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This is an abridged transcript of the latest FRDH podcast.

How do you report the news? How do you tell the story? If you had any idea how much time is spent discussing — complicating — what is basically a simple craft you would be amazed. In newsrooms, at dinner parties where journalists swap all the rumours they’ve heard during the week but didn’t report because they couldn’t transsubstantiate the rumours into facts; at learned seminars in elite journalism schools … that’s what journalists talk about:
How do you tell the story?
And when, as happened in 2016, the bulk of institutional journalism misses the biggest story — that Donald Trump needed to be taken seriously because American society had changed so much he could make a legitimate and ultimately successful run at the presidency — The question is asked with greater urgency.
Partially the answer is there for all to see. Data journalism was a trend of the last decade. The idea that you could explain much of what was happening with data took hold of news rooms. Charts and data, often sourced to think tanks, were replacing reporters and photographers on the street as the foundation of news.
Understandable in a way. It is expensive to go into the field to report a story. Cheaper for a reporter to sit at a desk and look at a data set online and then call up the people who did the research and those who disagree to get quotes. You can have your story filed well before deadline and quite possibly have an actual lunch break, maybe even go for a run during the course of the work day.
But — generational thing — I came up in journalism with the idea that scepticism was one of our primary tools. I am sceptical about data: Lies, damned lies and statistics. But younger hacks seem to have forgotten that epigram altogether. They have an almost religious belief in data. I sometimes wonder why they didn’t go to work for McKinsey or Grant Thornton or another of the big consulting firms. The places where data is never wrong — or at least that’s what they convince their clients. They could make a lot more money at McKinsey.
Right up to election night the journos who rely on data — especially data that agreed with their biases — had Hillary Clinton winning … and then she didn’t.
This is not to say that data doesn’t have a place in journalism. But numbers provide only a particular kind of fact. There are other kinds of fact and facts are only the building blocks of journalism.

Facts are to the truth what a pile of bricks are to a finished dwelling. They need to be arranged in a particular order and mortared together before you have the truth. Brick baking is an industrial process, but arranging the bricks, levelling them, mortaring them is a human one.

There is a German word to describe that human process in journalism.
“Einfühlung.” I came across it while researching my book Emancipation. It was a word coined by philosopher, historian, and clergyman Johann Gottfried von Herder in the 18th century. Google translate says Einfühlung means empathy which is accurate up to a point but doesn’t quite get at Herder’s intention. Einfühling means “in feeling.” Feeling your way into a story, using that place in your mind where rational imagination operates and then observing behaviours that to you make no sense because no one of your acquaintance would act that way or because the consequence of the behaviour is so obviously harmful to the person engaged in it — you can report on more impartially.
By using einfühling you understand actions and can describe them non-judgmentally. With intellectual honesty, you can extend your inquiry into an event and ask the right questions.
Herder, who is regarded in Germany … and other places, as the father of modern historical scholarship, came up with this very humane idea because he felt it imperative that if people in his time — the enlightenment — were to thoroughly understand people in the past and people from other cultures they needed to use this rational imaginative non-judgmental method.
I only discovered Herder and his theory after my daily journalism days were over but I recognized in it my work method. Einfühling:
The Northern Ireland story dropped on my plate when I became the NPR London correspondent in the early 1990s. The political process that would lead to the Good Friday Agreement was not public yet.
The reasons for the growth of the IRA and the Troubles had been covered often enough but what I was interested in was the Protestant or Unionist side of the story. The Christian wars of religion in Europe had ended hundreds of years ago. Discriminatory laws against Catholics in the UK had ended in the 19th century, yet here were a group of people perfectly willing to follow leaders one of whom, Ian Paisley, had to be bodily removed from the European Parliament for shouting out Pope John Paul 2, The Pope is the Anti-Christ . That was in 1988, not 1588.
Ulster’s Protestants were so unwilling to compromise that they allowed their little province to become a militarised zone, with almost 20,000 British soldiers on patrol in combat gear. They also tolerated paramilitary groups that went well beyond self-defence and into savagery. The Shankill Butchers murdered 23 people for being Catholics in a 7 year period. They were not killed swiftly.
How to understand this? Every year on the 12th of July, Northern Ireland shuts down. The Unionist community goes marching to celebrate the victory in 1690 of Protestant King William of Orange over the deposed Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne not far from Dublin. It’s their July 4th.

On the 12th, everyone turns out. Men from Orange lodges march to fife and drum for miles through cities and towns to assembly points where they listen to speeches … and drink. In Belfast the assembly point is called the Field.
In 1993, this event was past being an anachronism and it was as deeply offensive as you can imagine to Northern ireland’s Catholic community. But it was a big deal and a good way to get inside the protestant mindset was to fly over from London and do a story on it. I contacted the Shankill Road Orange lodge and asked would they mind if I marched with them? No problem, When I explained I meant that literally, they laughed and said sure. And so I did.

