Source : Globe & Mail

Anniversaries can be wooden affairs, requiring that attention be paid on arithmetic grounds to something that doesn't really justify it. A war. Middle age. A marriage.

The 35th anniversary of CBC Radio's As It Happens is an exception, because AIH retains so much of its vigour despite the passage of time, the pestilence of fads and the pomposity of managers who come and go. Its durability tells us something about good journalism.

Journalism students often ask what the single most important quality of a good journalist is. The best answer is "curiosity," which may kill cats but supports almost every virtue that a good journalist possesses. If a journalist doesn't learn something in the course of doing his or her job, neither do you. And if you don't learn something, journalism is failing you, and you will tune it out before long.

The people on As It Happens have sustained this capacity. They do their homework on the issues, and in conducting interviews, they follow the conversation, elicit new information and learn.

Barbara Frum once said that the most important tool of a good interviewer is listening, because it is often what your subject says in answering that provokes the next and most revealing question.

How many journalists today would say off the top that the best tool in doing their jobs is listening? Interviewers are more often propelled by convictions and conclusions already drawn -- as we tend to see on CBC Radio's The Current, surely the darkest, angriest radio journalism in years. The purpose of these interviews seems to be to demonstrate something rather than discover it. This is a different species of work, like the awful scripted interviews between hosts and journalists on many CBC programs these days.

Mary Lou Finlay's curiosity remains keen six years into hosting As It Happens, and 28 years after joining CBC Toronto itself. You can hear her listening and following up on the content of interviews as she goes. You can hear her learning -- being surprised -- which offers the listener the rewards of the chase and a share in the gift of the new. But there's more.

The classic definition of journalism in most newsrooms is "what went wrong yesterday," with some attention given to "what might go wrong tomorrow." Both of these negative paradigms are relevant, AIH understands that good journalism requires application to other paradigms as well: "what went right yesterday" and "what might go right tomorrow."

If something wonderful has happened in Alberta -- consistently great math scores in a certain high school -- Ms. Finlay and her snazzy sidekick Barbara Budd will call to find out what, why and how. And if something wonderful is promised for tomorrow -- a breakthrough in understanding Alzheimer's -- they will be there too.

Investigative journalism isn't just about the bad and the ugly; it is about the excellent and the marvellous. No journalistic vehicle in the country knows this better than As It Happens.

The folks at AIH remember to cover both matters of public interest, and matters that interest the public -- like the many uses of duct tape. Britain is a steady source of nutty projects, with the southern U.S. a close second. And God bless 'em for digging them up.

Curiosity is a defining characteristic of the young (as certainty is of the old). Journalism struggles to stay young.

William Thorsell is director and CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum.

© Globe Information Services