Working Definitions For Honest Journalists

Photo Credit: Patch Bowen

Exigency, noun. “A state of affairs that makes urgent demands; that which is required; the state of being.”

I’m a chronic info-hoarder, digitally and physically. I wouldn’t know where to start showing someone my watch-later playlist. I have every chapter of Lenin’s Revolutionary Theory of Organization in a desk drawer, and the speech-to-text versions for each. My household drawers were stockpiles for filing papers, mail, tax forms, and IRS documentation. Don’t get me started on the shred paper filling stop and shop grocery bags, stuffed into every available corner.

A career in investigative journalism makes sense for me, being raised financially insecure. Life in debt teaches you perseverance, or at least some resolve. I’m accustomed to finding documents, pulling papers and speaking in codes I don’t fully understand. That’s how I solved money problems at home and how my family saved me from theirs. I’m college aged and still prodding at people for the things I need to know.

A degree from Fordham nearly cost my mother our house. She’s living four states away to better afford my grandparent’s medical costs, which have swallowed up savings for my secondary education. This degree in Multi-Platform Journalism isn’t going to save my family from poverty. It’s a hell of a motivating factor though. Saving is why I became a journalist. To save people, and that’s a simple thing to spend my life doing.

Credibility,  “The quality or power of inspiring belief.”

Consider who journalists are. What compels us to stand in front of picket lines or question federal authorities? Lived experience leads us to doing the work we do.

This piece is largely inspired by the rhetorical undertaking of “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, by intellectual Ibram X. Kendi. I seek to define “honest” and “dishonest” journalism with clarity and specificity.

This requires stepping backwards to assess where the news media has faltered. I’ve developed a spotting-framework for journalists to reference at any time, which will be published as a companion to this piece in Horseshoe Magazine’s final edition of Spring 2026. These criteria for effective communication will ultimately pave the way towards journalistic credibility.

1. Impromptu Coverage

2. Obscurity

3. Equivocality

4. Immateriality

In 2024 I traveled to Washington, DC, with a cohort of 150 others who were disgusted by western complicity in Palestinian genocide. While on Capitol Hill, I spoke to reporters who were also moved to speak up for our fellow journalists in the Gaza Strip. I returned with a newspaper, fittingly titled “The New York Crimes.”

Among the pages is a memorial to Anas Al-Sharif, a photojournalist who at 28 was sprinting towards shelled hospitals and bravely covering the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land. He was killed, along with four other Al Jazeera journalists, in an IDF assassination. His eulogy is delivered and preserved by the Gaza Press Core and pinned up to the wall where I can see it at home.

Al-Sharif was labeled a “Hamas militant," and his murder made headlines in CNN, ABC, and notably the New York Times, parroting Israeli propaganda. Not to mention the other four killed colleagues, who did not receive the same fabricated justifications for their deaths.

Many passionate people just like me have been killed in the last three years. More journalists have been killed in 2025 than in the past three decades according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. More journalists have been killed in three years than in a century of Western imperial conflict, including both world wars, combined. This is the second consecutive year this record has been broken.

Normalization of Deviance, “When people within an organization become so insensitive to deviant practice that it no longer feels wrong.”

Frankly, the bar for copy editing is past subterranean. Articles are running with obvious grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and even missing sources. The corrections aren’t in the headlines. Those updates, at times adding significant context to under-developed newsbeats, get buried by the algorithm. It isn’t what generates attention from users, so it doesn’t matter to the machine.

If consequences are not immediate, repeated choices become easier to accept as normal over time. Cascading disaster is inevitable, yet decision makers in organizations do not see their choices as harmful; rather, they maintain that the deviant behavior was necessary. This phenomenon plagues organizations and institutions and is detrimental to the structure of public services like journalism.

Consider the structure of most prominent news companies.   Shrinking newsrooms nationwide. More demand to sensationalize topics. Growing dissatisfaction with stories that do reach audiences. There is overwhelming, top-down pressure to manufacture profitable content instead of producing quality coverage. The average investigation costs above $200,000, from research to publication, and return on investment is never certain. News media cannot rebuild credibility if journalists are forced to make choices between employment and honesty every day.

Sensibly, many choose a steady paycheck instead of braving the uncertain and dangerous field of independent journalism. There can only be so many lone wolf reporters in the field, though. “Individual communication skills are relatively insignificant in an environment where communication is distrusted by default” says Alan Zaremba, author of “Organizational Communication."

Solidarity Journalism, “…[journalism standing] for basic human dignity and against suffering, and is practiced through newsworthiness judgments, sourcing, and framing that center the lived experiences of people subjected to unjust conditions.”

“The decision to report – or not report – on these conditions inherently leaves neutrality behind.”

The Solidarity Journalism Initiative began at UT Austin in 2021, but this isn’t the first academic movement to address mainstream journalism’s inadequacies. The subject of “Human Rights Journalism” and “Peace Journalism” arose in the restructuring of post-apartheid South Africa in 1990. Journalists must consider the ways human lives could be valued as much as objectivity is. Omission of systemic patterns and historical context takes the news out of the news. This reduces stories to their passing headlines. No wonder so many drown in anxiety when CNN comes on the television.

I pore over journal articles now, seeking permission to care about my stories from authority. I’m choosing not to dance around the loss of life now, for my own survival in a deadly news industry. I seek to archive good examples of thoughtful, honest reporting for others my age to reference. I hope that with these practices, human-centered ethics can rebuild the credibility of news as an institution in the global community. Surely, somewhere, another confused young reporter is searching through their folders for the answers as I did. 

Solidarity might be that answer for them.