The Shankill road is the heartland of working class Loyalism, the ultra-form of Unionism. It supplied many of the footsoldiers of Protestant paramilitary groups. In 1993 it was separated from the Falls road, the heartland of working class Catholics who provided many footsoldiers for the IRA by a high wall erected at the start of the Troubles.
I arrived early at the Orange Lodge, joined some of the fellows in a stirrup cup of Irish whiskey before taking my place in line, turning on my tape recorder and setting off.
The Lodge marched down the Shankill to the center of Belfast where it fell in with lodges from all over the city and began the long processional to the field. There were thousands of marchers and the sidwalks were filled with their families cheering them on.
It must have looked odd as the Shankill lodge went past. Lines of burly men with orange sashes slung diagonally across their torsos and me, bespectacled, wearing a rain coat that wasn’t necessary because as any fool knows it is always hot and sunny on the 12th.
2/3rds of the way to the field we stopped for a breather and refreshments. A couple of fellows ran into a shop and returned with beer, lots of beer. They offered me one and we began to chat. “Where you from?” I said, New York, originally. “Paddy town.” They laughed. They asked my name, Michael Goldfarb. You’re Catholic? Michael’s a Catholic name. You’re Catholic? You’re a Mick? “Well, my last name is Goldfarb”. But they only heard the vowel sounds in my surname. Mickey O’Hara? one snorted.
It wasn’t threatening but it was racist. As the odd man out in the parade I felt like I should take it. Besides, I was getting the authentic voice of the community on tape.
We got to the Field, sore footed and sweaty. The men of the Shankill lodge skipped the speeches and immediately raced to a huge banqueting facility not far away where lunch had been arranged. I was invited to join them. The drinking was much more intense and the jokiness began to evaporate. Eventually, the lodge leader, with whom I was sitting suggested the time had come for me to leave, some of the lads wanted me gone and they were a little past the point of sobriety. He couldn’t guarantee my safety.
Anyway, I had a great feature and it aired that night and I also had a feeling for who these people were.
Three months later the IRA attempted to bomb a meeting of a protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Defese Assocation. The meeting was being held on the Shankill Road above a fish and chips shop. It was a Saturday afternoon at lunchtime and the chippie was packed with families just finished their weekly shopping. The bomb went off prematurely. The bomber was killed along with one UDA member and eight others including two children.
I flew back to Belfast, along with every reporter in the UK. The chip shop was just down the Shankill from the Orange Lodge. I was recognized and remembered and doors opened for me that didn’t open for other journalists.
I had felt my way into that community. I was taken deeper into it. Over the following five years as the Good Friday political process unfolded — and it was a political process, not a peace process — I was always able to walk on that road, alone, and hear the latest news and gossip, get a feel for what would and wouldn’t fly in the talks no matter what government spokesmen were saying and tell my listeners in America stuff that perhaps other colleagues couldn’t quite get to.
Feeling my way in …Einfühling … didn’t mean falling in love with the Loyalist community. I met men who had murdered and their wives and parents who supported them. I understood where they were coming from.

To understand doesn’t mean to condone.

Data journalism is the natural outgrowth of a society long defined by the terms of market research. As you read this, somewhere a focus group is in session, or a marketing team is exchanging e-mails about what to ask a focus group. The group will have been selected because they represent types: millenials or baby boomers or Generation X Y or Z. They will have been sorted by income and education and the basis for their categorization will be data. You can’t argue with data. Numbers don’t lie … until they do, and product launches fail and sure-bet candidates lose elections.
Even now, many journalists, are still trying to understand what led to Donald Trump’s election by crunching numbers or by looking at American society through the generalizations of marketing — political consulting branch.
They won’t find an answer that way.
Last June, I got into a little twitter argument with a younger colleague of colour. He was quoting some numbers that proved Trump had no chance of winning. There weren’t enough working class white people to put him over the top. I had just come back from Ohio talking to independent voters, most of them white, many of them young, quite a few of them women. I had listened to what they said, not just about politics but about more mundane things in their lives and looked at the ravaged physical landscape they inhabited and came away thinking Trump was going to win the state. And since no one had won the presidency in half a century without carrying Ohio, I thought Hillary Clinton was in trouble.
I tried to point this out in 140 characters to my young colleague but he was pretty dismissive. Numbers don’t lie, and he had his preferred set of numbers.

But numbers alone cannot make up a first draft of history and that’s what we journalists aspire to do every day: write the first rough draft of history.

Now, Herder never really detailed a work method for Einfühlung. He was aware that it could lead people to reach conclusions that fit their own biases … and that happened among his pupils. Pastor Herder wrote admiringly of the Jews in the German world of the 18th century. At the time, they were confined to ghettos and considered aliens in the German body politic, but Herder advocated that they be granted citizenship and treated equally. The next generation of German thinkers, most of whom claimed the Pastor as their intellectual father, were virulent anti-Semites. They were Romantic nationalists, like President Trump’s extremely special adviser Stephen Bannon.

Using their own process of einfühlung they refused to acknowledge that a Jew born in the German world had any of the fine qualities of the German nation and were in no way entitled to the same rights as a German.
Well, perhaps “in feeling” should be used for simpler tasks, like reporting the news, rather than grander tasks, like theorizing about the German nation.
What it all comes down to is this: The Pastor advocated a more empathic understanding of what it means to be human.
I’m with him. It is easy to wait for the latest data set to arrive from wonderful think tanks like the Pew Foundation in the US or Resolution Foundation in the UK. They provide clues about where to focus journalistic inquiry.
But they are numbers only. Building blocks at best. As a journalist, writing the first rough draft of history:

You have to sit with people themselves, find out about their work — or lack of it — absorb their anger, drink with them, accept their humanity even when they hate you; if you want to begin to understand how to report on events that affect not only them but the wider world as well.

(You can find out more about Herder and the rise of German nationalism and the Jews in my book Emancipation.)