He has interviewed organized criminals, terrorists and child abusers. His journalism helped overturn one of Canada’s most egregious wrongful conviction decisions. And his willingness to share his knowledge has taken him around the world training reporters on how to make a difference.
Julian Sher, one of Canada’s leading investigative journalists, authors and broadcasters, spent a recent afternoon with the IJB team in Toronto sharing a career’s worth of insights, tips and wisdom about how to pursue truth, challenge authority and serve the public interest.
Sher, who is a member of the IJB’s academic and editorial advisory committee, knew he wanted to be a journalist at a very early age.
His passion only grew deeper when he started reporting for the student newspaper.
“My first interview with the high school newspaper was with Pierre Elliott Trudeau, ” he recalls. Sher contacted the Prime Minister’s office for a story and although he only received a written answer, it motivated him to dig deeper and chart a career path in journalism.
Early on, that path narrowed to focus on investigative reporting.
“My job as a journalist is to take my passport and go to the Taliban, the Ku Klux Klan, the Hell’s Angels, the police, victims of trafficking, or internet child abuse images, and to tell people these stories.”
During his career, Sher worked at the Toronto Star with IJB founder Rob Cribb on organized crime cases related to sex and organ trafficking. He then reported on a diverse range of stories from corruption to Canadian politics at the Globe and Mail.
He later brought in-depth investigations alive on Canadian TV screens as a senior producer at The Fifth Estate, CBC’s premier investigative program.
As an international filmmaker, Sher produced numerous documentaries on wars, corruption, human rights abuses, and justice. One of them is the Ghost of Afghanistan, a documentary detailing the battle for human rights in Afghanistan and the failures of Western forces there. Highly acclaimed in the country, the film won three Canadian Screen awards for best documentary, writing and editing.
In his most recently published book, authored with his journalist wife Lisa Fitterman, the two dug into the life of Yves Trudeau Apache, a notorious Hells Angels’ hitman in the 70s and 80s.
His groundbreaking investigations have also inspired many up-and-coming reporters. Sher has led dozens of training sessions for reporters from more than 25 countries across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
But while the desire among many journalists to do ambitious, difficult and even dangerous work remains strong, Sher is worried about the decline of investigative reporting in newsrooms across Canada where in-depth reporting is often the first thing to get cut in difficult economic times.
“My view of journalism has always been that our job is to bring a dark mirror to people. To show people the parts of our society, our world, our culture, our cities that are maybe a bit disquieting,” he says. “That’s what makes what the IJB is doing so important, as it breaks new ground in cross-media collaborations, telling the stories that need to be told and showing Canadians we can’t just rely on the traditional ways of digging out the truth.”
