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Journalistic writing is, as you might expect, the style of writing used by journalists. It is therefore a term for the broad style of writing used by news media outlets to put together stories.

Every news media outlet has its own ‘house’ style, which is usually set out in guidelines. This describes grammar and style points to be used in that publication or website. However, there are some common factors and characteristics to all journalistic writing.

This page describes the five different types of journalistic writing. It also provides some tips for writing in journalistic style to help you develop your skills in this area.

The Purpose of Journalistic Writing

Journalistic writing has a very clear purpose: to attract readers to a website, broadcaster or print media. This allows the owners to make money, usually by selling advertising space.

Newspapers traditionally did not make most of their money by selling newspapers. Instead, their main income was actually from advertising. If you look back at an early copy of the London Times , for example (from the early 1900s), the whole front page was actually advertisements, not news.

The news and stories are only a ‘hook’ to bring in readers and keep advertisers happy.

Journalists therefore want to attract readers to their stories—and then keep them.

They are therefore very good at identifying good stories, but also telling the story in a way that hooks and keeps readers interested.

Types of Journalistic Writing

There are five main types of journalistic writing:

Investigative journalism aims to discover the truth about a topic, person, group or event . It may require detailed and in-depth exploration through interviews, research and analysis. The purpose of investigative journalism is to answer questions.

News journalism reports facts, as they emerge . It aims to provide people with objective information about current events, in straightforward terms.

Feature writing provides a deeper look at events, people or topics , and offer a new perspective. Like investigative journalism, it may seek to uncover new information, but is less about answering questions, and more about simply providing more information.

Columns are the personal opinions of the writer . They are designed to entertain and persuade readers, and sometimes to be controversial and generate discussion.

Reviews describe a subject in a factual way, and then provide a personal opinion on it . They are often about books or television programmes when published in news media.

The importance of objectivity

It should be clear from the list of types of journalistic writing that journalists are not forbidden from expressing their opinions.

However, it is important that any journalist is absolutely clear when they are expressing their opinion, and when they are reporting on facts.

Readers are generally seeking objective writing and reporting when they are reading news or investigative journalism, or features. The place for opinions is columns or reviews.

The Journalistic Writing Process

Journalists tend to follow a clear process in writing any article. This allows them to put together a compelling story, with all the necessary elements.

This process is:

1. Gather all necessary information

The first step is to gather all the information that you need to write the story.

You want to know all the facts, from as many angles as possible. Journalists often spend time ‘on site’ as part of this process, interviewing people to find out what has happened, and how events have affected them.

Ideally, you want to use primary sources: people who were actually there, and witnessed the events. Secondary sources (those who were told by others what happened) are very much second-best in journalism.

2. Verify all your sources

It is crucial to establish the value of your information—that is, whether it is true or not.

A question of individual ‘truth’

It has become common in internet writing to talk about ‘your truth’, or ‘his truth’.

There is a place for this in journalism. It recognises that the same events may be experienced and interpreted in different ways by different people.

However, journalists also need to recognise that there are always some objective facts associated with any story. They must take time to separate these objective facts from opinions or perceptions and interpretations of events.

3. Establish your angle

You then need to establish your story ‘angle’ or focus: the aspect that makes it newsworthy.

This will vary with different types of journalism, and for different news outlets. It may also need some thought to establish why people should care about your story.

4. Write a strong opening paragraph

Your opening paragraph tells readers why they should bother to read on.

It needs to summarise the five Ws of the story: who, what, why, when, and where.

5. Consider the headline

Journalists are not necessarily expected to come up with their own headlines. However, it helps to consider how a piece might be headlined.

Being able to summarise the piece in a few words is a very good way to ensure that you are clear about your story and angle.

6. Use the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure

Journalists use a very clear structure for their stories. They start with the most important information (the opening paragraph, above), then expand on that with more detail. Finally, the last section of the article provides more information for anyone who is interested.

This means that you can therefore glean the main elements of any news story from the first paragraph—and decide if you want to read on.

Why the Inverted Pyramid?

The inverted pyramid structure actually stems from print journalism.

If typesetters could not fit the whole story into the space available, they would simply cut off the last few sentences until the article fitted.

Journalists therefore started to write in a way that ensured that the important information would not be removed during this process!

7. Edit your work carefully

The final step in the journalistic writing process is to edit your work yourself before submitting it.

Newsrooms and media outlets generally employ professional editors to check all copy before submitting it. However, journalists also have a responsibility to check their work over before submission to make sure it makes sense.

Read your work over to check that you have written in plain English , and that your meaning is as clear as possible. This will save the sub-editors and editors from having to waste time contacting you for clarifications.

Journalistic Writing Style

As well as a very clear process, journalists also share a common style.

This is NOT the same as the style guidelines used for certain publications (see box), but describes common features of all journalistic writing.

The features of journalistic writing include:

Short sentences . Short sentences are much easier to read and understand than longer ones. Journalists therefore tend to keep their sentences to a line of print or less.

Active voice . The active voice (‘he did x’, rather than ‘x was done by him’) is action-focused, and shorter. It therefore keeps readers’ interest, and makes stories more direct and personal.

Quotes. Most news stories and journalistic writing will include quotes from individuals. This makes the story much more people-focused—which is more likely to keep readers interested. This is why many press releases try to provide quotes (and there is more about this in our page How to Write a Press Release ).

Style guidelines

Most news media have style guidelines. They may share these with other outlets (for example, by using the Associated Press guidelines), or they may have their own (such as the London Times style guide).

These guidelines explain the ‘house style’. This may include, for example, whether the outlet commonly uses an ‘Oxford comma’ or comma placed after the penultimate item in a list, and describe the use of capitals or italics for certain words or phrases.

It is important to be aware of these style guidelines if you are writing for a particular publication.

Journalistic writing is the style used by news outlets to tell factual stories. It uses some established conventions, many of which are driven by the constraints of printing. However, these also work well in internet writing as they grab and hold readers’ attention very effectively.

Continue to: Writing for the Internet Cliches to Avoid

See also: Creative Writing Technical Writing Coherence in Writing

The Art of Journalistic Writing: A Comprehensive Guide ✍️

Journalistic writing aims to provide accurate and objective news coverage to the audience. Learn how to write like journalists in this comprehensive guide.

In the fast-paced realm of freelance writing, captivating and informative articles are the key to setting yourself apart from the competition. That's where the art of journalistic writing becomes your secret weapon. 

Below, we'll delve into the significance of journalistic writing for Independents, demystify its definition and various types, explore its essential features, and provide you with invaluable tips to sharpen your skills. Get ready to unlock the power of journalistic writing and take your freelance career to new heights . Let's dive in and discover the magic behind compelling stories that captivate readers worldwide.

What is journalistic writing? 📝 

Journalistic writing, as the name implies, is the style of writing used by journalists and news media organizations to share news and information about local, national, and global events, issues, and developments with the public.

The main goal of journalistic writing is to provide accurate and objective news coverage. Journalists gather facts, conduct research, and interview sources to present a fair and unbiased account of events. They strive to deliver information clearly, concisely, and interestingly that grabs readers’ attention and helps them understand the subject.

Journalistic writing also encourages public discussion, critical thinking, and informed decision-making. Since journalists present diverse perspectives, analyze complex issues, and investigate misconduct, they empower readers to form opinions and actively engage with the news. Journalistic writing acts as a watchdog, holding institutions and individuals accountable and promoting transparency in society.

Types of journalistic writing 🔥

Different types of journalism writing styles serve unique purposes, from exposing truths to keeping us informed, sparking conversations, and providing meaningful insights into the world around us. 

Here are five types of journalistic writing you should know about:

Investigative journalism 🕵️

Investigative journalists are like detectives in the news world. They dive deep into topics, dedicating their time and resources to uncover hidden information, expose corruption, and bring wrongdoing to the surface.

News journalism 🗞️

News journalists are frontline reporters who inform people about the latest happenings. They cover a wide range of topics, from politics and the economy to science and entertainment. They gather facts, interview sources, and present unbiased information objectively and concisely.

Column journalism 📰

In column journalism, writers share their personal opinions and perspectives on various subjects. They offer analysis, commentary, and insights on social, cultural, or political issues. Whether they are experts in their fields or well-known figures with unique voices, their columns provide readers with different standpoints and spark thought-provoking discussions.

Feature writing 🙇 

Feature writers take us beyond the basic facts and immerse us in storytelling. They explore human-interest stories, profiles, and in-depth features on specific topics. They also delve into the personal lives, experiences, or achievements of individuals or communities, providing a deeper understanding of the subject matter by using narrative techniques.

Reviews journalism 📖

Reviewers are the guides helping us make informed decisions about the arts. They evaluate and critique films, books, music, theater shows, and more. Through their opinions and assessments, they analyze the quality, impact, and significance of creative works. Review journalism not only helps us choose what to watch, read, or listen to, but it also contributes to cultural conversations and discussions.

Key features of journalistic writing 🔑

Journalistic writing distinguishes itself from other forms of writing through several essential characteristics. And here are a few: 

• Accuracy and objectivity: These are of utmost importance. Journalists go to great lengths to gather reliable information, verify sources, and present a balanced perspective. They strive to separate facts from opinions, ensuring readers receive an accurate account of events.
• Timeliness and relevance: Journalists focus on current events and issues that are of interest to the public. They aim to provide up-to-date information, sharing the latest developments and their implications.
• Clarity and conciseness: Journalists use clear and simple language, avoiding complex jargon that might confuse the audience. They use short sentences and paragraphs that enhance readability.
• Inverted pyramid structure: Commonly employed in journalistic writing, this structure places the most important information at the beginning of the article –– in the headline and the first paragraph. Subsequent paragraphs contain supporting details arranged in descending order of significance. By adopting this approach, journalists enable readers to grasp the main points quickly and decide whether to delve deeper into the topic.
• Engagement and impact: Journalists leverage various storytelling techniques, such as vivid descriptions and compelling narratives, to captivate their audience. They incorporate quotes, anecdotes, and human-interest elements to evoke emotions among readers and make the story relatable.

How to write like a journalist: 7 tips 💯

Now that you know the ins and outs of journalistic style and storytelling, let’s explore the best practices to follow during news writing: 

1. Use the inverted pyramid structure 🔻

If you’re wondering how to structure and write a news story or article, the answer is simple: Go from the most important to the least important. Start your articles with vital facts, and arrange supporting details in descending order of significance. This structure ensures readers receive essential information even if they don’t read the entire piece.

2. Establish your angle 📐

 Before you begin writing , determine the angle or perspective you want to take on the story. Although you should share a neutral opinion, choosing an angle helps you stay focused and deliver a clear message. Consider what makes your story unique or newsworthy, and shape your narrative accordingly.

3. Stick to the facts 🩹

Journalistic writing values accuracy and objectivity. Present information verifiable and supported by credible sources, and avoid personal opinions and biases –– allowing the facts to speak for themselves. Fact-checking is essential to maintain the integrity of your writing.

4. Use quotations to generate credibility 💭

Including quotes from reliable sources adds credibility and depth to your writing. Interview relevant individuals, experts, or eyewitnesses to gather their perspectives and insights. Incorporate their direct quotes to support your narrative and provide first-hand accounts.

5. Write clear and concise sentences 💎

Use straightforward language to effectively communicate your message. Journalism articles typically only include one-to-three sentences per paragraph and should not exceed 20 words per sentence. 

6. Edit and revise 💻

Thorough editing is crucial to produce polished and professional journalistic pieces. So once you finish your first draft, invest time on editing and revising your work. Look for grammatical errors, clarity issues, and redundancies. And ensure your writing flows smoothly and maintains a consistent tone. 

7. Maintain ethical standards 🏅

You want repeat readers who’ll come back for more from you. And for that, you must keep in mind journalistic principles and share fair, trusting, and accountable pieces. Attribute information to appropriate sources, respect privacy when necessary, and conduct thorough fact-checking.

Write like a pro with Contra 🌟

Mastering the art of journalistic writing is the key to becoming a skilled and impactful freelance writer . By understanding the criticality of thorough research, engaging storytelling, and holding the powerful accountable, you can create compelling news stories that resonate with readers. 

And with Contra as your trusted companion, you'll have the tools and resources to refine your journalistic writing skills and take your freelance career to new heights. So don't miss out on the opportunity to write like a pro. Sign up with Contra today, promote your services commission-free, and connect with fellow writers. 

Check out Contra for Independents , and join our Slack community to interact with a supportive network of writers, sharing knowledge and learning from each other.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Journalism and Journalistic Writing: Introduction

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

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Journalism is the practice of gathering, recording, verifying, and reporting on information of public importance. Though these general duties have been historically consistent, the particulars of the journalistic process have evolved as the ways information is collected, disseminated, and consumed have changed. Things like the invention of the printing press in the 15 th century, the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791, the completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858,   the first televised presidential debates in 1960, and more have broadened the ways that journalists write (as well as the ways that their readers read). Today, journalists may perform a number of different roles. They still write traditional text-based pieces, but they may also film documentaries, record podcasts, create photo essays, help run 24-hour TV broadcasts, and keep the news at our fingertips via social media and the internet. Collectively, these various journalistic media help members of the public learn what is happening in the world so they may make informed decisions.

The most important difference between journalism and other forms of non-fiction writing is the idea of objectivity. Journalists are expected to keep an objective mindset at all times as they interview sources, research events, and write and report their stories. Their stories should not aim to persuade their readers but instead to inform. That is not to say you will never find an opinion in a newspaper—rather, journalists must be incredibly mindful of keeping subjectivity to pieces like editorials, columns, and other opinion-based content.

Similarly, journalists devote most of their efforts to working with primary sources, whereas a research paper or another non-fiction piece of writing might frequently consult an encyclopedia, a scholarly article, or another secondary or tertiary source. When a journalist is researching and writing their story, they will often interview a number of individuals—from politicians to the average citizen—to gain insight into what people have experienced, and the quotes journalists collect drive and shape their stories. 

The pages in this section aim to provide a brief overview of journalistic practices and standards, such as the ethics of collecting and reporting on information; writing conventions like the inverted pyramid and using Associated Press (AP) Style; and formatting and drafting journalistic content like press releases.

Journalism and Journalistic Writing

These resources provide an overview of journalistic writing with explanations of the most important and most often used elements of journalism and the Associated Press style. This resource, revised according to The Associated Press Stylebook 2012 , offers examples for the general format of AP style. For more information, please consult The Associated Press Stylebook 2012 , 47 th edition.

What Is Literary Journalism?

Carl T. Gossett Jr / Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Literary journalism is a form of nonfiction that combines factual reporting with narrative techniques and stylistic strategies traditionally associated with fiction. This form of writing can also be called  narrative journalism or new journalism . The term literary journalism is sometimes used interchangeably with creative nonfiction ; more often, however, it is regarded as one type of creative nonfiction.

In his ground-breaking anthology The Literary Journalists , Norman Sims observed that literary journalism "demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces to show that an author is at work."

Highly regarded literary journalists in the U.S. today include John McPhee , Jane Kramer, Mark Singer, and Richard Rhodes. Some notable literary journalists of the past include Stephen Crane, Henry Mayhew , Jack London , George Orwell , and Tom Wolfe.

Characteristics of Literary Journalism

There is not exactly a concrete formula that writers use to craft literary journalism, as there is for other genres, but according to Sims, a few somewhat flexible rules and common features define literary journalism. "Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism , voice , a focus on ordinary people ... and accuracy.

"Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered. A list of characteristics can be an easier way to define literary journalism than a formal definition or a set of rules. Well, there are some rules, but Mark Kramer used the term 'breakable rules' in an anthology we edited. Among those rules, Kramer included:

• Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds...
• Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor...
• Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.
• Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions.

... Journalism ties itself to the actual, the confirmed, that which is not simply imagined. ... Literary journalists have adhered to the rules of accuracy—or mostly so—precisely because their work cannot be labeled as journalism if details and characters are imaginary." 

Why Literary Journalism Is Not Fiction or Journalism

The term "literary journalism" suggests ties to fiction and journalism, but according to Jan Whitt, literary journalism does not fit neatly into any other category of writing. "Literary journalism is not fiction—the people are real and the events occurred—nor is it journalism in a traditional sense.

"There is interpretation, a personal point of view, and (often) experimentation with structure and chronology. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of those who are affected by those institutions."

