The strange position of mainstream news ethics today is that, on the one hand, journalists are trying to maintain to the public that they’re trustworthy, and reliable, and in many cases they are. But at the same time, there’s a different set of standards for Joe Blow online, who’s not a professional journalist, to say whatever he damn well pleases. If, here in Canada, the CBC steps over a cultural taboo line to show a little bit of perspective, they are trounced by emails saying “You’re biased. You’re biased. You’re biased.”

But these same news consumers don’t mind going to other sources of information from people online who are as biased as you please. Now, is that because they only want their public broadcaster to be that way? I don’t know. There’s a bifurcation going on. The problem has burst the bounds of professional journalism. So what do we do about that? I don’t want draconian laws. I don’t want censorship. So what else?

Self-knowledge, self-informing, teaching, bringing out reliable journalists, monitoring the news flow, pointing out where stories come from—all of that helps. But a lot of that is being done on an individual, fragmented basis. One newsroom does some fact-checking. Another newsroom does it too. That lacks the coming-together, the force, of having a nationwide system of collaborators with different expertise joining in to keep a very close eye on what’s going on.

One thing journalists have to do is be transparent about using AI, and it’s not enough to post on your website that “We do some things with AI,” because it doesn’t mean anything. You need to explain how you use AI. Otherwise, people who don’t know what AI and news means are going to think that machines are now writing your stories, and that the bylines are not real people, that the photo of your reporter is just a picture off the internet. It is important to be very specific about how you’re using AI and transparent about what you will not do. Be honest about the fact that it’s an experiment. For example, “We are using AI tools to try and help us do better reporting. We will never use AI to replace reporters, to have machines write the story.” 

You almost cannot overexplain in this realm, because it’s new and people don’t know it. In the survey work that I’ve done, most people don’t know what an op-ed is. So how are they going to know what you mean when you say, “We use AI to help produce our journalism,” if you don’t specify what the heck you mean?

As the information ecosystem falls victim to disinformation, weaponization, and conspiracy theories, the ethics of handling hacked or anonymously leaked information have become especially complicated. Earlier this summer, the New York Times published the hacked Columbia University application files of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. And the Wall Street Journal published leaked information about a drawing and message that Donald Trump allegedly included in a fiftieth-birthday album compiled for sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. (Trump denies it is his drawing and has sued the Journal for libel.)

The first question a newsroom always has to ask, of course, is: Is the information authentic? Verification has always been problematic because forgeries have always been possible (take, famously, the Hitler Diaries). But online trickery, including deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence, has made forgeries both more realistic and riskier. 

If the newsroom has done the work to gain confidence about authenticity (and with the risk of crippling lawsuits, it had better be confident!), the next question is newsworthiness. Until recently, I would have applied one simple rule to verified information, regardless of source: If it’s newsworthy—and if you didn’t participate in stealing it—your responsibility is to publish.

But I don’t see it as so simple anymore. Broadly, the media isn’t doing its job in correctly balancing the news value of a leak vs. the news value of who made the leak and why. Editors, myself included, have tended to shelter behind the conviction that every source has a motive and that we’d miss a lot of important news if we focused too much on the leaker’s intent.

But motives do matter, because they deeply inform the question of whether a story is fair. What if the source’s motive is as newsworthy as the substance of the leak? What if it’s more newsworthy? In our instinctive rush to publish—whether the files are leaked Hillary Clinton emails, the Steele dossier, or university admissions records—we’ve sometimes downplayed, or outright missed, the profound newsworthiness of the source’s identity and motivation. 

At the start of the reporting, an ethical journalist needs to think especially hard about the fairness of granting anonymity to someone who will benefit from a story. If anonymity is granted, the reporter still needs to devote an appropriate portion of the story to the apparent motive—and to whether and how the leak is intended to factor into a campaign or policy agenda. The leaker may not like it, but that’s kind of the point.

Ultimately, reporting on motive helps put the leak in context—and, in these toxic times, we have to work harder than ever to put facts in their full frame and to avoid being manipulated by advocates and operatives.

Yes, our bias as journalists and truth-tellers should still be to publish information that’s relevant to the public and not to self-censor, in keeping with our core societal role of getting information out. But we should do this with much more attention to why we have the information and what that means—and with a commitment to explaining to the public why we’re sure it’s true and why we decided to share it.

It’s really important to go out and talk to real people, with names. With images, blow up that photo, examine it, and figure out where it came from. Talk to the person who took the photograph. Find out why they’re posting it or why they’re sending it to you.

