APTNs Paul Barnsley on uncovering what others are working to hide

As a teenager, Paul Barnsley was glued to his television, watching the hearings into the Watergate scandal. “It was exciting stuff,” says Barnsley, who was witnessing the downfall of an American president based on the reporting of two young, relatively unknown journalists at the time. Nearly four decades into his journalism career, Barnsley has witnessed the downfall of others in part to the reporting of the investigative unit he heads up at APTN News and Current Affairs. “I’m interested in things that people are working really hard to hide, I like to uncover them and find out what’s really going on. I like to solve puzzles,” says Barnsley on the latest episode of Face to Face. Barnsley has been the executive producer of APTN Investigates for nearly 18 years. Before that, he worked at Windspeaker and the Tekawennake, the weekly paper out of Six Nations of the Grand River. Barnsley still remembers the night in 1995 when Dudley George was shot and killed by an OPP sniper at Ipperwash. “The family, Sam George, especially, Dudley’s brother, it took them 15 long years of fighting to finally get the truth to be told and they got the land back too,” says Barnsley. “The sad part of that is the night before the ceremony where they were going to give the camp and the park back to the Kettle and Stony Point people, Sam was dying of liver cancer and he called me that night just to say ‘thanks’ for the help over all the years and that’s just the kind of guy Sam was. “He was a remarkable guy, I’ll never forget him. There’s been a lot of people I’ve met like that, that’s the cool part about this job is you meet a lot of remarkable people.” Now in its 16th award-winning season, APTN Investigates had a rough start, with Barnsley admitting he can’t even watch the first few seasons. Barnsley, whose background was in print journalism, says he learned the hard way that television news was an “art form.” Soon after, came the Bruce Carson story about a former senior advisor to then prime minister Stephen Harper who was lobbying Indian Affairs to land water contracts potentially worth millions of dollars for an Ottawa-based water company that employed his fiancée, who was an escort. “It was a sensational story and we had it and nobody else did thanks to Jorge Barrera and Ken Jackson – the guys who brought it to light. Every news agency in the country wanted to follow it but they all had to say as first reported by APTN,” says Barnsley. “That had a gigantic effect on the news organization here. I don’t want us to claim I put them on the map or we put them on the map but we sure made sure that a whole lot more people knew about us. And I think a lot of people went ‘wow this is old time journalism, this is the way it’s supposed to be, this isn’t Fox News.’ It was a wild ride, I got to tell you. That was my Ben Bradley moment,” says Barnsley. As for advice for up-and-coming journalists, Barnsley says they should work hard and lead with their heart. “We treat people with a lot of respect and a lot of consideration here and if you do that, word gets around,” says Barnsley. “I tell my folks, every day is an audition, people are watching. Powerful people with information that they would like to share but with great risk to themselves, their careers, maybe their personal safety. “They’re looking for somebody they can trust to provide that information to and if you’re a reporter with great integrity and great compassion, you may win that sweepstakes, you may be the one they come to and say ok here it is, this is important, the world needs to know about this,” says Barnsley. Continue Reading