The Role of the Reader

Because creative nonfiction is so nuanced, the burden of interpreting literary journalism falls on readers. John McPhee, quoted by Sims in "The Art of Literary Journalism," elaborates: "Through dialogue , words, the presentation of the scene, you can turn over the material to the reader. The reader is ninety-some percent of what's creative in creative writing. A writer simply gets things started."

Literary Journalism and the Truth

Literary journalists face a complicated challenge. They must deliver facts and comment on current events in ways that speak to much larger big picture truths about culture, politics, and other major facets of life; literary journalists are, if anything, more tied to authenticity than other journalists. Literary journalism exists for a reason: to start conversations.

Literary Journalism as Nonfiction Prose

Rose Wilder talks about literary journalism as nonfiction prose—informational writing that flows and develops organically like a story—and the strategies that effective writers of this genre employ in The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary journalist. "As defined by Thomas B. Connery, literary journalism is 'nonfiction printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story or sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical  techniques generally associated with fiction.'

"Through these stories and sketches, authors 'make a statement, or provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted.' Norman Sims adds to this definition by suggesting the genre  itself allows readers to 'behold others' lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own.'

"He goes on to suggest, 'There is something intrinsically political—and strongly democratic—about literary journalism—something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite.' Further, as John E. Hartsock points out, the bulk of work that has been considered literary journalism is composed 'largely by professional journalists or those writers whose industrial means of production is to be found in the newspaper and magazine press, thus making them at least for the interim de facto journalists.'"

She concludes, "Common to many definitions of literary journalism is that the work itself should contain some kind of higher truth; the stories themselves may be said to be emblematic of a larger truth."

Background of Literary Journalism

This distinct version of journalism owes its beginnings to the likes of Benjamin Franklin, William Hazlitt, Joseph Pulitzer, and others. "[Benjamin] Franklin's Silence Dogood essays marked his entrance into literary journalism," begins Carla Mulford. "Silence, the persona Franklin adopted, speaks to the form that literary journalism should take—that it should be situated in the ordinary world—even though her background was not typically found in newspaper writing." 

Literary journalism as it is now was decades in the making, and it is very much intertwined with the New Journalism movement of the late 20th century. Arthur Krystal speaks to the critical role that essayist William Hazlitt played in refining the genre: "A hundred and fifty years before the New Journalists of the 1960s rubbed our noses in their egos, [William] Hazlitt put himself into his work with a candor that would have been unthinkable a few generations earlier."

Robert Boynton clarifies the relationship between literary journalism and new journalism, two terms that were once separate but are now often used interchangeably. "The phrase 'New Journalism' first appeared in an American context in the 1880s when it was used to describe the blend of sensationalism and crusading journalism—muckraking on behalf of immigrants and the poor—one found in the New York World and other papers... Although it was historically unrelated to [Joseph] Pulitzer's New Journalism, the genre of writing that Lincoln Steffens called 'literary journalism' shared many of its goals."

Boynton goes on to compare literary journalism with editorial policy. "As the city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in the 1890s, Steffens made literary journalism—artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses—into editorial policy, insisting that the basic goals of the artist and the journalist (subjectivity, honesty, empathy) were the same."

• Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
• Krystal, Arthur. "Slang-Whanger." The New Yorker, 11 May 2009.
• Lane, Rose Wilder.  The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist . Edited by Amy Mattson Lauters, University of Missouri Press, 2007.
• Mulford, Carla. “Benjamin Franklin and Transatlantic Literary Journalism.”  Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 , edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 75–90.
• Sims, Norman. True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism . 1st ed., Northwestern University Press, 2008.
• Sims, Norman. “The Art of Literary Journalism.”  Literary Journalism , edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, Ballantine Books, 1995.
• Sims, Norman. The Literary Journalists . Ballantine Books, 1984.
• Whitt, Jan. Women in American Journalism: A New History . University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• Genres in Literature
• literary present (verbs)
• Interior Monologues
• Third-Person Point of View
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• What Is a Synopsis and How Do You Write One?
• A Guide to All Types of Narration, With Examples
• The Essay: History and Definition
• A Look at the Roles Characters Play in Literature
• What Is a Novel? Definition and Characteristics

• Writing Style
• How to write …
• Analysis of Speech
• Storytelling
• Career Development

What Is Journalistic Writing: Purpose, Features, Types, and 10 News Values

• by Anastasiya Yakubovska
• 26.04.2022 02.05.2024

Further in the article, you will learn about what journalistic writing is, its main purpose, what are the features and characteristics of journalistic style, get acquainted with three types of journalism, and at the end of the article, you will find information about how the media select news.

Not so long ago, people could get news only from local newspapers, radio, and television. Nowdays we have access to any information in any format 24/7 (thank you, Internet!).

The ways of obtaining information have changed, but the principles and features of journalism have remained the same.

Table of Contents

What is journalistic writing, and its main purpose.

• Features of Journalistic Writing 

How to Write a Journalistic Text: 3 Key Elements

Information genre and its types, analytical genre.

• Artistic-journalistic Types of Journalistic Writing 
• 10 News Values 

Journalistic writing is a style of writing that is used by the media to transmit news messages to a mass addressee (newspapers, television, radio, Internet).

Journalistic writing has two main purposes, which to some extent contradict each other:

• Informing . The main aim of journalistic writing is to inform the public about the event that has occurred or will occur in the future, while the journalist must be as objective as possible.
• Impact on the audience . In some cases, news reports may be overly emotional with a pronounced position of the author and his personal opinion. Such messages have a social assessment and appeal, influence the people and form public opinion.

Features of Journalistic Writing

Journalistic writing has some specific features by which it is easy to identify:

• Informative heading. The news headlines are quite long. From the title, it is clear what will be discussed in the news article. 
• The first sentence (paragraph or lead) summarizes the essence of the news. 
• The inverted pyramid principle . The priority, value, and usefulness of information decrease from the beginning of the text to its end.
• Sentences and paragraphs are mostly short.
• Lots of specifics and details.
• Readability, simplicity, competent presentation of information.
• Emotionality and evaluation.
• Frequent use of socio-political vocabulary (names of political parties, departments, economic and legal terms, etc.). 
• Focus on a mass audience.
• Rhetorical questions, exclamations, and repetitions.
• In addition to the main colloquial (informal) style used in journalism, there are slang and jargon words.
• post “What Is Scientific Writing Style: Characteristics, Types, and Examples”.
• “What Is Business Writing Style: Characteristics, Types, and Examples”.

There are three key components on which any journalistic text is built:

• Lead (or lede). This is the first sentence or main and opening paragraph of the news article. The lead is the “header” of the article, which outlines the main idea of the text. Often the lead is highlighted in a different font or color, usually, its length is from 3 to 5 lines of text.

Lead cannot be ignored. It can be sensational or dramatic, it can reveal the details of an event or briefly describe the news, it can amuse the reader or challenge him.

A news article lead looks like this:

“ Rescue operations are continuing in South Africa in an effort to save the lives of dozens of people who are missing following the floods in KwaZulu-Natal province. With more rain on its way, emergency teams face further peril as they search for survivors. “   bbc.com

2. Citation . 90% of all journalistic investigations are based on interviews or other primary sources. Therefore, it is not surprising that quotes have a special place in news reports.

Read also post “How to Write a Persuasive Article or Essay: Examples of Persuasive Argument”.

3. Brevity and readability. Sentences and paragraphs are short and simple. It does not mean that you will not find long compound sentences in the text. But in most cases – “brevity is the soul of wit.”

In addition, it is important not to overdo with terms. Still, the news articles should be understandable to the mass audience: if you used the term “legal nihilism”, be kind, and explain what it means (p.s.: legal nihilism is the denial of laws and rules/norms of behavior ). 

Journalism Genres and Types of Journalistic Writing

There are three genres of journalistic writing:

• Informational : reportage, interview, information note, informational report. The main function is to communicate information: what, where, when, and under what circumstances it happened or will happen.
• Analytical : conversation, review , article, survey, correspondence. The primary function is to influence the public. There are the author’s reasoning, argumentation, analysis of the event, personal conclusions, and assessment of what is happening.
• Artistic-journalistic : essay , feuilleton, pamphlet, profile essay. These genres used to get a figurative, emotional idea of an event or fact.

Let’s take a closer look at each genre.

Note as a Type of Journalistic Writing

A note is a short message about a new event or fact. The main features are the reliability of the fact, novelty, and brevity.

“The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were accompanied by two of their children as they joined other royals for the Easter Sunday service at Windsor Castle. Prince George was dressed in a dark blue suit like his father while Princess Charlotte’s dress matched her mother Catherine’s light blue outfit . Several of their second cousins, such as Mia Tindall and Savannah and Isla Phillips, also attended. The Queen was not at the service – one of the staples of the family’s year. The 95-year-old monarch, who has been suffering mobility issues recently. was also absent from the traditional Maundy Service last Thursday where special coins were given to 96 men and 96 women .”   bbc.com

Read also “How to Write a News Story”.

Reportage is a message from the scene. Features: efficiency, objective coverage of events, the reporter is an eyewitness or participant in what is happening.

Example: television report (live broadcast from the scene), report in the print media after collecting and processing information.

An interview is the receipt of information during a conversation between an interviewer (journalist) and an interviewee. 

Examples: informational interviews to collect up-to-date data on an air crash that has occurred (for example, an interview with eyewitnesses); interview investigation; personal interview or interview-portrait.

Informational Report

A report is a chronologically sequential, detailed report of an event.

Example: a report on hostilities, a report on the results of a meeting, a conference, a government or court session.

Conversation or Dialogue

A conversation (dialogue) is a type of interview when a journalist acts not just as an intermediary between the hero and the viewer, but communicates with the interlocutor on an equal footing thanks to his achievements, experience, and professionalism.

Example: TV show with artists. 

A review is a critical judgment or discussion that contains an assessment and a brief analysis of a literary work, scientific publication, analysis of a work of art, journalism, etc. 

Examples: book review , play review, movie review , TV show review, game review.

An article is a genre of journalism that expresses the author’s reasoned point of view on social processes, on various current events or phenomena.

After reading an analytical article, the reader receives the information he needs and then independently reflects on the issues of interest to him.

The subject of the article is not the event itself, processes, or phenomena, but the consequences they cause.

Examples: an article on the political development of the country, a practical and analytical article on the rise in food prices, a polemical article (dispute) on teaching the basics of Orthodox culture.

Analytical Correspondence

Analytical correspondence is a message that gives information about an event or phenomenon (usually this is one significant fact).

Analytical correspondence may include fragments of a “live” report or a retelling of what is happening. But necessarily in such a message, there is a clarification of the causes of the event or phenomenon, the determination of its value and significance for society, and the prediction of its further development.

The primary source of this genre of journalistic writing is always the author of the publication (correspondent).

Artistic-journalistic Types of Journalistic Writing

Essay : a journalist not only describes a problem, an event, or a portrait of a person, based on factual data but also uses artistic methods of expressiveness. 

Examples: a portrait essay about the life of a famous person; historical essays , description of incidents, meetings with people during the author’s travel (essay by A. S. Pushkin “Journey to Arzrum”, 1829).

Feuilleton is a short note, essay, or article of a satirical nature, the main task of which is to ridicule “evil”.

Examples: satirical writers such as M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, I.A. Ilf, and E.P. Petrov.

A pamphlet is a satirical work or article, the purpose of which is to ridicule certain human vices, to denounce and humiliate a hero who appears to the author as a carrier of a dangerous social evil.

In a pamphlet, the author uses grotesque, hyperbole, irony, and sarcasm.

Examples: “Lettres provinciales” by the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal, “The Grumbled Hive” by the English writer Bernard Mandeville, pamphleteers D.I. Pisarev with the pamphlet “Bees”, A.M. Gorky “The City of the Yellow Devil”, L.M. Leonov “The Shadow of Barbarossa”.

10 News Values

First of all, journalistic writing is associated with the media. A special place in the mass media is occupied by news articles : they are in demand and attract more readers.

Therefore, I propose to pay attention to one very interesting point: how is a news article written, and by what criteria are news “selected”?

So, 10 news values are:

• Relevance . The news must meet the needs and interests of the audience.
• Timeliness . Event information must be up to date and appear on time. No one will read the election results two weeks after the election.
• Clarity and unambiguity. Simple, understandable news is more accessible to the public, read more often, and is more interesting. 
• Predictability . Significant events usually have specific dates (for example, election day, the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, the football championship). Therefore, with the approach of such an event, public interest increases, and the news becomes more valuable.
• Unpredictability . On the other hand, unpredictable events and phenomena (natural disasters or crimes) also arouse public interest.
• Importance and scale of the event. War, elections, protests, sports games, and other important events require long and detailed press coverage.
• Composition . Sometimes, to dilute, for example, the negativity of the information flow, the editor selects news reports of the opposite nature: funny cases, love, romance, salvation, animals, adventure, risk, etc.
• Celebrities . News with the participation of politicians, artists, and sportsmen, due to their status and recognition, is more often published in the media and arouses increased interest.
• Leading countries in the world economy and politics. A strike, a natural disaster, or a plane crash in a developed country will immediately hit the media. But about the lack of drinking water in Ethiopia, you can write later.
• Negativity . The “bad” news is more popular.

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What is Literary Journalism: a Guide with Examples

Literary journalism is a genre created with the help of a reporter’s inner voice and employing a writing style based on literary techniques. The journalists working in the genre of literary journalism must be able to use the whole literary arsenal: epithets, impersonations, comparisons, allegories, etc. Thus, literary journalism is similar to fiction. At the same time, it remains journalism , which is the opposite of fiction as it tells a true story. The journalist’s task here is not only to inform us about specific events but also to affect our feelings (mainly aesthetic ones) and explore the details that ordinary journalism overlooks.

Characteristics of literary journalism

Modern journalism is constantly changing, but not all changes are good for it (take fake news proliferating thanks to social media , for instance). Contemporary literary journalism differs from its historic predecessor in the following:

• Literary journalism almost completely lost its unity with literature
• Journalists have stopped relying on the literary features of the language and style
• There are fewer and fewer articles in the genre of literary journalism in modern editions
• Contemporary media has lost the need in literary journalism
• The habits of media consumers today are not sophisticated enough for a revival of literary journalism

The most prominent works of literary journalism

With all this, it’s no surprise that we need to go back in time to find worthy examples of literary journalism. Fortunately, it wasn’t until the 1970-s that literary journalism came to an end, so here are 4 great works of the genre that are worth every minute of your attention.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

Mark Twain studied journalism from the age of 12 and until the end of his life. It brought him his first glory and a pseudonym and made him a writer. In 1867, Twain (as a correspondent of the newspaper Daily Alta California , San Francisco) went on a sea voyage to Europe, the Middle East, and Egypt. His reports and travel records turned into the book The Innocents Abroad , which made him famous all over the world.

In some sense, American journalism came out of letters that served as an important source of information about life in the colonies. The newspaper has long been characterized by an epistolary subjectivity, and Twain’s book recalls the times when no one thought that neutrality would one day become one of the hallmarks of the “right” journalism.

Of course, Twain’s travel around the Old World was a journey not only through geography but also through the history that Twain resolutely refused to worship. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes not too much, but the more valuable are the lyrical and sublime notes that sound when Twain-the-narrator is truly captivated by something.

John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)

John Hersey was a war correspondent and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his debut story A Bell for Adano . As a reporter of The New Yorker , he was one of the first journalists from the USA who came to Hiroshima to describe the consequences of the atomic bombing.

Starting with where two doctors, two priests, a seamstress, and a plant employee were and what they were doing at exactly 08:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Hersey describes the year they lived after that. Hersey’s uniform and detached tone seems to be the only appropriate medium in relation to what one would call indescribable and inexpressible. Without allowing himself sentimentality, admiring horrors, or obvious partiality, he doesn’t miss any of the details that add up to a horrible and magnificent picture.

Hiroshima became a sensation due to the formidable brevity of the author’s prose, which tried to give the reader the most explicit (and the most complete) idea of what happened for the first time in mankind’s history

Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood” (1965)

Truman Capote turned to journalism as a young writer looking for a new form of self-expression. He read an article about the murder of the family of a farmer Herbert Clutter in Holcomb City (Kansas) in the newspaper and went there to collect the material. His original idea was to write about how a brutal murder influenced the life of the quiet backwoods. The killers were caught, and Capote decided to use their confessions in his book. He finished it only after the killers were hanged. This way, the six-year story got the finale.