The AP had a case where we circulated an image of Kate Middleton and her family that had been edited to make a very perfect-looking family even more perfect. Careful observers looked at it and said, “Well, this sleeve doesn’t quite line up with this wrist.” (The AP retracted the photo.)

It’s going to be harder to identify deception as AI tools are used to alter photographs. Maybe we should use AI to combat altered photographs. One thing we’re discussing is whether we can build into the metadata of photographs a kind of blockchain that tells us exactly where that photo was created and by whom.

There’s always been fraud and hoaxes, but what’s scary now is that because of the ubiquity of social media and AI and bots, governments and other political groups are becoming more and more sophisticated about trying to shape public debate. That underscores the need for old-fashioned journalists and old-fashioned journalism to try to cut through all that sea of deception and get to the facts that we can trust.

The United States is constantly evolving, and journalism, like other professions, must evolve with it. Social, political, and technological changes have reshaped both the country and the news landscape. News habits and preferences have shifted, and consumers now have far more options for information of all kinds, including news. But much of what’s available is false, often packaged as legitimate reporting, and only the most discerning Americans can distinguish what’s true.

Part of the evolution of the information ecosystem has been driven by sharp differences in Americans’ political beliefs and a stronger sense of party identity. We have two Americas now—one where people want to know what’s going on and want accurate information and another where people say they want facts but, in reality, want information that confirms their viewpoints, perhaps unknowingly or subconsciously. This America wants the ideas they believe to be celebrated and emphasized, and the ideas they reject to be downplayed or not reported at all. One approach to handling a divided America is to take seriously our roles as watchdogs and truth-tellers.

One of the legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency is that politicians have learned they can manipulate the press—more so than before—with few, if any, repercussions. Traditional journalistic norms and conventions for covering politics and politicians were not created for a president like Donald Trump.

When a politician is accused of wrongdoing, reporters generally follow the long-established standard of contacting the person and allowing them to respond to the allegations. In the Trump era, the response has often been a provable lie. Yet journalists treat the information as we always have: Print it. Broadcast it. Post it.

This contradicts our role as truth-tellers, and makes us complicit in the spread of misinformation. We can still run the politician’s comment, but we shouldn’t let it stand unchecked. Instead, we should follow the lie with documented evidence that it’s false. Some of our traditions and conventions do not work today, and we must constantly find ways to convey the truth to the shrinking number of people who still believe us.

Scholars often say that the news values in industrial news organizations are conflict, controversy, celebrity, solutions, sometimes good news, catastrophe, and so on. If your story is about a controversy, it’s implicitly considered newsworthy. If you make a pitch on it, your editors are likely to say, “Oh, it’s controversial, let’s do it.” That creates a new cycle, because once a story comes out, everybody jumps on it. That set of values, especially controversy, is what needs to be reexamined from a democratic culture perspective.

Ask: Is the controversy legitimate? Because antidemocratic factions can stoke a controversy on social media just for the sake of it looking like a controversy. And once you stoke it, journalists almost feel compelled to respond because it’s gaining virality. People are responding to it, and journalists feel left out if they don’t report on it. But very powerful media manipulators know how to stoke these things.

The BBC published a report in 2018 admitting it allowed climate change to look like a dispute when by 2012 the settled evidence had become fairly clear. Once you take somebody else’s framing, and you make it part of your controversy, you’ve legitimized the controversy. If we legitimize it, then after that, we have to do both sides. We have to do all the sides involved. A better approach is: Determine whether something is a controversy or not.

Once you know it’s truly a controversy, because it’s a factual dispute or scientific dispute, then you source as many sides as you can, because the issue of bothsidesism doesn’t apply. Bothsidesism only becomes an issue when we’ve not determined whether the issue is an actual controversy. Around those lines, you can build up an ethics. You can say, “This is how we look at controversies; this is how we can look at the word conflict.”

Every news organization has what’s called the “house brew,” like the house-brew coffee when you go to a coffee shop. The “house brew” is what I call the built-in code of ethics. The Economist has one; if you go to the New York Times, they have one. Codes of ethics are usually articulated at the level of the article—things like: “No conflicts of interest,” “You will diversify your sourcing,” and so on and so on. But news organizations are almost never asking: “What are our news values? How are we as a news organization determining factions? How are we determining what are the sides to a dispute? What is the purpose of diversifying sourcing?”

