is expensive because of the time involved, Dreyfuss emphasized repeatedly. Moreover, newspaper and magazine publishers “have lost faith in it.” They want “shorter stories and don’t believe that this kind of reporting attracts readers.” Because of this, he asserted, investigative reporting is “a dying art.”

To Dreyfuss, what editors seem to think wins readers is bread and circuses. Paradoxically, he notes that there are so many targets worth investigating it is almost a hunter’s paradise. That’s partly why he jokingly refers to himself as a semi-investigator. “What I do,” he says modestly, “is pick the low hanging fruit. There are lots of stories out there ‘waiting to be plucked’.”

I asked him if the restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the USA PATRIOT Act had interfered with collecting information. He explained that, as a free-lancer, FOIA was too slow a process for the deadlines he worked with. On the other hand, he felt that since 9-11, the accessibility of previously available government information had been reduced. He expected that to continue, possibly for the next ten years. In our conversation and his later talk to the Stony Run audience, he reiterated that he thought the American political system was self-regulating. Using the metaphor of a pendulum, he voiced the belief that in time the pendulum would swing back in a more liberal direction.

Was it harder to gain information today? I probed. “It’s a lot easier now,” he replied. Why? Because the Internet gives us access to information and databases that earlier we might never have uncovered.

To Robert Dreyfuss, journalism is a profession. This obligates the professional to be dispassionate and balanced. He doesn’t deny that a journalist may have a point of view, but he insists that point of view needs to be subordinated to some sense of objectivity. In the question-and-answer session following his talk many members of the audience took issue with his “professionalism.” While some claimed that journalists were necessarily biased by their employment in large media conglomerates, Dreyfuss stuck to his professional stance insisting that most journalists were working hard at trying to present a balanced perspective. He rejected other charges by this activist audience, which grew increasingly critical, that there was a fascist drift in the country and that the news media were caught up in it. To that he replied by exhibiting his pendulum theory. Things would swing back in enough time. Several members of the audience challenged his individualism. It wasn’t the professionalism of journalists that was the issue, they said in different ways, it was the changes in institutions that enveloped us. Dreyfuss shrugged that off, at one time referring to it as a paranoid theory. Two audience participants maintained that the role of the journalist should include advocacy and activism. They demanded that investigative reporters should be able to define a course of social action given their great knowledge of the issue they were reporting. “That’s your job,” he insisted, “not mine.”

When I asked Dreyfuss about his job, he said. “It’s fun. I love getting the bad guys. That’s why I do it.”