In Cold Blood was published in “The New Yorker” in 1965. Next year it was released as a book that became the benchmark of true crime and a super bestseller. “In Cold Blood” includes:

• A stylistic brilliance.
• Inexorable footsteps of doom destroying both innocent and guilty.
• The horror hidden in a person and waiting for a chance to break out.

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Tomas Wolfe is one of the key figures of literary journalism. Mainly due to his creative and, so to speak, production efforts, “the new journalism” became an essential part of American culture and drew close attention (both critical and academic).

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test became one of the hallmarks of this type of journalism with its focus on aesthetic expressiveness (along with documentary authenticity). This is a story about the writer Ken Kesey and his friends and associates’ community, “Merry Pranksters”, who spread the idea of the benefits of expanding consciousness.

Wolfe decided to plunge into the “subjective reality” of the characters and their adventures. To convey them to the reader, he had to “squeeze” the English language: Wolfe changes prose to poetry , dives into the stream of consciousness, and mocks the traditional punctuation. In general, he does just about everything to make a crazy carnival come to life on the pages of his book (without actually participating in it). Compare that with gonzo journalism by Hunter S. Thompson , the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which draws upon some similar themes.

The book’s main part is devoted to the journey of the “pranksters” on a psychedelic propaganda bus and the “acid tests” themselves, which were actually parties where a lot of people took LSD. Wolfe had to use different sources of information to reconstruct these events, and it’s hard to believe that he didn’t experience any of them himself. Yet, no matter how bright his book shines and how much freedom it shows, Wolfe makes it clear that he’s talking about a doomed project and an ending era.

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The Pyramid of Journalism Competence: what journalists need to know

What does a journalist need to know?

What defines “competence” in journalism?

When you graduate from a journalism school, what should you know how to do?

In the digital age, the answers to those questions are more important than ever. For more than three decades now, they have been near the center of conversation and debate at Poynter. Before we could figure out what to teach, we needed to understand – in the public interest – what journalists needed to learn.

This process was energized in 1997 by a call to action from Tom Rosenstiel, one of the leaders of a group called the Committee of Concerned Journalists. Over the next two years, the committee conducted “21 public forums attended by 3,000 people and involving testimony from more than 300 journalists,” according to the book “The Elements of Journalism”  by Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach.

Poynter was asked to conduct one of those forums on a most challenging topic: What does it mean to be a competent journalist? And so we did.

In preparation for this conference on Feb. 26, 1998, the Poynter faculty, under my direction, built an edifice we came to call the Pyramid of Competence. This structure comprised 10 blocks. The cornerstones were news judgment and reporting . The foundation also included language and analysis . The central stone was technology , between audio-visual knowledge and numeracy . Closer to the top were civic and cultural literacy. At the apex was ethics .

The pyramid has had an interesting history, inside and outside the institute. Its most serious consideration came from the accrediting council of AEJMC. At a time when the standards for accreditation were under review, leaders such as Trevor Brown, dean at Indiana University, thought the ideas behind the pyramid would lead to a clearer articulation of educational “outcomes,” what students should expect to get out of a journalism education.

Much has changed in the world of journalism since the pyramid was constructed. New media platforms have been invented; business models have collapsed; arguments about who is a journalist abound. Pyramids may be tombs for dead kings, but they have a way of hanging around – for a long time.

What you are about to experience is the most up-to-date version of the Pyramid of Competence. It contains 10 sections, one for each of the competencies. It begins with a description and a definition, followed by a list of imagined courses that could impart that competency, topped off with an example of an essay that could be used to cultivate that area of journalistic knowledge.

You will find in these descriptions language that, we hope, is contemporary, including words such as “curation,” “aggregation,” and “data visualization,” language that was not part of journalism study when the pyramid was first created.

There were some key questions that were not resolved when the pyramid was built — and that remain unresolved. The big question is this: How many of these competencies should reside in any individual journalist? Or is it possible and desirable to imagine that these competencies can reside across a news organization, expressed in the work of specialists? In short, should the writer of the story also know how to develop an algorithm of data analysis and also be able to design a page?

Our tentative answer (perhaps I should restate that as “my” tentative answer) is that versatility is one of the most important virtues in contemporary journalism. That does not mean that the journalist need be an expert in all these areas. But it requires the journalist to be able to converse with colleagues in these areas across disciplines and “without an accent.” Competence is not a synonym for expertise.

We invite you to climb the Pyramid of Competence. Let us know how the world of journalism looks when you reach the top.

News Judgment

This competence resides in every academic discipline but is made manifest in powerful ways in the study and practice of journalism.

On any given day – or minute – the journalist (especially the editor) sorts through the events and concerns of the moment, hoping to determine which of them deserves the special attention of general and particular audiences.

Decisions on what to publish are based on two broad categories, expressed here in the form of questions:

• Is it important?

• Is it interesting?

There are, of course, important things that may not be interesting – a fluctuation in the money supply. Interesting things – celebrity divorces – may not be important. But on many days, the two categories will converge:

• The attacks of 9/11.

• The oil spill in the Gulf.

• The collapse of the economy in 2008.

• The election of the first African-American president.

• The rate of suicide of soldiers returned from war.

All these are terribly interesting and crucially important, relevant at some level to every person on the planet. Such stories deserve a standing at the top of the news ladder.

But these choices are obvious. The importance of news is relative. On some days news is slow so that an alligator attack across the state gets more attention than it may deserve. Then there are big news days when stories elbow each other for prominence. A significant tropical storm that hit Tampa Bay in 2001 got much less attention than usual because it happened the week of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

An editor with rich experience and refined news judgment will be able to see important news that is invisible to others. This is an invaluable civic, democratic, and commercial power. An expert is paying attention.

[News judgment describes the cognitive acts of understanding what matters: what is most important or most interesting. It is exercised in such practices as the generation of story ideas by reporters; by selection and play of stories by news editors; by the curation and aggregation of items on the Internet.]

Courses that would enrich news judgment

• Reporting I & II

• Advanced Reporting

• Editing I & II

• Investigative Reporting

• Computer-Assisted Reporting

• Work on School Publications

• Internships at News Organizations

• Media & Society

• News & Media Literacy

• Understanding Social Networks

An essay to read that would enhance news judgment

“From Politics to Human Interest,” by Helen MacGill Hughes

Reporting and Evidence

If news judgment sits as one cornerstone of the pyramid of competence, reporting serves as the other. In an academic context, reporting represents the gathering, verification, and distribution of evidence.

• Why is the price of gasoline so high?

• Where is the balance between personal privacy and national security?

• What were the root causes for the attacks on America on 9/11?

• Is Apple exploiting Chinese workers?

The answers to these questions cannot be simply asserted. Reporters and other news researchers must go out, gather evidence from reliable sources, check it out, and present it in the public interest.

Journalists of various types learn different methods of hunting and gathering information: documents (such as court records), minutes or notes taken at meetings, chronologies, interviews, public records, direct observation, participant observation, immersion reporting, data analysis, participation in social networks – these are just some of the methods journalists use to gain a meaningful picture of the world.

Science, law, economics, ethnography – each discipline offers a distinctive perspective on what constitutes good evidence. The big word for this in philosophy is “epistemology,” the philosophy of knowing. In journalism the questions might go simply, “How do reporters know?”

Academic study takes this to another level, “How do they KNOW what they know?”

[Reporting and Evidence represent the process and products of research.

The traditional methods of reporting all involve finding things out and checking them out, what Kovach and Rosenstiel describe as a discipline of verification, not assertion. Evidence involves tests of reliability, often based on knowledge of the sources. Reporters gather evidence, which is then tested against the standards of editors. Investigations, often to expose wrongdoing, require different standards of evidence than traditional reporting. Forms of evidence are gathered by photographers and documentary videographers, and, most recently, by computer-assisted and data-management efforts. Since standards of evidence differ in various disciplines, knowledge of a field outside of journalism – law, economics, biology – enrich all acts of reporting.]

Courses that would enrich reporting and evidence

• Public Service Reporting

• Fact-Checking and Verification

• Scientific Method

• Ethnography

• Rules of Evidence

• Philosophy of Knowledge

• Quantitative Methods

An essay to read that would enhance reporting and evidence

“Getting the Story in Vietnam,” by David Halberstam

Language and Storytelling

The pyramid of journalism competence is built upon a foundation. One of its blocks is the effective use of language to express reports, stories, and other appropriate forms of communication.

Canadian scholar Stuart Adam argues that, at heart, journalists are a type of author, the work existing on a spectrum that extends from the civic to the literary. Competent journalists exhibit versatility in this area, demonstrating the capacity to write in different genres and for different media – long or short, fast or slow – for a variety of audiences and platforms.

A key distinction is between reports and stories. At the heart of journalism remains the neutral, unbiased report, still grounded in the traditional questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how. Using what semanticist S.I. Hayakawa termed “unloaded” language, the reporter sorts through the evidence to provide audiences with good information in the public interest.

The yang to the yin of the report is the story. The product of story is not information, but experience, and the effect is not just actionable knowledge, but empathy. This is created by the transformation of elements of reporting into narrative, so that who becomes character, what becomes scenic action, when becomes chronology, where becomes setting, why (always the most difficult) becomes motive, and how becomes how it happened.

There are forms of reportage and narrative that are expressed via other media and methods (we’ll get to these). But the written word on the page is the basis for all others.

[Language and Storytelling come to the journalist through normal intellectual development, but are enhanced by the practice of authorship, the study of language (including a foreign language), experimentation with a variety of narrative strategies in multiple genres across media platforms.]

Courses that would enrich language and storytelling

• Elements of Language

• Composition I & II

• Surveys of English and American Literature

• Nonfiction Narrative

• Theories of Narrative

• Foreign Language

An essay to read that would enhance language and storytelling

“Politics and the English Language,” by George Orwell

Analysis and Interpretation

To quote the 1947 Hutchins Commission report , “It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.” Context, meaning, trends, relationships, tensions all must appear on the radar screen of the discerning journalist. Some scoops are conceptual.

“Critical thinking” has become too vague a concept to describe this capacity. This form of literacy falls somewhere between analysis and interpretation and is often conveyed in arguments, commentary, opinion, and investigative reporting.

• How does a sexual abuse scandal at Penn State University resemble the one inside the Catholic Church?

• In what sense has global economics given us a “flat” world?

• Can the events of 9/11/2001 really be traced back to political and religious forces in Egypt, dating back to 1948?

The ability to see such questions, to analyze them and derive meaning from them, comes from the exercise of cognitive muscles toned in the gymnasia of traditional academic disciplines, from studies as diverse as evolutionary biology to anthropology to calculus to world literature.

Formal journalism study that is too narrow (with too many courses specifically about journalism) may result in short-term gains at the expense of long-term progress in a career. The aspiring journalist needs the enrichment of the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences; it is from those deep wells that the competent journalist can draw.

[Analysis and Interpretation describe the ability of the journalist to make sense of the often jumbled and chaotic movements of the day. In a deadline story or in a book, the journalist gains audience and credibility when he or she can discern trends, patterns, a higher or deeper level of meaning. This has no agreed-up name, but comes under phrases such as “sense-making,” “gaining altitude,” “conceptual scoops,” and “collateral journalism.”]

Courses that would enrich analysis and interpretation

• Myth and Literature

• History of Science

• Abnormal Psychology

• Quantum Physics

• Principles of Economy

• Art Appreciation

• Technology and Society

An essay to read that would enhance analysis and interpretation

“The Dark Continent of American Journalism,” by James W. Carey

Innumeracy can be as bad as illiteracy in a profession – especially one such as journalism that describes its members as watchdogs in the public interest. Corruption of power – by banks or governments – often involves the abuse of numbers. The ability to work with numbers – especially for those with a natural word orientation – enriches reporting capacity exponentially.

[If you do not know the meaning of the metaphor “exponential,” you may have some work to do.]

Let’s take the case of the young reporter who asks a state commissioner of education why the budget for pre-school education was cut last year. “Check your facts, please,” says the commissioner. “Our budget increased by one percent,” and that’s what the reporter put in a draft of the story. Until a more numerate editor asked “What was the inflation rate last year?” Turned out, it was 3 percent. So that in real dollars, the value of money to be spent on education did, indeed, decline.

More and more, the numbers tell the story. The analysis and presentation of numbers – described in the jargon “big data” – adds in the reporting of such diverse topics as to whether state lottery revenues actually contribute to education, to the probable winners in an electoral cycle, to whether or not a certain economic policy is discriminatory, to the workings of a successful fantasy football league.

A lack of numeracy has been described as the “dark hole” of journalism competence. It need not be that way. In fact, the analysis of numbers often reveals a secret part of the world that can be explored by reporters and storytellers. Reporter Mara Hvistendahl knew that in normal circumstances 105 boy babies are born for every 100 girl babies. Her research discovered that the Chinese port city of Lianyungang has a gender ratio for children under five of 163 boys for every 100 girls. Armed with such numbers she set off for Asia to report their human consequences.

[Numeracy is most often the ability to use computation skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) to understand the world. For some stories, higher skills are necessary, including the ability to report for numbers, understand probability and statistics, and work with basic economic concepts – such as adjusting for inflation. Journalists also make routine decisions about what information to include in print stories, and which ones to illustrate graphically.]

Courses that would enrich numeracy

• Probability and Statistics

• College Level Algebra (and more advanced courses in mathematics)

• Math for Journalists

• Econometrics

• Quantitative Social Science Methodology

An essay to read that would enhance numeracy

“The Scientific Way,” by Victor Cohn

It may be obvious to state the importance of technological literacy in the digital age, but consider the complexity of this: that many students raised with the Internet may be, in important ways, more technologically literate than their professors. Universities must grapple with who has the capacity to teach students about technology in the interests of journalism and democracy.

The key for journalism competence is to understand technology in two ways:

1. How technology undergirds changing forms of journalism – the way that the telegraph liberated news from geography and transportation.

2. How technology acts as a force that changes society – for better and worse – thus demanding coverage in the news itself.

The competent journalist must be prepared to work successfully in a variety of media platforms, from print to video to digital to mobile – including forms that have not yet been invented. Just as “computer assisted reporting” once enriched investigative work, there is now new potential in forms of computer programming, data analysis and display.

Technological innovations can be disruptive, placing demands on the competent journalist to manage change, and often to embrace it, but it does not require achieving escape velocity from enduring values and traditions.

What is called for here is neither technophilia nor phobia, but a techno-realism that recognizes the gains and compensates for the losses brought by new technologies.

[Technology literacy includes abilities in word processing, search and research functions, social networking, blogging, programming, mobile applications, data analysis and display, aggregation and curation.]

Courses that would enrich technological competency

• History of Technology

• Technology, Community, Culture

• Computer Science

• Introduction to Programming

• Introduction to Blogging

• Data Analysis and Display

An essay to read that would enhance technological literacy

“Into the Electronic Millennium,” by Sven Birkerts

Audio-Visual

Long before the invention of the written word, humans created forms of storytelling that took care of their informational and aspirational needs. Drawings on cave walls in France tell stories of the hunt and of the gods. Oral poetry – often recited to music – defined cultures and described heroes and enemies.

The audio and visual have evolved as crucial modes of journalism expression, a movement magnified by the Internet.

While there remains a place for journalism specialization, versatility is a virtue of the day. The backpack journalist collects photos, videos, sound, and writes texts. The cell phone is a tool that allows the collection of all these elements in the palm of the hand.

But one key feature of favorite technologies is their design. The world’s great designers have turned their attention from newspapers and magazines to websites and blogs to mobile technologies such as the iPhone and iPad. Audio and visual elements enrich everything from news navigation to data display to storytelling in multi-media and multiple media forms.

Radio remains a powerful medium for journalism worldwide, and famous networks such as the BBC and NPR now use text and visual elements on their websites.

This is one literacy in which collaboration is crucial and the best work undertaken comes from the marriage of writing, editing, and design.

[Audio-Visual literacy is expressed through photography and video, design and illustration, the use of color, creation of slide shows and other multi-media productions, the use of natural sound, and the use of music, when appropriate.]