Because of the DEI movement’s rightful arguments from a democratic standpoint about diversity, the whole diversity conversation is now being turned on its head by antidemocratic people. They are saying, by not sourcing from them, “the liberal media are being anti-diverse; you are against political diversity.” And that’s only because the approach to why diverse sourcing is needed was never explained, in my opinion, in terms of democratic culture. You diversify sourcing in pursuit of the truth, not in pursuit of any side’s legitimacy.

The recent essays on what we owe our audiences and the role of objectivity in journalism point out a core crisis organizations are facing today: trust in the media has eroded dramatically over the past decade. More than ever, one of the key goals a publication should strive for is to build and maintain a relationship with its audience—but that can only happen if a publication does the hard work of understanding that audience’s motivations and concerns.

We hear the same concerns from the audience when it comes to consuming information. People are overwhelmed by the news and want to avoid it; news can be depressing; stories aren’t always easily approachable or accessible. Those critiques highlight the fact that too many of us in the media are still on autopilot and don’t truly think through what it means to put the audience front and center. Changing course gets harder by the day with the death of SEO and the rise of new platforms.

The era of believing that a twelve-hundred-word news story is the key product to keep our audiences informed has been over for a long time. The need to venture to new formats such as social video, newsletters, and more has been well discussed. But what’s been missing from the conversation is an honest accounting of where the audience is and how we can meet them. We should be asking: How can we help audiences feel less overwhelmed by the news? How can we give people the information to live better lives? How can we help people better understand the world around them without assuming they read, listen to, or watch the news every day? How do we keep people from feeling overwhelmed?

The essays about objectivity and sourcing presented smart solutions to tackling the trust issue in journalism. But in many ways, we’ve only scratched the surface of the fundamental issue, which is the urgent need to reimagine journalism from the ground up, starting with thinking through how we can best serve readers, listeners, and viewers.

I came from a sort of activist background many years ago, but I got drawn into standards. I would see other people’s coverage and think, “Gee, is that a fair way to phrase this? Is that the right way to present this story?” It was a learning process. Initially, looking at things from an activist point of view, I would get angry at the quote-unquote media for reflecting other points of view. 

But I changed, and came to my current way of thinking, which is that if you think you’re right, then the truth should be on your side. And if it’s not on your side, you need to go back and figure out what’s wrong with your position. Once I started thinking in those terms, I found standards fascinating. Back in the old days before digital media, if you and I were mad at Joe Biden, we could stand on the corner of 110th Street and Broadway and hand out fliers that said “Joe Biden’s a jerk” or “Donald Trump’s a jerk” or “End the war.” And people would not take those homemade fliers as seriously as something they saw in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Now with the advent of digital media comes the ability for just about anybody to make perfect copies, to do word processing and layout. There was a lot of talk in the beginning of the internet age of the democratization of the media, but it’s also become the massification of the media, and people are now able to reproduce professional-looking material, even if the quality is not. Journalists used to have a technological edge. Two people on a hissy cassette tape wouldn’t be taken very seriously. We no longer have that. So the one thing that sets us apart, I would argue, is our standards, our ethics, our doing what journalists are supposed to do.

When a news organization publishes an article based on unnamed sources, it is putting its reputation on the line. The organization’s journalists are effectively asking readers to take their word for it. If the article’s veracity is subsequently challenged, and the organization has made a deal not to reveal its sources, it may be out there defending itself alone.

So why do news organizations sometimes publish articles based on unnamed sources? In cases where the Wall Street Journal has done so, we’ve reviewed the reporting and the sources carefully and decided that the story is worth telling, and that we can’t do it without relying on sources we’ve agreed to not name.

Reporters are only as good as their sources. The best sources—well-placed people with direct knowledge of events—often aren’t willing to go on the record precisely because sharing the information could put them, or their jobs, at risk. The fewer people who know, the more risk a source may be taking by talking to journalists—and the more newsworthy the information may be.

Editors seek to safeguard the reputation of their newsrooms by carefully vetting sources and striking clear and narrow deals that balance protecting their identities while also telling a reader as much as possible about how they know what they know—whether they were present at the meeting, for example, or reviewed the relevant documents. This helps to make our sourcing more transparent to readers without outing the source.

That balancing act between source protection and transparency with the reader has grown more challenging as concern about potential leak investigations has heightened, especially for US government sources. Sources are also much more circumspect about how they communicate and are asking more questions about how we share information internally.