Courses that would enrich audio-visual literacy

• History of Western Art

• 20th Century Art (Modern & Post-Modern)

• Theories of Color

• History of Photography

• Art and Craft of Photo Composition

• Multi-Media Reporting and Editing

• Music Appreciation

• Selected Masters of Classical Music

• Musical Performance (any instrument, including voice)

An essay to read that would enhance audio-visual literacy

“In Plato’s Cave,” by Susan Sontag

Civic literacy

The teaching of civics in American public or private schools has never been known as ideal – even in decades past. Civic literacy requires basic knowledge of such things as the separation of powers, the three branches of government, and how a bill becomes a law. It is enriched by a knowledge of American history and familiarity with the foundational documents of democracy, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, famous Supreme Court Decisions, the Emancipation Proclamation, etc.

Much of what journalists will learn about civics will come from the experience of covering beats such as city hall, the school board, and criminal courts. All this is necessary but insufficient to the achievement of civic literacy. In addition to official sources of power and influence, there are countless informal ones: the barber shop, the nail salon, the diner, the soccer field, the church choir – sources of social capital where the pulse of practical democracy can be taken.

[Civic Literacy requires knowledge of government, politics, social capital, social contracts, power, history, public life, civic culture, how audiences can be measured for public opinion, how media influence the constituent groups in society.]

Courses that would enrich civic literacy

• Introduction to U.S. Government

• Comparative Government and Politics

• American History

• World History

• Introduction to Democratic Theory

• Lippman, Dewey, and the American Social Contract

• Origins and Structures of Social Capital

• Introduction to Constitutional Law

An essay to read to enhance civic literacy

“Bowling Alone,” by Robert Putnam

Cultural Literacy

Professor James Carey would often argue that news and other forms of journalism were expressions of culture, increasing their value as objects of scholarly study and practical investigation. One of the purposes of journalism is to reflect the constituent elements within a society so that they can see each other and converse across differences.

It is not unusual for certain expressions of journalism to emanate from a particular cultural point of view. In America, in spite of changing demographics, that mainstream perspective often reflects the interests and beliefs of the white governing class, residing in centers of power such as New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles.

Recognizing the potential for self-interest and bias, journalists seek a cultural competence that allows them to operate with people and in places that are unfamiliar. To use the academic jargon of the day, they must learn to see The Other.

Often this is most easily understood and accounted for when journalists serve as foreign correspondents. When they travel to Asia, the Middle East, or South America, they may prepare themselves by studying the language and culture of the new setting. But the same learning across difference must occur when an American reporter travels to another part of the country.

In many towns, differences must be learned when traveling from one end of a street to the other.

[Cultural Literacy requires knowledge of and sensitivity to cultural differences, whether they are expressed by race, social class, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Key issues related to cultural literacy include assimilation and diversity, multi-culturalism, international understanding, and foreign languages.]

Courses that would enrich cultural literacy

• Introduction to Anthropology

• Gender Studies

• Class and Power in American Society

• From Slavery to Freedom

• Race and Culture in America

• Comparative Culture and Literature

An essay to read to enhance cultural literacy

“Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” by W.E.B. DuBois

Mission and Purpose

From the cornerstones of news judgment and reporting, up from the foundational blocks, through technology, and beyond civic and cultural literacy, the pyramid of competence reaches a pinnacle with an understanding of mission and purpose.

Journalism is a profession that often resides within a business, an enterprise that creates wealth that can be used to commit better journalism. While there has always been – and always will be – a tension between professional and commercial interests, all involved in the enterprise must achieve a clear vision of mission and purpose.

The exercise of craft without purpose can become irrelevant or even dangerous. When journalists operate in the public interest, they often commit their best work. A sense of purpose grows out of the practice of journalism, but also out of academic study, which includes familiarity with the canons of ethics, law, journalism history, standards and practices, and the study of principles of democracy, theories of liberty and justice, conversations about the social contract.

[Mission and Purpose derive from both practice and study. Sources of knowledge include media ethics and law, the First Amendment, the history of journalism (with special attention to its noble and heroic characters), principles of democracy, and a working knowledge of the role journalism plays in communities and municipalities.]

Courses that would enrich a sense of mission and purpose

• Studies in the First Amendment

• History of Journalism

• Media and Journalism Ethics

• Applied Ethics

• Principles of Democracy

• Theories of Justice

• Advanced Literary Studies

• Theories of the Press

• Civic Journalism

• Journalism and Society

An essay to read to enhance a sense of mission and purpose

“A Free and Responsible Press,” report of the 1947 Hutchins Commission

Correction: A previous version of this post contained a typo in a reference to 9/11/2001.

Opinion | Inside Sally Buzbee’s departure and what’s next for The Washington Post

Buzbee’s abrupt resignation and the ensuing plans have staffers angry, confused and curious about the future of one of America’s great institutions

Opinion | AP Stylebook’s new chapter on crime is a glimpse into the future

A decade from now, American newsrooms will have replaced cheap stories with data-rich narratives that educate communities and hold cops accountable

Does Trump’s felony conviction bar him from owning a gun?

Federal law prohibits people with felony convictions from possessing or acquiring firearms

Opinion | Sally Buzbee steps down as executive editor of The Washington Post

Buzbee joined the Post in 2021 after a career at The Associated Press. She was the first female editor of the Post, which was founded in 1877.

What do horse race journalists think of ‘horse race journalism’?

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, breathless reporting of incremental polling has already begun.

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Journalism Ethics: A Philosophical Approach

Professor of Philosophy

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Since the introduction of radio and television news, journalism has gone through multiple transformations, but each time it has been sustained by a commitment to basic values and best practices. Journalism Ethics is a reminder, a defence, and an elucidation of core journalistic values, with particular emphasis on the interplay of theory, conceptual analysis and practice. This unified text on journalism ethics begins with a sophisticated model for ethical decision making, devised by two of the nation's leading ethicists, which connects classical theories with the central purposes of journalism. Top scholars from philosophy, journalism and communications offer essays on such topics as objectivity, privacy, confidentiality, conflict of interest, the history of journalism, online journalism, and the definition of a journalist. Theoretical essays are paired with practical essays in order to better inform the discussion. The result is a guide to ethically sound and socially justified journalism, in whatever form that practice emerges.

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Journalism’s Essential Value

The debate around “objectivity”—if that’s even the right word, anymore—has become among the most contested in journalism. In recent years, CJR has served as a forum for that discussion, through numerous pieces , and even a conference , last fall, exploring approaches to the question. This essay, from the publisher of the New York Times , and the chairman of the New York Times company, is the latest in that ongoing conversation. Email us your thoughts at [email protected] .

As long as independent journalism has existed, it has angered people who want stories told their way or not at all. But I can pinpoint the moment when I realized how contested the very idea of journalistic independence had become.

It was the fall of 2018, my first year as publisher of the New York Times . I had spent my career until then as a reporter and editor steeped in the methods, values, and stylistic quirks of traditional journalism, covering small towns for the Providence Journal and local government for the Portland Oregonian before joining the Times . Even after years of watching these traditions come under intensifying pressure from the internet and social media, I was struck by how frontally the old journalistic model was being challenged by the dynamics of covering a new president unconstrained by precedent and social norms—sometimes even reality itself.

At the time, the country was waiting for the results of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump’s campaign. Many of the president’s critics believed that the investigation would force the removal of a man they regarded as unfit to lead the nation. They were also convinced that the last safeguard against the president’s relentless efforts to undermine the investigation was Rod J. Rosenstein, the second-highest-ranking official in the Justice Department, who had assumed oversight of the investigation when the attorney general recused himself.

After months of careful reporting, two reporters in the Washington bureau of the Times , Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt, uncovered a startling story. The previous spring, Rosenstein himself had been so concerned about Trump’s erratic behavior that he had suggested secretly recording the president and even raised the possibility of invoking a constitutional mechanism contained in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that had never been used, to declare Trump unfit and remove him from office.

There was no question about whether to publish the story. It was based on extensive interviews with high-level players in the administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI and backed up by a paper trail. It seemed like exactly the type of journalism the public should expect from an independent press.

The article appeared on September 21. Given that the reporting raised profound concerns about the president’s ability to serve—from one of his own appointees, no less—the swift and angry response from the right was not at all surprising. Some saw our reporting as a validation of their theories about a “deep state coup.” Many others dismissed the reporting as entirely untrue and attacked us for publishing the story. Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a response to the piece that proved typical: “When it comes to President @realDonaldTrump….. BEWARE of anything coming out of the @nytimes.”

What caught me by surprise was the outrage from the left. Here the criticism was not so much that the reporting was untrue—though some did jump through hoops to make that assertion—but that the information was too dangerous to publish.

From Twitter to magazines to cable news, these critics charged that our reporting had effectively armed Trump with the pretext to fire Rosenstein and end the inquiry into his own conduct. On her show that night, Rachel Maddow attacked the credibility of the story at length before warning: “They have provided President Trump this headline and this fully cooked, fully baked New York Times –approved headline inviting the president to fire Rod Rosenstein and thereby end the Mueller investigation.”

Even those who regularly espoused support for independent journalism suggested that in this case our values had led us to a misguided neutrality that jeopardized democracy. Readers accused the reporters of journalistic recklessness and even of treason. “I suppose you would argue that your job is to print the news, whatever it is,” one reader wrote in one of the thousands of online comments and letters to the editor protesting the article. “However, thinking so narrowly is an abdication of your responsibility, and I’m not sure this was really news anyway. To ignore the consequences of your stories is not ethical and is no service to democracy. You have a profound duty to consider whether the news value is worth the damage the reporting will do. In this case, I do not believe it was.”

As I watched the reaction unfold, I found myself increasingly concerned not just by the growing pressure on independent journalism, but by the troubling demand implicit in the criticism. A leading news organization had discovered that a top law enforcement official had such profound concerns about the fitness of the president of the United States that he discussed whether unprecedented steps should be taken to remove him from office. And many people, even some journalists, wanted this information actively hidden from the public.

The Challenge to Independence

American journalism faces a confluence of challenges that present the most profound threat to the free press in more than a century. News organizations are shrinking and dying under sustained financial duress. Attacks on journalists are surging. Press freedoms are under intensifying pressure. And with the broader information ecosystem overrun by misinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and clickbait, public trust in journalism has fallen to historical lows.

There is no clear path through this gantlet. But there will be no worthwhile future for journalism if our profession abandons the core value that makes our work essential to democratic society, the value that answers the question of why we’re deserving of the public trust and the special protections afforded the free press. That value is journalistic independence.

Independence is the increasingly contested journalistic commitment to following facts wherever they lead. It places the truth—and the search for it with an open yet skeptical mind—above all else. Those may sound like blandly agreeable clichés of Journalism 101, but in this hyperpolarized era, independent journalism and the sometimes counterintuitive values that animate it have become a radical pursuit.

Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn—fully and fairly—regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to favor one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.

This approach, tacking as it does against the with-us-or-against-us certainty of this polarized moment, requires a steadfast, sometimes uncomfortable commitment to journalistic process over personal conviction. Independent journalism elevates values grounded in humility—fairness, impartiality, and (to use perhaps the most fraught and argued-over word in journalism) objectivity—as ideals to be pursued, even if they can never be perfectly achieved. And crucially, independent journalism roots itself to an underlying confidence in the public; it trusts that people deserve to know the full truth and ultimately can be relied upon to use it wisely.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched the arguments against this model of independent journalism become more widespread and more insistent, even within the ranks of established news organizations, including the Times . This critique has been accompanied by calls to instead embrace a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction.

Many have made thoughtful arguments in favor of this shift. Some say that journalists are incapable of controlling for their own biases and hide behind a false objectivity that masks, for instance, liberal worldviews (the critique from the right) or privileges a straight, white, male perspective (the critique from the left). Others suggest that the model leads journalists to make unequal things seem equal—sometimes to the point of rationalizing nonsensical or dangerous positions—in performative displays of balance, often mocked as “false equivalence” or “both-sidesism.” Some argue that the posture of journalistic independence has evolved into a self-serving justification for powerful gatekeepers to protect business as usual, including the invisible assumptions and biases that prop it up. Still others assert that this model of journalism is poorly matched for the perils of the moment, arguing that more than just describing the world, journalists should do everything in their power to fix it.

In responding to these arguments, let me first acknowledge that my background may make me uniquely, perhaps even comically, unpersuasive as a participant in this particular debate. I am the publisher of one of the most scrutinized media institutions in the world; a wealthy white man who succeeded a series of other wealthy white men with the same first and last name; and someone whose family has starred in a full century of shadowy media conspiracy theories. At the same time, the Times is a 172-year-old human enterprise that publishes more words every week than Shakespeare wrote in his entire life. Despite our best efforts, it will not be hard to find examples where the Times has fallen painfully short of the independent ideal I defend here, from our early coverage of the Soviet Union to the run-up to the Iraq War. And I can also already hear critics dusting off their arguments about whether we wrote too much about Hillary Clinton’s emails, or too little about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or whether I personally mishandled my response to a now notorious opinion essay by Senator Tom Cotton.

On the other hand, there may be few people for whom this subject is of greater personal and professional concern. My great-great-grandfather, the founder of the modern New York Times , helped establish the model of independent journalism—“without fear or favor,” in his now famous motto—and entrusted his successors “to maintain the editorial independence and the integrity of the New York Times and to continue it as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.” For more than 125 years, generations of my family have made it our explicit mission to promote and defend that vision of independent journalism.

I hung our century-old mission statement on my office wall on my first day as publisher. In the years since, it’s become clear that maintaining journalistic independence through this polarized moment will be as difficult and unpopular as any challenge I will face in this job—and, I believe, as urgent as any challenge the broader news industry faces. Indeed, even as I prepared this essay for publication, three influential figures in the profession separately published major explorations of the topic, most recently a piece in these pages by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wesley Lowery.

My own view is illustrated using examples from the Times . But there are many outstanding news organizations that exemplify the type of independent journalism I’m describing, from newspapers like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to wire services like the Associated Press and Bloomberg News to broadcasters like the BBC and NPR to digital publishers like ProPublica and Politico .

My defense of journalistic independence doesn’t come from reverence for some golden age of journalism. Each generation transforms journalism and the institutions that make it, almost always for the better, and I’m proud to have played a part in some of those transformations . It is certainly not rooted to a belief that journalism should be unmoored from values. Independent journalism has a natural and welcome affinity for the classic tenets of liberal democracy—the rule of law, honest governance, equal rights, free expression—as well as universal principles of human dignity, freedom, and opportunity. That’s why journalists tend naturally toward stories that shine a light on injustice, especially as they pertain to the most vulnerable among us. But independent journalism also rests on the bedrock conviction that those seeking to change the world must first understand it—that a fully informed society not only makes better decisions but operates with more trust, more empathy, and greater care.

In this way, independent journalism is the exact tonic the world needs most at a moment in which polarization and misinformation are shaking the foundations of liberal democracies and undermining society’s ability to meet the existential challenges of the era, from inequality to political dysfunction to the accelerating toll of climate change. When the stakes feel highest—from the world wars to the red scare to the aftermath of 9/11—people often make the most forceful arguments against journalistic independence. Pick a side. Join the righteous. Declare that you’re with us or against us. But history shows that the better course is when journalists challenge and complicate consensus with smart questions and new information. That’s because common facts, a shared reality, and a willingness to understand our fellow citizens across tribal lines are the most important ingredients in enabling a diverse, pluralistic society to come together to self-govern. For that, as much as anything, we need principled, independent journalists.

How We Got Here

It is no coincidence that maps of the world’s healthiest democracies and maps of the world’s freest press environments are essentially identical.

The press plays a straightforward informational role: who’s running for office, how tax dollars are used, what legislation aims to achieve. It plays an accountability role, exposing corruption and incompetence, ensuring that the law is administered evenly and justly, and shedding light on institutions that don’t want their secrets out in the open.

In a pluralistic democracy like ours, an independent press plays another crucial role. It binds society by providing the connective tissue of a common fact base that can be discussed and debated and by exposing people to a wider range of experiences and perspectives. “Democracy’s legitimacy and durability depend on dialogue and deliberation, on process as much as on outcomes,” Carlos Lozada, a Times columnist, wrote in a recent piece on this topic.

The history of the Times is intertwined with this vision of an independent press. For much of the early life of the country the press was, in the main, openly partisan, with newspapers aligning with various factions, ideologies, and politicians, championing supporters and attacking opponents. The Times itself was part of this tradition when it was cofounded, in 1851, by one of the men who helped form the Republican Party three years later. That changed when the small, struggling newspaper was sold out of bankruptcy to my great-great-grandfather Adolph Ochs in 1896. He embraced a journalistic model that contrasted sharply with the sensationalistic (and much more financially successful) newspapers of the era, like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal . Ochs vowed to his readers that the Times would instead be fiercely independent, dedicated to journalism of the highest integrity, and devoted to the public welfare. His vision for the news report: “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” His vision for the Opinion report: “to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”

This approach helped lay the foundation for the model that became known as journalistic objectivity. The most prominent champion of this approach was the journalist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann, whose writing almost always makes an appearance in pieces like this. He argued that journalists “ought not to be serving a cause, no matter how good.” Recognizing that journalists inevitably carried personal biases and blind spots, Lippmann called for controlling them by professionalizing journalistic processes and, in particular, embracing lessons from the scientific method. He entreated journalists to focus as much as possible on facts and to actively pursue evidence that could challenge, rather than simply confirm, their own hypotheses. In this conception, words like objective and impartial are not a characterization of an individual journalist’s underlying temperament, as they are so often misunderstood to mean, but serve as guiding ideals to strive for in their work. “The idea was that journalists needed to employ objective, observable, repeatable methods of verification in their reporting—precisely because they could never be personally objective,” Tom Rosenstiel, coauthor of The Elements of Journalism and one of the leading defenders of the model, explained in 2020. “Their methods of reporting had to be objective because they never could be.”

In the decades that followed, this model would become the dominant approach to American journalism, taught in universities and practiced at news organizations from the local to the national level. Today, however, the word objectivity is so contested inside the journalistic community that it is viewed by many as self-discrediting in the debate over the role of journalism. I continue to believe that objectivity—or if the word is simply too much of a distraction, open-minded inquiry—remains a value worth striving for. But independence, the word we use inside the Times , better captures the full breadth of this journalistic approach and its promise to the public at large.

How Independence Works in Practice

What does independence look like in practice, and what choices does it require of journalists?

Prioritizing process. The most important ingredient is treating independence as a discipline, backed by processes and ethics designed to foster it. At the Times , as with many other traditional news organizations, the commitment to independence is reflected at every stage of our journalistic efforts. Our goal is to only publish what we know; we would rather miss a story than get one wrong. We correct our errors openly because mistakes should be transparent and, honestly, painful. We talk to the people we write about whenever possible and give those accused of wrongdoing the opportunity to respond. We use multiple sources to confirm information and display a healthy skepticism of everything we learn. We review pieces not just for factual accuracy but for fairness. We enforce ethical guidelines designed to prevent conflicts of interest (for example, we prohibit supporting politicians and political causes) as well as stylistic guidelines designed to minimize bias (for example, we avoid the use of partisan terminology and provocative labels in our news pages).

Language is constantly shifting, and news organizations should shift too. But one of the ways propagandists and advocates try to steer coverage to advance their agendas is to win the battle over terminology. For this reason we generally try to use the everyday language of the public, what we call idiomatic English, rather than the specialized language embraced by academics, activists, and marketers. That means typically waiting until specific terms have gained broad societal acceptance (generally using the widely recognized terms “Latino” or “Hispanic” over the little-used “Latinx”) and trying to avoid market-tested phrases that have been designed specifically to shift public opinion (generally avoiding terms like “pro life” or “pro choice” and instead describing such views as for or against abortion rights). This can be contentious—when a Palestinian carries out an attack in Israel, the Times generally calls this person a “militant” and often hears protests from one side that considers the attacker a “freedom fighter” and another that considers the attacker a “terrorist.”

As with other professions that have adopted explicit systems and ethical norms to support independence—science, medicine, and the judiciary, for example—the journalistic process described above doesn’t guarantee perfect results. Personal biases and agendas can still distort the work reporters and editors produce—just as people’s personal experiences and backgrounds can elevate it. But good journalistic processes reduce the frequency of mistakes and create mechanisms for self-correcting when we err. That stands in contrast to alternate models guided by political objectives, partisan loyalty, or, most obviously, self-interest—all of which are more vulnerable to mistakes, hypocrisy, and corruption. As with scientists, doctors, or judges, it is far better to have journalists imperfectly striving for independence backed by a defensible process than choosing not to bother because total independence can never be fully achieved. “Failure to achieve standards does not obviate the need for them. It does not render them outmoded. It makes them more necessary,” wrote Marty Baron, former executive editor of the Washington Post , in a recent essay on this theme. “And it requires that we apply them more consistently and enforce them more firmly.”

Following facts. Independent journalism can be morally straightforward and satisfying. Journalists hold power to account by exposing corruption and abuse. Journalists reveal injustice and inequality. Their work regularly leads to a society that is freer, fairer, and more just. This is the type of journalism seen in movies like All the President’s Men , Spotlight , and She Said .

Independence protects journalism from being distorted by business incentives. The fact that Harvey Weinstein was a longtime advertiser in the Times didn’t keep us from revealing the abuses that set off a cascade that ultimately landed him in prison. Independence protects journalism from being distorted by government pressure. The fact that China promised severe repercussions not long after we spent millions to launch a new Chinese-language website there did not keep us from publishing a major investigation into government corruption. And independence protects journalism from being distorted by various forms of self-interest. Even our own leaders , investors , and journalism are not immune from receiving unflattering coverage in the Times . These protections are not simply a matter of ethics and values; they are rooted in systems and processes and are reflected in the structure of the company itself—by ensuring, for example, that journalists are walled off from advertisers or that reviews of books by Times journalists are written by independent freelancers.

These commitments are widely accepted as necessary principles of an independent news organization. But a true commitment to independence—and the insistence on putting journalistic process ahead of a preferred outcome—isn’t always easy or comfortable. One of the surest signs of independence is that readers are frequently told things they don’t expect and would prefer not to hear. Take two recent examples:

For years, the Times has documented the brutal persecution of the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority in Myanmar, that human rights experts have called a genocide. This was the story one of our reporters was prepared to tell when she interviewed four young sisters in a refugee camp, who recounted how soldiers burned their home, killed their mother, and abducted their father, who was now feared dead. But days of additional reporting revealed that little of what they said was true. The girls had shared heart-wrenching stories to compete for the limited attention of aid groups. In an overcrowded camp, four orphaned sisters were more likely to win sympathy than an intact family that lost all its possessions. In this case, following the facts didn’t simply confirm the larger moral truth but also exposed a smaller, less expected one: these refugees were incentivized to one-up each other in suffering to get much-needed support. And not without a cost. The reporter, Hannah Beech, later explained in her searching piece: “Such strategies are a natural survival tactic. Who wouldn’t do the same to feed a family? But false narratives devalue the genuine horrors—murder, rape and mass burnings of villages—that have been inflicted upon the Rohingya by Myanmar’s security forces. And such embellished tales only buttress the Myanmar government’s contention that what is happening in Rakhine State is not ethnic cleansing, as the international community suggests, but trickery by foreign invaders.”

A year later, on the other end of the world, an American aid convoy headed to Venezuela erupted in flames after being blocked at the border by the country’s repressive security forces. The idea that the government had ordered the torching of desperately needed supplies in the midst of a devastating famine appeared to fit the narrative of President Nicolas Maduro’s brutal authoritarian rule. Many prominent global leaders quickly denounced him. But as we reported on the calamity, video footage revealed the fire had apparently not been carried out by Maduro’s security forces; it had most likely been caused by an anti-government protester throwing an errant Molotov cocktail.

That’s the counterintuitive commitment of independent journalism. It must be open to the idea that a suffering refugee child may not be telling the truth, or that a tyrant who is persecuting millions may be accused of a crime he didn’t actually commit. In both cases, critics asked who could possibly benefit from such journalism. Society benefits, of course, since it depends on credible information to make any number of related decisions, from distributing aid to relief organizations to imposing sanctions for human rights violations. The truth benefits, too, as does the credibility of those sharing it. The next time the Times reports on Maduro’s offenses (as we’ve done here , here , and here ) or the horrors that the Rohingya suffer (as we did here , here , and here ), readers can be sure that those are the facts as best we could ascertain them.

This commitment to putting facts above outcome is easy to caricature as amoral, perhaps even as nihilistic. But it is grounded in a foundational optimism about people and democracy. Independent journalism is predicated on the belief that democracy is stronger when people have trusted sources for reliable facts. And that people should be trusted to comprehend these facts, process their complexity, and make up their own minds. Information empowers, and empowered people are more likely to make better decisions.

Covering uncertainty. Even if it’s not always popular, the discipline of following the facts wherever they lead is far more straightforward than grappling with the tricky questions that emerge when the facts cannot be fully established. The number of topics that are factually or morally unambiguous is dwarfed by the number of topics marked in some way by uncertainty, where facts are unresolved or questions are still subject to debate. The role of independent journalists in such cases is to help the public understand and examine the broadest possible range of intellectually honest positions.

In cases in which the facts have been established beyond reasonable dispute, journalists should not quote a fringe position to check a box or shield their work from accusations of bias. There is, for instance, no serious debate in the scientific community about the reality of climate change. The world is warming, with devastating consequences. There are plenty of other examples: The Holocaust happened. COVID vaccines work. Trump lost the 2020 election.

But even in moments when the facts are beyond reasonable dispute, there can be reasonable differences of opinion about how society should interpret and act on those facts. What specifically should be done to mitigate the effects of climate change? Should people espousing anti-Semitism be barred from social media? Should vaccine requirements be linked to employment? Should specific legislative measures be taken to safeguard elections? Independent journalism should not shy away from fully examining such contentious questions, even if some insist that the truth has already been established.

There are also some moral issues that we, as a society, have rightly come to view as settled and beyond reasonable debate: Racism is wrong. Women deserve equal rights. People shouldn’t be tortured. At the same time, there are many related questions society is debating and independent journalism must explore, even if the larger principle is beyond question. Should race be a factor in college admissions? Under what circumstances should abortion be allowed? What methods of coercion are acceptable in a war zone?

There can be a temptation to attempt to steer these debates based on our personal views or our sense of how history will settle the matter, thinking that represents a more honest and authentic form of journalism. However, independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy, should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry. (And even in cases where debates are broadly recognized as closed, there is often added benefit to understanding the motivations and tactics of those who continue to push the issue to the fore.)

Prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate forces disagreements to fester beneath the surface. In even more damaging cases, it allows conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society. Deference to such popular narratives—as the Times has learned the hard way—is as dangerous as any personal bias: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; Trump has little chance of winning a general election; inflation isn’t a significant risk in modern economies. The problem in each case, and many more like them, was that conventional wisdom isn’t always right, and even when it turns out to be, it benefits from probing and testing.

Evaluating these debates is one reason why the journalistic process is designed around hearing from a diversity of voices. That’s most obviously true in reporting, which requires talking to people and representing a range of perspectives. But it also is why reporters benefit from the additional eyes of editors, not just for style and accuracy, but to ensure the issues they include are fairly represented and contextualized. When journalism succeeds in illuminating questions and debates, it not only helps people better understand those with whom they disagree, it helps them better recognize the differences they have with people they thought they agreed with—and it can help society move conversations about these issues toward resolution.

Navigating criticism . Criticism is a natural and important part of the journalistic process. That’s partly because independent journalism, with its commitment to exposing problems and holding power to account, often upsets the people it’s about, as well as their supporters. It’s also because the business of making these types of editorial decisions, especially on deadline, is imperfect work.

Intense barrages of criticism were once reserved for a handful of the most polarizing topics in public life, like presidential politics, abortion, and the Middle East, where every word and image was tracked for signs of bias and loudly contested as inaccurate or harmful. Now nearly every issue sets off that level of reaction. The dynamics of social media have enabled pushback to be quicker, louder, and better organized, as supporters and opponents become more entrenched in their narratives and more aggressive in assailing anything that runs counter to their views or objectives.

This often reflects genuine anger and disappointment. Even those who appreciate the vast majority of our reporting often feel that our coverage is uniquely off the mark in its portrayal of the very subject they care most about—and where they naturally have the strongest views on how the story should be told. But such frustrations are often harnessed by interest groups in an effort to make coverage more favorable and to make it uncomfortable to report things these groups—or subsets of these groups—don’t like.

In the past, most of those without access to a printing press or a presidential pulpit could only hope that a news organization would police itself through corrections or letters to the editor. Today anyone with a Twitter handle or an email address can have their concerns heard. That shift has brought a welcome increase in accountability, but it has also created a challenging dynamic. Journalistic decisions are continually being criticized in public by leaders, activists, journalists, celebrities, and influencers speaking for themselves or, just as often, for a broader community. These communities are often tied to personal identity, whether it’s derived from race , religion , gender , ethnicity , nationality , or partisan affiliation. But the same dynamic applies to groups of all types, like climate activists , Silicon Valley rationalists , economists , and Taylor Swift fans. Even those whose identity centers on warning about the dangers of tribalism sometimes succumb to their own forms of groupthink. Navigating such criticism has become among the most challenging parts of the practice of independent journalism.

Journalists are often accused by these groups of misrepresenting their communities, perpetuating stereotypes, or increasing risks for people who already have good reason to feel vulnerable. Sometimes these criticisms have merit—a look back through the archives of any news organization will find a wealth of examples that were bad in the moment and look worse today. Many minority groups continue to think mainstream news organizations do not fully capture their communities and too often focus on moments of controversy or tragedy. And it is understandable that anyone who has personally experienced particular hardships—from enduring anti-Semitism or racial discrimination to fleeing one’s homeland or terminating a pregnancy—would have strong views about how these issues should be covered and what downstream consequences of that coverage they’d like to see.

Sometimes such groups will entreat journalists to lift up their communities by focusing on positive stories. Sometimes they will assert that their community can only be fairly covered by a member of it. Sometimes groups will offer to retrain reporters on what language and framing to use in covering their communities. And many times they will look past an entire body of coverage that addresses many of the issues they raise to instead find fault with a single article, headline, image, source, or phrase—sometimes a single word. (Even our personnel decisions are at times read through an ideological lens, with a departure taken as a sign that we’re caving to a progressive mob or a conservative one, or a hiring offered as evidence that we can’t fairly cover one side of a conflict or the other .)

Often the central criticism is not so much about the accuracy of the coverage itself, but whether it could be misused. Recently, for example, the Times described how scores of Hasidic Jewish schools were failing to provide students a basic education. The coverage was called anti-Semitic and dangerous even before it was published because it could be misused to demonize a highly visible population at a moment when they already faced rising prejudice. A group representing Orthodox Jews highlighted this line of criticism in a recent letter , arguing that “a free press can be an incredibly powerful force—for good or otherwise. Particularly so when these words appear, sometimes on the front page, of a prominent newspaper. The Times has misused this incredible power. And the victims of this reporting—Orthodox and Hasidic Jews in New York—are a marginalized minority already subject to a rising, frightening number of hate crimes.”

Independent news organizations should strive to cover every community with respect, nuance, and sensitivity. That is especially true in the context of the risks and prejudices marginalized communities or vulnerable people in particular face. But even when doing so, journalism will not always reflect the way these groups want to be seen or emphasize the issues they would prefer to talk about. When coverage features different groups engaged with directly conflicting narratives—for example, the anti-Muslim violence coming from Hindu nationalists in India today—it’s easier to see the impossibility of covering each group exactly as it would like to be covered.

And the care independent news organizations should take in reporting on every such group doesn’t overwhelm the value to the public—and often to the community itself—of reporting difficult but important facts and issues. In the example above, we also heard from many Hasidic readers who felt their school system had failed them and their children and were relieved that future students may be better served because of our reporting.

The attacks on this type of work sometimes take aim at the natural fear of journalists that their work, often called “the first draft of history,” will later be regarded as on the wrong side of it. But these attacks also confront journalists whose work explores subjects that divide the public or upsets a specific interest group with more pressing concerns. In this new environment, journalists—in particular female journalists—routinely receive threats of rape and death. Menacing visits to their homes and offices. Campaigns to get them fired. Harassment of family members. And a never-ending stream of insults and personal attacks, from racial slurs to accusations of bigotry, that can arrive by the thousands in a single day. With such a high price to their reputations and sense of security, journalists often wonder whether pursuing a given story would be worth the potential backlash. The silence that can stem from these fears is, of course, the goal of these attacks. The responsibility of independent journalists is to not be intimidated and to continue to report without fear or favor.

Critiques of the Model

The arguments against this model of journalistic independence have become far more persistent in recent years amid the reshaping of the journalism industry and the broader information ecosystem.