People in general are becoming much more reluctant to speak with journalists on the record due to fears of retaliation. It’s hard to argue, for example, that being named in a WSJ story doesn’t pose a risk to a migrant living in the country illegally. But we generally try to avoid featuring unnamed people for purely anecdotal or illustrative purposes, and use them to get to the truth of events we can’t get elsewhere. 

Limiting the use of unnamed sources to matters of public interest wherever we can helps us ensure we don’t dilute the credibility that makes our coverage worth reading.

There is a disconnect between the conversations journalists have about their ethics and the conversations the public has about journalism ethics. When journalists discuss ethics, they are mostly (unfortunately) talking about things they should not do, like manipulate videos to distort what really happened, or use AI irresponsibly, or trick a vulnerable person into talking to a reporter. When the public discusses journalism ethics, they are talking about the effect journalism has on the people it is meant to serve, including how crime coverage can hurt neighborhoods where crime happens, how excluding certain perspectives distorts the truth, or how story selections often fail to reflect the concerns of communities that journalists don’t visit or understand. 

These two parallel conversations rarely intersect, because journalists leave the very people they intend to serve out of the ethics conversation. In medical ethics, decades ago, doctors did the same to their patients, withholding information and disregarding their ability to consent to or otherwise participate in their own treatment. In journalism, it’s hard to include the beneficiary of our work—the public—in our ethical decision-making. Doctors actually interact with their patients. So when the medical profession decided that consent and autonomy were important, they had a place to start as they changed their ethical practices. Journalists talk to their sources, and they talk to one another. But they rarely talk to the people they serve. Look at a newsroom budget or org chart and it’s easy to see that the resources devoted to listening to the audience are minuscule.

Instead, when we argue about our ethics, we tend to do so in professional spaces. We debate whether reporters should embrace objectivity, whether we should call someone a liar or use the labels “terrorist” and “genocide.” Unless we include the people intended to consume our work in these discussions, it doesn’t really matter what we decide, because the people we are trying to serve don’t always understand our journalistic purpose. Rarely does a newsroom explain what its journalism is intended to accomplish and then listen to the audience feedback.

As a result, journalism ethics fails to mature and thrive as it does in other professions. Ethics aren’t about just avoiding bad choices. Ethics are about building a system that makes good outcomes possible for a specific group of people. It’s impossible to set ethical standards if goals and beneficiaries are not defined. Most newsrooms fail to state such promises because their leaders haven’t articulated a clear news strategy, which in turn happens because most newsroom leaders don’t want to reconcile their slender resources with their lofty ambitions. This is a tragic flaw throughout journalism. 

As a result, we talk about journalism ethics in the abstract. We talk about what journalism does in a democracy. But we don’t talk about what specific journalism organizations are trying to accomplish. If the public doesn’t know what a specific newsroom covers and why, they can’t participate in a conversation about whether the work helps them.

What would it look like if journalists considered the needs of news consumers as the foundation of their ethical imperatives? Every news organization would have a published mission that describes who it serves and how. Under that mission, newsrooms would list the topics they routinely cover and the benefit that brings to the audience. Newsroom leaders would devote resources to tracking whether their work is achieving its intended purpose, including seeking feedback from the audience.

Out of those promises and these conversations, journalism’s ethical standards would grow. And then, when we in the profession discussed our newsroom standards on any issue—from objectivity to language choices—it would be in the context of how we provide our particular communities with information they find useful. 

Until that happens, our journalism ethics will continue to be stunted. The people we serve will sense their irrelevance to our ethical principles. As a result, they won’t value us or trust us. And in the end, our ethics won’t matter.

Last year, for the first time, I taught a course at Newmark J-school on Law, Ethics, and Safety. We spent one class talking about objectivity, poring over the principles and guidelines of dozens of news organizations. I asked students to review these guidelines and break them down: which were ethical principles, universally applicable to the practice of journalism, and which were institutional values, reflecting the standards and approach of a particular news organization. Objectivity, my students affirmed, fell into the latter category.

Their conclusions made sense to me and reflected my own experience. During my tenure running the Committee to Protect Journalists, I took a broad view of what constitutes journalism and saw it practiced in nearly every conceivable context. The reality globally is there is very little journalism that could be considered objective in the US sense. Many news organizations—even those that are independent of power—are opinionated and even ideological. In my own journalism, either early in my career covering Latin America, or today, when I write mostly on media and press freedom issues, my personal perspective infuses my work.