Inside the industry, newspapers continue to shutter and the number of working journalists has dropped by tens of thousands over the past fifteen years. The newspapers that endure, embracing the approach of many of the digital news organizations that have emerged, have often felt compelled to shift increasingly scarce resources away from expensive original reporting to far cheaper but less journalistically nutritious efforts like punditry, aggregation, and clickbait. As a result, the journalists who managed to keep their jobs now often find themselves stuck at their desks aggregating and opining on others’ work, instead of coming face to face with new people and perspectives through on-the-ground reporting.

At the same time, newsrooms have become more diverse, with far greater numbers of women, people who identify as LGBTQ, and people of color—though there is far more progress still needed. As this has happened, there’s been an overdue reckoning with the dominance of straight white men in our industry, a dominance that has long contributed to missing and distorted coverage. As a result, minority groups often carry deep skepticism that the same institutions and institutional values that badly served them in the past can now do better and actually capture the breadth of the world they live in. The conversation about those failures has left lingering uncertainty inside newsrooms as to whether those failures should be blamed on lack of representation or on outmoded values that may no longer fit the moment.

The shifts for the public have been no less dramatic. The fracturing of the media’s gatekeeper role, in which a handful of outlets in print and television were able to set the national agenda, means that proliferating publishers and individual commenters are increasingly built around specific niches and more focused on catering to their audiences’ identities, passions, and politics. The gatekeeper approach was far from perfect, but the unmediated nature of the internet has led to a surge in content aimed at driving engagement by playing to people’s hopes and, especially, their fears and resentments. The more conversational style of writing for the internet and the obvious dissonance between the carefulness of some reporters’ published work and their informal, sometimes injudicious social media commentary have exacerbated the sense that standards are shifting. These trends further confused the public’s understanding of the role of the press, making journalism seem partisan and unreliable. Today, barely over one-quarter of Americans trust the news, according to a Reuters Institute report, a figure that now ranks lowest of the countries they surveyed. The numbers from a Gallup survey were even more abysmal, with 16 percent expressing a high degree of confidence in newspapers and 11 percent in television news. In many studies like this, journalistic bias was a top concern cited.

The current pushback to the model of journalistic independence typically takes three main forms.

“Objectivity” as a myth : One of the most persistent critiques asserts that journalists should own up to their biases rather than pretending to be able to meet an impossible ideal of being truly objective or impartial.

The primary argument from the right, a staple of Republican stump speeches and conservative media for decades, alleges that reporters and editors use statements of journalistic independence to disguise a consistent bias against conservative views and more negative treatment of conservative leaders. This stretches from long-standing critiques of coverage of topics like gun rights and rural America, same-sex marriage and faith, and it extends to the ongoing national conversation about slavery’s role in our history that was, in part, sparked by the Times ’ groundbreaking 1619 Project.

It’s true that the two populations that make up the vast majority of journalists—college graduates and people who live in big cities—have become more likely in recent decades to hold liberal views, particularly on social issues. These groups tend to be more secular and less likely to own guns; they engage with a different mix of culture and hobbies; they are typically more embracing of racial, gender, and sexual-orientation diversity. Those qualities—everyday assumptions in a place like New York City, our hometown—are why my predecessor, even as he pushed back on accusations of political bias, sometimes talked about the Times having a metropolitan sensibility .

This type of journalistic culture, the norm in most large newsrooms today, sometimes leads to journalistic decisions that many conservatives regard as picking a side in what they consider to be open debates, like the existence of climate change or the frequency of voter fraud, but which newsrooms treat as settled. On the many more issues that are obviously unsettled and subject to robust debate, the model of journalistic independence is explicitly designed to help correct for the narrowness of a journalist’s own experience and worldview, including by intentionally seeking out and attempting to fairly convey a much broader range of views. It doesn’t deny personal experience; it provides a method not to be trapped by it. If you look at coverage of abortion, as an example of an issue where society has been conflicted for decades but where the urban professional class has been disproportionately on one side of the debate, you’ll see the Times grappling with a fair representation of views from across many backgrounds and political orientations.

It is also true that the MAGA-era Republican Party has become more challenging to cover in a way that the party and its supporters would recognize as fair. On some subjects, a significant portion of the party has become untethered from fact and science, and it has made startlingly direct attacks on democracy and its foundations. Journalists have an obligation to report on this shift plainly, even if that leads our coverage to be accused of bias. If a majority of Republican voters believe—as polls have consistently shown—that Trump won the 2020 election, it’s safe to assume that those same voters would be skeptical of a news organization that clearly labels that belief false. But this heightened skepticism can at times go too far, and that risk can be compounded in moments of premature consensus among experts journalists rely on. Here the early coverage of the COVID pandemic is instructive. The press was confronted with the challenge of the president and others in his party sharing inaccurate information about the disease and the toll of the pandemic while also undermining the efficacy of vaccines and peddling sometimes dangerous alternatives . Those stories required the press to be intensely skeptical of the administration’s claims and actions. But there was insufficient skepticism of an emerging scientific and bureaucratic consensus that presented itself as more settled than it actually was. That combination sometimes created blind spots, like an overly quick dismissal of the lab leak theory or insufficient questioning of the wisdom of extended school closures.

Critics on the left also argue that supposedly objective journalists are anchored to a point of view, but in this case one that privileges a straight white male perspective and the status quo. This critique takes many forms, but often centers on the belief that notions like objectivity—the very idea of it, not just the failure to achieve it—exist to maintain and insulate existing power structures from change or scrutiny.

The assertion that newsrooms, like virtually all of the nation’s institutions, have long been overly dominated by straight white men is obviously true. Even with significant progress in diversifying in recent years, few newsrooms look like the communities they cover, leaving gaps in the stories they find and the insights journalists bring to them. That’s the case not just with race and gender, but with groups like evangelical Christians, military veterans, or people who attended community college. It is also true that at times, news organizations have wielded the objectivity label to wrongly suggest that minority journalists couldn’t fairly cover issues crucial to their own communities, even though they rarely questioned whether white men could fairly cover white men.

These shortcomings should be seen as a failure of independence rather than an indictment of it. In all kinds of coverage, reporters bring their experience and expertise to bear. More diverse newsrooms—armed with a broader range of backgrounds, experiences, relationships, skills, and expertise—spot more stories and imbue them with greater nuance and insight. A reporter who studied physics will be a better science reporter for it. An editor who grew up in the Great Plains will have a sharper eye for nuance in a story that takes place there. And a journalist from an underrepresented group can bring life experience and direct knowledge to stories involving that group. “Our eyes are connected to our bodies, which often shape the way we experience the world and how the world experiences us. My eyes will see some things yours never will,” as Lowery put it in his recent CJR essay. “The ‘story’ we seek to tell is in fact a mosaic that must be filled in piece by piece. While one journalist may supply many tiles, seeing the entire scene requires others to fill in the rest. Thus, understanding objective reality requires a diversity of contributors.”

It’s striking how often these two ideals—a diverse newsroom and an independent newsroom—are pitted against each other, as if one or the other must be chosen. What’s clear is that representation alone is not enough; it needs to be backed by a culture that invites a broad range of views into conversations about story choice and story framing. Many journalists from underrepresented groups have stories about being recruited in part because of the different perspectives they bring but, once on board, being told to put aside those perspectives to avoid being dismissed as biased.

Independence doesn’t mean that a reporter has to be a blank slate. A reporter who grew up in a neighborhood where racial profiling or police violence was a daily concern can bring an invaluable depth of knowledge and understanding to those topics. That experience might lead to a healthier dose of skepticism of police accounts or a greater understanding of the ways these injustices damage communities. Independence is only compromised if a reporter’s preconceptions undercut the goal of genuinely open-minded inquiry, like dismissing all police statements or downplaying rising crime. The public is best served when journalists—regardless of personal identity, personal political views, and personal life experience—approach each story with an open mind, ready to seek out information that might upend expectations or present a more complicated picture.

Both-sidesism: One of the most common criticisms of independence is that it leads journalists to treat unequal things equally.

False equivalence—today often derided as “both-sidesism,” a phrase popularized by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU—is when journalists make opposing views appear similarly credible, even when they are not, to leave the impression of down-the-middle reporting that doesn’t take sides. Once again, it is not difficult to find historical grounding for this critique. News organizations long included comments from outlier scientists casting doubt on the reality of climate change, even after the vast majority of scientists had concluded it was real. Several factors drove such failures. Newsrooms often cared not just about being independent but about being perceived as independent, by readers and sources alike. The mechanics of deadline journalism also played a role, as inserting a quote from all sides was a quick and simple way to signal both fairness and completeness. There is good reason to disparage a model that elevates a pantomime of fairness over demonstrations of good judgment. It’s lazy journalism that fails readers and is easily exploited by bad-faith actors. As a previous publisher of the Times remarked: “Although I favor the open mind, I certainly do not advocate that the mind should be so open that the brains fall out.”

But this line of criticism misses the profound ways that traditional news organizations that believe in the independent model have shifted. Journalists today use plainer language, show a greater willingness to expose lies, and produce more analytical work grounded in their own reporting and expertise, even when doing so opens them up to calls of bias. While that shift was already well underway, it was solidified through the norm-shattering presidency of Trump, whose statements—whether they were about crowd sizes, the birthplace of his predecessor, the COVID pandemic, or election results—were often demonstrably untrue and were typically called out as such without euphemism or counterpoint.

Today, the both-sidesism argument thus has the feel of media critics fighting the last war . But the both-sidesism line of attack has been happily embraced by activists and partisans who want to pressure the media to minimize any alternative to their views. By demanding that journalists treat a topic as settled fact, they attempt to win a debate by avoiding one. This is why people often invoke both-sidesism when journalists interview a voter for a candidate they oppose, explore the opposite side of an issue to the one they hold, or take the journalistically responsible course of giving those accused of wrongdoing a chance to explain themselves.

This charge is particularly common on issues where participants have staked out zero-sum positions—as with abortion rights or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in which open-minded coverage of each side is seen as undermining the other. For example, despite Russia’s attempts to make it a criminal offense to report the truth, it is undeniable that Russia invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked act of war and that its troops have carried out a huge number of shocking atrocities . It is also true that Ukrainian forces appear to have used internationally banned cluster munitions . Reporting this does not amount to a moral judgment asserting “on the other hand, Ukrainians do bad things too,” but reflects an attempt to fully capture the conflict. Without such independent assessments it would be impossible for Ukrainians, Russians, foreign leaders, or ordinary people to understand the true state of the war and its costs.

As that example shows, the both-sidesism argument is wielded most powerfully when the stakes are highest. We often hear a version like this: Trump is a threat to democracy, and you’re asking about his opponent’s age or emails? Or, the world is facing a climate catastrophe and you’re wondering if gas prices are too high? Or, the human rights of my group are under systemic attack and you’re focusing on one bad actor on our side? In the end, these efforts attempt to reduce wide-ranging lines of coverage into a single statement about what is most true and important, rather than to reflect the reality that many things can be true and important at the same time. Journalists should be alert to the risk of false equivalence. But today I believe the greater journalistic risk is for reporters to close themselves to the possibility of new and evolving facts that may reveal other aspects of a story or, worse, to actively embrace a journalistic one-sideism to signal that they are on the side of the righteous.

Bad outcomes: Another line of criticism asserts that when journalists report information that makes a negative outcome more likely, they are complicit in that outcome. This argument typically takes two forms: that news organizations should not publish information that bad actors might misuse and that they should not offer airtime to views that should be excised from the public square.

It is true that journalists should not be blind to the potential impact their reporting may have. And in limited cases we do change a specific story or alter our approach to a broader area of coverage with an eye toward minimizing any resulting danger. For example, we are careful in quoting dissidents in countries where such an action may lead to reprisal, particularly when it comes to ordinary people who may not fully appreciate the risks they are taking. Similarly, our coverage of subjects like mass shootings and suicide has been informed in part by research looking at how media attention can inspire others to do the same thing. And on rare occasions, we will hold publication of a national security story when we are told the release of certain secrets could directly endanger lives.

But, in general, independent reporters and editors should ask, “Is it true? Is it important?” If the answer to both questions is yes, journalists should be profoundly skeptical of any argument that favors censoring or skewing what they’ve learned based on a subjective view about whether it may yield a damaging outcome. Do we overlook the corruption of a US ally because it could embolden an anti-American opposition? Do we fail to explore legitimate questions about the physical or mental health of a political candidate because some believe the other candidate might be worse? Do we not report that the government has been secretly wiretapping US citizens without warrants because the Bush administration argues the disclosure would put lives at risk by undermining a critical antiterrorism tool? That last argument succeeded in delaying a story for the better part of a year—a decision many now view as the wrong one—but its eventual publication made clear that this information was needed to open up an important debate about how the country was balancing national security and civil liberties.

More recently, we’ve heard similar arguments about journalism putting lives at risk emerging from our coverage of the debates inside the medical community over care for transgender children. Critics have accused our work of “‘both sides’ fearmongering and bad-faith ‘just asking questions’ coverage” and have suggested that even acknowledging a broader range of views on this topic has legitimized—wittingly or not—a repressive legal effort to undermine the rights and the safety of a group that faces significant prejudice. “The pretense of objectivity—the newsroom ideal that all ‘sides’ of an issue should be heard—often harms marginalized people more than it helps them,” wrote one critic of our coverage. “If you say ‘I want to live,’ and I say ‘No,’ what happens next isn’t a debate; it’s murder.”

The Times has covered the surge of discrimination, threats, and violence faced by trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, including the rapidly growing number of legislative efforts attacking their rights. We’ve also covered the many ways in which people challenging gender norms are gaining recognition and breaking barriers in the United States and around the world. Yet our critics overlook these articles—and there are hundreds of them —to instead focus on a small number of pieces that explore particularly sensitive questions that society is actively working through, but which some would prefer for the Times to treat as settled.

In the long run, ignoring societal disagreements or actively suppressing certain facts and viewpoints—even with the best of intentions—turns the press into an overtly political actor, encourages conspiracy theories about hidden agendas, and validates accusations that the media is dishonest. That, in turn, undermines trust in journalism and limits its ability to have an impact when we reveal injustice, corruption, or other wrongdoing.

The second bad outcome that is often raised is “platforming,” the concept that including people with bad or dangerous views in articles—or allowing them to write guest essays in the opinion section—makes the world a worse or more dangerous place. The central concern in this argument is that the very act of examining or sharing disliked or repugnant opinions, without explicitly condemning them, amounts to promoting and legitimizing them.

This reflects the heated societal debate about what to do about views one finds questionable, offensive, or dangerous. The Times has been criticized along these lines for everything from a profile of a Nazi sympathizer to an opinion essay from a Taliban leader, not to mention the essay “Send in the Troops” by Senator Cotton that roiled the Times like nothing else that has happened in my tenure. It is true that a soft feature or an unrebutted essay can effectively misinform by failing to provide needed context and thus obscure a larger truth. And it is certainly true that news organizations don’t serve readers well by flooding them with a cacophony of information and perspectives in the hope that they stumble upon the truth on their own. Everything we publish should meet basic standards of verification and intellectual honesty. Exercising journalistic judgment about which voices to include and how does not amount to censorship.

But there is just as much risk to a journalistic model that aggressively narrows the field of acceptable speakers and comment. When we err, we would rather err on the side of inclusion, not exclusion. For example, as part of our extensive coverage of COVID vaccines, we published an article about vaccine skeptics, which clearly stated that the vaccines were safe and gave careful context about conspiracy theories. But why bother to understand skeptics’ views at all if they are wrong, even dangerous? The United States has the lowest full-vaccination rate of any of the world’s wealthiest democracies, and the anti-vaccine movement was strengthening in ways that raised profound public health questions that society continues to grapple with.

It’s also worth briefly noting two more criticisms that are more specific to the structure of the Times , though they are shared by many other news organizations as well.

The first is that the existence of our opinion section can appear to be in direct tension with our promise of independence. It’s easy to see why some people would make this argument, given that every opinion piece promotes a personal point of view. But opinion journalism can actually represent another valuable way to meet this core commitment to independence by helping readers explore ideas and develop and challenge their own views on important subjects. That’s why we employ a diverse group of columnists who bring a range of backgrounds, interests, and political leanings to their work. And it’s why we make a point to solicit guest essays from an even wider range of perspectives. For many of our readers, the voices and pieces they’ve come to appreciate most are the very ones they agree with least.

Indeed the original goal of inviting outside writers and experts onto our pages was based on the belief that exposing readers to a diversity of opinions would have the effect of “stimulating new thought and provoking new discussion on public problems.” Even if each piece, including our editorials, is rooted to an individual view, reading across the section offers a broad and diverse collection of views that together should serve as a guide through the big debates in society. The best opinion writing embraces many of the same values as an independent newsroom—with columnists and other opinion writers using reporting, analysis, and expertise to inform their work and editors holding it to high standards of accuracy, fairness, and intellectual rigor.

Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet. For that reason, we’ve long kept the opinion department intentionally small—it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff—and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom. In recent years we’ve also gone to increasing lengths to make its work both less prominent on our homepage and more visually distinct from news reporting to avoid confusing readers about the difference between news and opinion.

The second criticism centers on our subscription-based business model. In this time of institutional skepticism, it’s easy to assume cynical business motives when executives espouse high-minded ideals. Conservative critics assume we are incentivized to cater to a liberal audience. And progressive critics assume that our insistence on independence is motivated by a desire to acquire more conservative subscribers. In truth, the value of a fair representation of the world—and the people and ideas shaping it—isn’t just for the believer, it’s for the skeptic. A diverse society should aspire to understand the lives and motives of all people, as well as the range of arguments shaping the public debate. Thankfully, we’ve found that readers generally agree. Though I’m often asked about the cancellation campaigns led by interest groups upset with our coverage, the actual numbers are vanishingly small. Instead, studies of our readers show that across all their diversity, their most consistent shared quality, compared with the broader public, is a desire to be challenged, confronted with information, ideas, and perspectives that expand rather than merely validate their sense of the world. Even as our coverage has upset every part of the political spectrum, the number of people who value independent journalism enough to engage with it and pay for it has grown significantly at the Times and elsewhere.

The Risks of the Alternatives

Much as with democracy itself, to borrow a quip from Winston Churchill, the case for independent journalism is made stronger by the weakness of the alternatives.

Independent journalism is not a neutral platform. Rather than simply deluging readers with a cacophony of voices and hoping the most valuable rise to the surface, it makes countless journalistic choices, large and small, that aim to actively guide readers to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the world grounded in fact. These choices include contextualizing information, discerning which voices would be most relevant in capturing a debate, and helping people put the significance of an event in perspective.

But independent journalism is also not advocacy journalism. To be clear, the model of advocacy journalism—whose practitioners wear their leanings openly—has shown its value in a long and honorable history. News outlets focused on specific ethnic or racial groups, for example, have played an essential role for more than a century of forcing attention on issues, celebrating people, and championing reforms too often ignored by the mainstream press. Today many high-integrity news organizations are open about their politics and objectives, from Mother Jones on the left to The Dispatch on the right to a host of podcasts and newsletters catering to every imaginable subject and viewpoint. The Marshall Project has not let its core goal of remaking the criminal justice system allow it to skew the facts. CoinDesk broke a story that threatened the very cryptocurrency industry it was launched to support.

But this advocacy model is dangerous when treated as independent journalism’s replacement rather than its supplement. The revelations from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News underscore the dangers of the advocacy model when fully unchecked. In trying to satiate its audience’s desire for validation—or to advance its preferred political outcome—Fox and those who have embraced its model ultimately unhinge themselves from a fair-minded pursuit of the truth. Facts that match their ideological leanings or preferred political outcomes are often hyped up while those that undermine them are downplayed. Instead of broadening understanding, this model misleads its audience—seen in the fact that Fox News viewers are more likely to believe, incorrectly, that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11, Barack Obama wasn’t a US citizen, and the 2020 election was stolen.

Putting ideology front and center is frequently promoted as more honest (isn’t it better to announce one’s biases than to hide them?) and more honorable (isn’t it better to push for solving problems rather than just describing them?). But this can stoke false confidence that one’s personal opinions are actually fundamental truths. What it means to fight for justice is different for everyone. For some it means defending the right to openly carry a weapon, for others the right of migrants to cross unfettered into another nation. But what are the facts about whether carrying guns makes people safer? What impact has tightening or loosening immigration laws had on people, jobs, and culture?

Journalists, no matter how wise and well intentioned, who believe in their own righteousness can find their conviction hardening in ways that obstruct rather than illuminate the world they cover. Even if journalists can navigate all these hazards, journalism driven by a desire to shape outcomes struggles in the inevitable moments when the facts they discover sit in conflict with a larger political goal that they—or their employer—is committed to advancing. And there are further risks when those views are motivated not by genuine principle but by self-interest or partisan advantage.

Contrast the advocacy model with the independent model and you’ll see how different the approaches are. The same Times reporter who broke the story that Donald Trump had asked the director of the FBI to pledge his personal loyalty also broke the story that Hillary Clinton used her personal email account as secretary of state. Similarly, just months after a Times investigation revealed large payouts to silence sexual harassment allegations against Bill O’Reilly, a leading conservative commentator, we published a similar investigation into Harvey Weinstein, a leading liberal donor. And we’ve vigorously reported on everything from personal misconduct to gerrymandering efforts by both Republicans and Democrats. We didn’t write these stories to balance a ledger; we wrote them because each one was individually true and individually important.

The pushback we get on every such piece makes clear that one of the most profound journalistic choices of the era is to either pick a tribe or prepare to upset people. A commitment to independence means the latter is the only defensible option, even though it comes at a substantial short-term cost. At a moment in which forces are attempting to exploit classically liberal ideals—like the journalistic model I am defending here—toward illiberal ends, independent news organizations shouldn’t do their work for them by forsaking those values ourselves.

The Path Forward

How do we protect independent journalism, as challenges arrive from nearly every corner?

The most important safeguard of an independent press is a strong and sustainable press. We need to build up the business model for reported journalism, particularly at the local level. We need to secure legal protections for reporters and their sources to ensure the free flow of information to the public. We need to address the deepening crackdowns against journalists overseas—like Russia’s recent arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—and the growing harassment of them at home.

But focusing more narrowly on the question of independence, a few steps are clear for journalists and leaders of journalistic institutions, the Times very much included.

First and foremost, journalists should remember that our core purpose, as I have been saying, is to follow the facts wherever they lead, even when we would prefer for them not to be true, and to fairly represent people and perspectives, even when we disagree with them. Any compromise on this is likely to further erode the public’s already shaky confidence in journalism and ultimately hobble the ability of journalists to serve a society desperately in need of reliable information. I’ve seen countless instances in which people want journalists to bury reporting, twist the facts, or embrace speculation—all to demonstrate allegiance to some higher cause. Instead, journalists should interrogate the world with curiosity, not certainty. We should remain skeptical, humble, searching, as we explore every story, no matter how well we think we know a topic. We should complicate seemingly tidy narratives, embrace nuance, and continually question what we find.

Second, journalists should recommit to reporting as the most valuable service we provide to the public. Reporting—not commentary or aggregation—is the essential ingredient of new ideas and new insights and allows every part of the journalism ecosystem to flourish. This requires journalists to get out of our bubbles. One insidious side effect of the collapse of local news is that journalism jobs are increasingly dominated by highly educated people living in blue coastal cities: according to the Pew Research Center, more than one in five journalists lives in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington. And far too many over-rely on Twitter, mistaking it for a public town square rather than a journalistic echo chamber. Reporters need to work harder to go to unfamiliar places, meet with unfamiliar people, and challenge our own assumptions with unfamiliar perspectives, experiences, and ideas.

Third, journalists need to better recognize how public criticism can manipulate coverage. In today’s hyper-connected environment, the response to our work is more immediate and intense than ever. The increase in transparency and greater accountability for our mistakes and missteps is a welcome shift. But the reaction to our work now often arrives through attacks designed to intimidate by questioning journalists’ legitimacy or morality. The critics here don’t want to set the record straight; they want to cajole, shame, and scare journalists into providing more favorable coverage. At the same time, cheers, like jeers, can be used to co-opt. Self-respecting journalists don’t take marching orders from politicians and corporations; they need to equally resist shaping their coverage to win the praise of activists and interest groups, even those engaged in admirable work. As Dean Baquet, the former executive editor of the Times , often says: Watchdogs cannot allow themselves to become lapdogs.

Finally, journalists should more actively reckon with the uncomfortable reality of widespread distrust in the media. It will take years, if not decades, to win over people who have been told again and again by those they admire and trust—including a former president of the United States—that the media hates them and hates this country. But news organizations can’t act as if they are powerless to reverse the growing distrust in journalism more broadly. They need to do a far better job fighting for their reputations and explaining how they make journalistic decisions. Many of the profession’s conventions—the inverted-pyramid article structure, datelines and bylines, and contortions to excise the writer from the work— are relics of an era when faith in journalistic institutions was assumed. I’m not convinced people ever really understood these conventions. But today we can say with certainty that they don’t. The Times ’ own research suggests that even many loyal readers did not understand that our journalists—who, in a normal year, report on the ground from more than 160 countries, often in difficult and dangerous conditions—actually go to the places they write about. That is a failure not of readers’ understanding but of our communication. We haven’t consistently and clearly shown what goes into our reporting, adequately explained our process, or fully clarified how we view our role.

Beyond the journalism industry, others must do their part if we are to protect independent journalism and the role it plays to nurture an informed society. Three groups stand out.

Search engines and, especially, social platforms—most notably Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok—have played an outsize role in creating the conditions that threaten independent journalism. I’m not talking about the shift of advertising dollars from news organizations to tech giants, though that hasn’t helped. I’m talking about the profound shifts in how people find and engage with information, shifts that have exacerbated groupthink, fostered antipathy, and fractured people’s understanding of reality. These platforms and others have largely treated facts as indistinguishable from opinions, allowed reality to mix with conspiracy, and given propaganda equal footing with journalism. And the use of likes and shares to assess engagement and determine promotion has incentivized publishers to produce content that affirms rather than informs, that inflames divisions rather than promotes understanding. I’m sympathetic to the challenges the platforms face in regulating their environments, but they will continue to foster misinformation and polarization until they do more to both differentiate and elevate reputable independent news sources, even if it comes at the cost of user engagement or political backlash.

If journalism was the unintended casualty of the platforms, it’s been the political establishment’s explicit target. Our country’s founders largely defended the free press, even as they knew that its scrutiny wasn’t always comfortable. But particularly in the past few years, a sustained and escalating campaign from the American right has focused on attacking the press to win votes and inoculate itself against criticism or scrutiny. Rather than responding to the substance of unflattering reporting, they’ve labeled reporters “enemies of the people” and our work “fake news.”

This campaign has widened what was long a modest partisan gap in trust in journalism to a chasm. Today, 70 percent of Democrats say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media; 14 percent of Republicans do. The anti-press rhetoric has also inspired legal action. The Times has faced four times as many libel suits in the six years since Trump’s election than in the six years before—many from right-wing activists who want the Supreme Court to overturn what were long assumed to be bedrock legal protections for the press. A not-so-subtle goal of this effort is to make it easier to sue news organizations and, as a result, harder for journalists to bring information to the public.

This may be an effective tactic. Few professions today evoke more widespread scorn than journalism. But attacking the free press is reckless and unpatriotic. In countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, similar anti-journalism rhetoric and action have presaged broader dismantling of democratic norms, efforts made far easier without the transparency and accountability provided by a free and independent press. In the United States, this amounts to a dangerous incursion not just on the spirit of the First Amendment, but on the special formula that has made this country the most successful on earth. Our nation’s history shows independent journalism not only makes our society more informed, it makes our nation more secure, our economy stronger, our people healthier, our society more just. Systematically undermining independent journalism—and seeking to replace it with self-serving propaganda from powerful interests—weakens the nation.

No one stands to lose more from these trends than the American people. For decades, spreading a newspaper on the kitchen table or gathering to watch the nightly news was an essential part of being a good citizen. The rituals may have changed, but the need hasn’t. Citizens still benefit from a shared set of facts. They still benefit from understanding their neighbors and their nation and caring enough to peek beyond the boundaries of their own lives to engage with the larger world.

It is Americans themselves who will need to insist that there is a future for independent journalism. Amid all the distraction, confusion, and chaos of the digital world, it’s more important than ever that citizens develop relationships with news organizations that inform and challenge them, commit to finding a daily place in their lives for independent journalism, and use it to expand, not merely reinforce, their worldview. If the press holds fast to journalistic independence, I am confident that over time more people—of all backgrounds and perspectives—will come to see the value of journalists serving as fair-minded guides through a complex world at a consequential moment.

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journalistic

Definition of journalistic

Examples of journalistic in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'journalistic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1791, in the meaning defined above

Dictionary Entries Near journalistic

Cite this entry.

“Journalistic.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/journalistic. Accessed 4 Jun. 2024.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/sen-bob-menendez-is-on-trial-for-corruption-why-his-trial-and-that-of-other-public-officials-may-not-end-in-jail-time

The bar for prosecutors in the Menendez corruption trial is higher thanks to this 2016 Supreme Court ruling

Experts say it’s harder today than it was a decade ago for prosecutors to build a political corruption case against lawmakers like Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who is on trial for allegedly accepting bribes in exchange for political favors.

That’s because of a landmark 2016 Supreme Court decision that narrowed the definition of political corruption, including what is considered official acts.

READ MORE: Sen. Menendez reveals his wife has breast cancer as presentation of evidence begins at his trial

Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were indicted last September on corruption charges and pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors added a charge of obstruction of justice and another charge accusing the pair of conspiring to act on behalf of Egypt while Menendez was serving as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

An FBI raid at Menendez’s home in 2022 turned up 13 gold bars and almost $500,000 in cash, stuffed into jackets hanging in the closet, inside bags and a safe. His defense team has argued that the senator, who is of Cuban heritage, was motivated to keep cash in his home because of trauma from having family property confiscated after the Cuban revolution.

This is the second time in nine years the senator has faced corruption charges. That first Menendez case, focused on what prosecutors described as a yearslong bribery scheme where the senator received gifts and trips in exchange for government favors, ended in a mistrial in 2017 after the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Reports at the time drew a connection between that mistrial and the Supreme Court ruling in McDonnell vs. U.S.

The 2016 Supreme Court case, McDonnell vs. U.S., was an appeal from a lower court ruling that found Virginia’s former Gov. Bob McDonnell guilty of accepting more than $165,000 in gifts from a businessman in exchange for favors that would help promote dietary supplements. These gifts included loans, a Rolex watch, family vacations, almost $20,000 in clothing for McDonnell’s wife and $15,000 paid for the catering at McDonnell’s daughter’s wedding.

A jury in 2014 found that in exchange, McDonnell helped set up meetings for the dietary supplement business with state health officials and hosted an event for the company at the governor’s mansion.

McDonnell argued that these were not “official acts” under the law but rather constituent services – routine assistance that elected officials provide to the public.

FILE PHOTO: Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (C) is trailed by reporters as he departs after his appeal of his 2014 corruption conviction was heard at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, U.S. April 27, 2016. Photo by REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

In 2016 the Supreme Court agreed in a unanimous 8-0 decision that overturned his conviction. Calling McDonnell’s original case “distasteful” and “tawdry,” Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that, nevertheless, the law’s definition of “official acts” was too broad.

“There is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that. But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns. It is instead with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute,” Roberts wrote.

“A more limited interpretation of the term “official act” leaves ample room for prosecuting corruption, while comporting with the text of the statute and the precedent of this Court,” he continued.

The decision caused several former officials to challenge their corruption convictions, and moved the ball for prosecutors in terms of what they must prove.

“What the statute does makes very clear that …. paying for access, paying for influence is not considered bribery,” Wayne State University Law professor Jennifer Taub said.

To Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, senior government affairs manager for the Project on Government Oversight, the McDonnell ruling has created a too-high bar for prosecutors and juries to clear when it comes to convicting a public official for corruption.

“A lot of us have criticized the Supreme Court in the McDonnell ruling, because there is a lot, a lot of bad behavior on the part of public officials that very much is corruption and any other definition you might want to think of,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “But if it doesn’t just barely meet that kind of McDonnell threshold … suddenly it’s not corruption.”

He added that if corruption allegations have “to be that blatant and that explicit and that obvious, then that basically allows for all kinds of bad behavior and all kinds of shenanigans, all kinds of skullduggery, including the types of stuff that Sen. Menendez has been charged with.”

Under federal statute, bribery can fundamentally be described as “a prohibition on using public office for private gain,” Taub said. “But then it gets very narrow from there.”

While selling favors quid pro quo could be bribery, if a public official does something favorable for a particular business because the official believes it would be good policy, that would not necessarily fall afoul of the statute.