It also made sense in terms of the history of objectivity as a concept within the journalism profession. Yes, “objectivity” was first articulated by Walter Lippmann as a strategy to counter yellow journalism. But it took hold in the postwar years and during an era of media consolidation fueled by joint-operating agreements that meant many large metro areas eventually had only one daily newspaper. Their goal was to maximize readership within a defined geographic community. Objectivity—presenting both sides of every story—proved an excellent strategy.

Of course, new technologies have vastly reduced the commercial viability of such an approach. Audiences are no longer confined by geography and easily sort themselves ideologically,

accessing national and specialized news organizations that reflect their varied perspectives.

As someone who seeks to consume news and information from a variety of perspectives, I continue to value media organizations that elevate objectivity as a critical institutional value. I also think that in some contexts an objective approach to news can help guide, ground, and inform complex debates. In other words, thank God for the AP. But objectivity is not now, and never has been, a universal principle that defines the profession. It’s just one approach, and is not part of our ethical framework. This is what history and experience show—and what my students helped make plain.

The rise of nonprofit journalism has sparked new conversations about funding and independence. But the need to protect journalism from the potential corrupting influence of money is as old as the profession itself. 

Case in point: My first job in journalism was at a small-town paper where the local Toyota dealership was the biggest advertiser. Late in my tenure, Toyota became embroiled in a scandal over concerns that some cars’ accelerators were getting stuck and causing high-speed crashes. An edict arrived in the newsroom that any story about the scandal must include the voice of the local dealer. Each time the AP wrote an article on the topic, our editor in chief would call him up and get a quote. 

The unavoidable truth is that journalism costs money. No matter your revenue source, you need to be diligent to protect your integrity. Advertisers could try to sway coverage. Paying subscribers could revolt if you tell a hard truth. 

At the Texas Tribune, we have multiple measures in place. First, we actively seek funding diversity. Pick a topic, and you’ll likely find people on our supporter list who stake out positions on opposite sides. Those supporters might not agree on the issue, but they agree that our democracy needs reliable and honest news. 

Second, we try not to rely too much on any funder. If one person is supporting the whole operation, you’re going to be reluctant to piss them off—consciously or unconsciously. So you don’t want any donor who’s too big to anger. 

Third, we practice radical transparency. If someone gives us money, their name appears on our “Who Funds Us?” page. If someone gives us more than a thousand dollars, we disclose that at the end of any story that mentions them. A big investigation may include a note at the end that the subject has supported the Tribune. A story about a state official fleeing a subpoena in a Suburban may note that Chevrolet was a sponsor. Our product team is currently updating our technology to make that process as seamless—and automated—as possible.

The practice can occasionally lead to attacks from someone who digs up a small donation and tries to argue that we can’t be trusted because of it. But we persist in disclosing. We’re built on the mission of giving people the information they need, and then trusting them to make up their minds. That value doesn’t go away when we’re talking about ourselves.

In a presidential debate with Jimmy Carter on October 6, 1976, Gerald Ford said, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” These words caused a sensation among journalists, Ford’s advisers, and his political opponents. Did he really think that the Poles in Poland were free to govern themselves? And if that’s not what he meant, why did he say, in reply to Max Frankel of the New York Times, “I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union”?

Looking back at this event last year for Politico, Jeff Greenfield called Ford’s statement “a comment that made the president look delusional…a debate gaffe that arguably cost Ford the election and changed American history.”

Compare that with the modern era. In 2021, Glenn Kessler, a fact-checker for the Washington Post, said his newspaper calculated that, “by the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency.”

Here’s my question: If in 1976 a single gaffe led to a political crisis for Gerald Ford, how could Donald Trump make more than thirty thousand false or misleading claims and emerge as the Republican nominee in 2020, and then return to the White House in 2024, having lied to this day about his defeat? 

What is required of ethical journalists when the political system they are a vital part of fails to hold power to account? Or try this one: What is required of ethical journalists when democracy itself is under attack by one of the two major parties and its leader? (A reasonable description of where we are, I think.)

During the 2024 campaign, press critics like me and Margaret Sullivan argued that journalists need to find a way to become more pro-democracy without usurping the role of the voters, or the parties. I will never forget the editor who said to me, “‘Pro-democracy’… you mean pro-Biden, right?”

That was exasperating, but my question remains: If you’re in journalism during a political crisis that could bring an end to accountability itself, what is the ethical thing to do? One reply I have heard (whispered) is, “Do what you have to do to stay in business.” 

But as Sir Harold Evans is said to have mused: The challenge is “not to stay in business; it is to stay in journalism.”