Taub gives a hypothetical example of a lobbyist who convinces a legislator to support a bill. The lobbyist is so pleased with this outcome that they give the legislator a gift.

“That sort of ‘gift after I do something,’ unless you can directly link it to a specific act, that kind of gratuity would not be actionable,” Taub said.

Taub said the same would be true if a politician agrees to make introductions on behalf of the lobbyist.

“‘I will introduce you to all the fancy people who are the movers and shakers. I will say nice things about you to everybody.’ That’s influence peddling. That’s disgusting. But that is not against federal law,” Taub said.

Penn State professor Stanley Brand argues that public officials are owed due process and, like all criminal defendants, should be protected from prosecutorial overreach.

“These concepts … prevent the courts from stretching those statutes beyond their clear and precise definitions, and the reason for that is what the [Supreme Court] has said is, ‘You don’t want to give prosecutors that much power and discretion,’” Brand said. “Every American is entitled to not having prosecutors stretch these statutes to the breaking point.”

READ MORE: Judge rejects Sen. Menendez’s claims that legislative immunity protects him from bribery charges

Taub argues that the public’s understanding of what constitutes corruption is much broader than the reality that will be enforced by the court.

Most people picture the public definition of corruption “as a big-size swimming pool,” Taub said. “But what qualifies under the federal statute as corruption is more like one of those backyard blow-up kiddie pools.”

When it comes to quid pro quo corruption, Taub said, “ I do think that wanting to be absolutely clear what is considered an official act matters.”

It’s up to Congress to make the law more strict with explicit restrictions on, for example, gifts or payments to lawmakers or detailed language about what constitutes an official act for a public official, she said.

After his indictment on the most recent charges and facing dismal poll numbers , Menendez withdrew from New Jersey’s Democratic Senate primary. This week, he announced he was re-entering the race as an independent candidate. Hedtler-Gaudette said that while voters are the “ultimate backstop” against a candidate implicated in corruption, the chances of them doing so may be slim.

“Everything we know from the political side of literature is that incumbency and the ability to have a name you are familiar with on the ballot are the two biggest predictors of someone being elected,” Hedlter-Gaudette said.

And while the accusations against Menendez are serious, Hedlter-Gaudette said, many voters have not been paying attention to them.

“It probably hasn’t penetrated as deeply as you might think. And so a lot of people who are going to vote, you know, are just going to hear the name they’ve been seeing on the ballot for the last 25 years and check the box.”

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Journalism ethics.

• Patrick Lee Plaisance Patrick Lee Plaisance Department of Journalism & Media Communication, Colorado State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.89
• Published online: 09 June 2016

News workers—writers, editors, videographers, bloggers, photographers, designers—regularly confront questions of potential harms and conflicting values in the course of their work, and the field of journalism ethics concerns itself with standards of behavior and the quality of justifications used to defend controversial journalistic decisions. While journalism ethics, as with the philosophy of ethics in general, is less concerned with pronouncements of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of certain acts, it relies on longstanding notions of the public-service mission of journalism. However, informing the public and serving a “watchdog” function regularly require journalists to negotiate questions of privacy, autonomy, community engagement, and the potentially damaging consequences of providing information that individuals and governments would rather withhold.

As news organizations continue to search for successful business models to support journalistic work, ethics questions over conflicts of interest and content transparency (e.g., native advertising) have gained prominence. Media technology platforms that have served to democratize and decentralize the dissemination of news have underscored the debate about who, or what type of content, should be subjected to journalism ethics standards. Media ethics scholars, most of whom are from Western democracies, also are struggling to articulate the features of a “global” journalism ethics framework that emphasizes broad internationalist ideals yet accommodates cultural pluralism. This is particularly challenging given that the very idea of “press freedom” remains an alien one in many countries of the world, and the notion is explicitly included in the constitutions of only a few of the world’s democratic societies. The global trend toward recognizing and promoting press freedom is clear, but it is occurring at different rates in different countries. Other work in the field explores the factors on the individual, organizational, and societal levels that help or hinder journalists seeking to ensure that their work is defined by widely accepted virtues and ethical principles.

• minimizing harm
• public service
• global ethics
• newsgathering standards
• framing effects
• journalism culture
• media technology

Introduction

Potential harm posed by news accounts, the use of deceptive tactics to secure stories, and the increasing prevalence of infotainment content are all examples of journalism ethics issues. In addition to specific practices, the field of journalism ethics also addresses broader theoretical issues such as what roles the news media should play in society, whether the idea of patriotism poses a conflict of interest for journalists, and what might constitute a set of universal or global values to define good journalism across cultures. As a field, journalism ethics spans a wide range of issues from examination of specific case studies that raise questions of privacy and editorial independence, to abstract, normative arguments about how concepts from moral philosophy such as realism, relativism, and the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia , or flourishing, should inform the work of journalism.

As the idea of journalism has evolved over the centuries, economic imperatives and the desire to be seen as performing “professionalized” work have motivated news publishers and journalists to embrace various standards of behavior. Depending on its cultural context, the idea of journalism emerged from commercial or political “hack” work, where newspapers were entertainment or party organs, to its role in most developed countries as an autonomous broker of information and “watchdog” of power centers on behalf of citizens. As a result, publishers, editors, and writers recognized the value of embracing standards of conduct to build integrity and commercial viability. Journalism ethics scholars and researchers have explored the philosophical underpinnings of these standards, the recurrent failures of news workers to meet them, and the moral obligations of journalism on a societal level.

Ethics and the Journalistic Mission

While ethics is conventionally understood as the work involved to discern “right” actions from wrong, it is more precisely a field of inquiry focused on examining the quality of our deliberations when dealing with moral dilemmas. It is about asking the “right” questions to best illuminate our duties and potential impacts on others. As such, ethics rarely provides clear answers about the best way to handle quandaries. Rather, ethics serves to help us highlight morally relevant issues and come up with optimal defensible decisions. This also describes the field of journalism ethics: while there are some clear rules and standards about how journalists should operate, more common are abstract statements of value that are intended to inform good behavior. Journalism ethics is a distinct subfield of media ethics in that it addresses behavior and dilemmas unique to the practices of gathering and presenting news content. It works within the context of journalism culture that assumes a critical public-service function of the work in a professional or semi-professional setting distinct from marketing or promotional media content. While journalism ethics scholarship draws from moral philosophy in its use of concepts such as autonomy, harm, and justice, it also represents an applied ethics approach, focusing as it often does on case studies and analyses of situations that pose dilemmas involving protection of journalistic credibility or potential harm to story subjects. Ethicists in media often call for a deontological approach in journalism practice—for journalists to be more mindful of these broad duties and less concerned about the consequences of providing the news to the public. True public service, they argue, requires journalists to report the news, as explosive, discomforting, or controversial as it may be, and let the chips fall where they may. The public must decide how that information will be utilized. These ethicists insist that journalists should resist paternalistic impulses and pressure to “sanitize” the news. Despite this general tendency, many journalism ethics codes and standards also include explicitly utilitarian concerns—a recognition that journalists must, of course, be mindful of the consequences of their work, particularly when it comes to potential harmful effects of some information. The tensions created by these two approaches often constitute the heart of many journalism ethics controversies, just as they do in other areas of applied ethics. A look at codes of ethics embraced by various journalistic organizations around the world illustrates how both approaches are invoked. These codes most often avoid clear declarations of prohibitions or required actions, and instead provide aspirational calls for journalists to report the news courageously, to be accountable to the public, and to minimize harm as much as possible. All of these imply a special covenant with the public and an obligation to act in ways that serve more than the commercial interests of individual journalists or news organizations. This includes, as one of the first publishers of the New York Times famously said, to report the news “without fear or favor”—in other words, without being cowed or intimidated by powerful people or institutions who might want to shape the news for their own interests, and also without any agenda to promote any single individual, cause, or policy in the course of reporting. In commercial media systems, the specter of corporate conflict of interest is a recurring journalism ethics issue: corporate media conglomerates use their journalism divisions to promote, in the guise of news content, products or services (such as a film or musical artist) produced by another division. Similarly, nationalized or party-owned news outlets subject to government or political control are typically perceived as lacking sufficient editorial autonomy to report news that may adversely impact those in power. Accountability in journalism most often refers to fulfilling a public-service role in the dissemination of news. It calls for journalists to respond quickly to questions about accuracy, and to acknowledge and correct mistakes. It also implies the notion that journalists wield considerable power in their ability to spotlight and scrutinize the behavior of others, and that they must use that power judiciously. Journalists, consequently, are expected to acknowledge their own ethical lapses, and to apply the same standards of behavior to themselves that they hold for news subjects. Most journalistic ethics codes also call for minimizing harm in the course of news work. Note that the call to minimize harm is distinct from imperatives to “prevent” or “avoid” harm, which are virtually non-existent in journalism. This semantic distinction is deliberate and reflects an acknowledgement that harmful effects are occasionally inevitable in the course of good journalism. Journalistic harm is most conventionally understood as materially “setting back” an important and legitimate “interest” of someone or some group that is the focus of news. Some such harms might be easily defended, such as the economic harm caused by an investigative report on the questionable or illegal practices of a company. Other such harms are more difficult to justify, such as the damage created to someone’s reputation by the disclosure of personal facts not considered very newsworthy. But harm can take many other forms. Ill-considered behavior might result in harm to the individual journalist’s reputation or that of his or her news organization. As with most other lines of work, the ethically questionable behavior of individual actors can easily reflect on—and harm—the profession or field as a whole, reducing trust. The public also can be harmed with misinformation and sensationalistic coverage or content that leaves people with an inaccurate understanding of a topic or issue. In most cases, journalists minimize potential harms by articulating the public value of published information and by considering withholding information that might be less important or relevant for a story. Journalists also consider story “play”—how images and graphics are used as well as story placement and prominence. More recently, journalism ethics discussions and scholarship have emphasized additional values. One is transparency, or being aboveboard in explaining news decisions. For example, recent efforts to revise the code of ethics of the Society for Professional Journalists in the United States resulted in adding the imperative that journalists “be transparent.” In some cases, this has meant inviting the public to observe, either personally or via streaming video, editorial meetings of news organizations. In others, it has meant allowing digital access to databases and other files that are used in building news stories. Another value that has gained in prominence in journalism ethics is community engagement. More journalistic organizations, particularly digital-only news sites, have expressed an obligation to move beyond mere reporting of the news and to make efforts to foster civic participation. At its most basic, this manifests itself through active story comment lines and forums to discuss stories and issues. But it also can include the sponsorship by news organizations of public meetings to address specific issues of concern as well as inviting audience members to “sponsor” an investigative effort, which a news organization, once receiving sufficient financial support, “pledges” to publish.

Journalism and Ethics Frameworks

Much work in journalism ethics is rooted in two predominant strains found in the philosophy of ethics. One is consequentialism , in which much of the moral weight of decisions is placed on the goodness of the outcome. In journalism, this is most clearly illustrated by the focus on possible harms resulting from newsgathering and publishing. The other predominant strain is deontology , or duty-based ethics. Many news outlets and journalism associations have embraced ethics codes that itemize the various duties that responsible journalists must carry out: duty to serve the public, duty to scrutinize centers of power, duty to be as transparent and accountable as possible. But the “third way” in ethics, virtue theory, has recently been gathering prominence in journalism practice as well. Rooted in the work of Aristotle, this approach focuses instead on identifying “virtues”—what it means to be courageous, charitable, honest, and so forth—and articulating how such virtues ought to be manifested in our lives if we are serious about the promotion of human “flourishing.” Insisting that journalists should “be virtuous” may sound like a less-than-useful platitude, but recognizing and living by virtues is far from simple. We would not still be discussing them thousands of years after Aristotle if it were. And as we have seen, ethics is rarely black and white. We must juggle competing claims, weigh various possible harms, articulate often multiple duties—all in the course of just one ethical question. In moral psychology (discussed later in this article), the idea of “moral commitment” is an important one—the degree to which individuals internalize moral principles, or virtues, into their very self-identities, so that those principles almost reflexively inform daily behavior. Moral “exemplars” are those among us who not only internalize these principles, but whose moral development has given them what might be called a highly developed skill of discrimination: the ability to make fine-grained distinctions among similar situations and to thoughtfully respond with just the right mix of appraisals, beliefs, and behavior that still reflect one’s broader moral commitments. This is the more character-driven approach that preoccupies virtue ethicists. One of them, Rosalind Hursthouse ( 1999 , p. 154), argued that the virtues “are not excellences of character, not traits that, by their very nature, make their possessors good and result in good conduct.” Rather, she said we must remember the “Aristotelian idea that each of the virtues involves practical wisdom, the ability to reason correctly about practical matters.” It is more of a “ground-up” approach, rather than the “top-down” approach of duty ethics or the “ends-focused” approach of consequentialism. And for a growing chorus of journalism ethics scholars, it may be the most useful one. “By building from our appreciation of ‘particular facts’ about how the media operate in the contemporary world, we have a more useful starting point for the tangled problems of media ethics than by relying on supposedly consensual norms, rights or obligations,” wrote media ethicist Nick Couldry ( 2013 , p. 42).

A notable example of virtue ethics applied to journalism is offered by media ethicist Sandra Borden. Borden draws on the work of philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, who argues that the ancient Greeks understood the notion of virtues as qualities that were critical to have if one were to perform well in his or her social roles. Aristotle described virtues not as ends in themselves, but as tools to achieve what he said should be our broader aim: “the good life,” or eudaimonia . As individuals, we not only contribute to our own well-being but help bring about such flourishing for all through specialized work that is often referred to as professional behavior. In his landmark book, After Virtue , MacIntyre ( 2007 , p. 187) called this type of work a practice :

By ‘practice’ I . . . mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the end and good involved, are systematically extended.

Such practices, he argued, involve “standards of excellence and obedience to rules” that are aimed at attaining internal goods, or things that contribute to the common good regardless of who actually receives them. Media professionals, when deliberately informing their work with the “standards of excellence” that are attached to their “practices,” are able to deliver public goods such as providing information and analysis that enables the public to participate in a vigorous democratic life. As Borden ( 2007 , p. 16) summarized, “an occupation’s purpose provides it with moral justification, from a virtue perspective, if it can be integrated into a broader conception of what is good for humans.” In her book, Journalism as Practice , she made the compelling case that journalism should indeed be treated as a MacIntyrean practice . Another media ethicist, Victor Pickard ( 2011 , p. 76), eloquently described the “practice” of journalism having internal goods as its aim:

[Journalism] is an essential public service with social benefits that transcend its revenue stream. In its ideal form, journalism creates tremendous positive externalities. It serves as a watchdog over the powerful, covers crucial social issues, and provides a forum for diverse voices and viewpoints. As such, journalism functions as democracy’s critical infrastructure.

Implications of Specific Practices

Due to the ongoing nature and recurring tensions inherent in news work, several specific types of questions and controversies regularly surface. Yet it should be clear that ethics provides no clear-cut solution to cases of the same type; indeed, ethicists often argue for very different resolutions or optimal decisions among similar cases, depending on context and factors that may have more or less importance in different situations. It nonetheless is valuable to note several broad types of journalism ethics questions:

Conflict of interest. As noted previously, corporate and political conflicts of interest commonly raise questions of journalistic autonomy and adherence to ideals of public service. Conflict of interest can also occur at the individual level, where the interests or values of a single journalist might tempt him or her to compromise his or her news judgements. Most journalistic policies require news workers to treat potential appearances of conflict of interest as just as much a threat to credibility as actual conflicts, and, in cases of the latter, to take explicit steps to acknowledge the conflict and to either minimize or eliminate it. In most cases, journalists are expected to recuse themselves from activities that might pose a journalistic conflict. This includes policies that prohibit reporters covering politics from featuring political bumper stickers on their private vehicles.

Minimizing harm. Also as noted, the concept of harm can take many forms, and journalists are regularly called upon to justify their decisions that arguably cause harm to individuals or groups. Photojournalists in war zones and those covering sites of humanitarian tragedy have been challenged, for example, for their decisions to maintain their role as dispassionate witnesses to scenes of human suffering, rather than setting down their cameras and helping those in need. News organizations also have drawn criticism when disclosing secret or classified information that, in the course of informing the public, may arguably harm or undermine national interests.

Balancing privacy interests. Generally, theorists agree that everyone requires a degree of privacy to allow for self-development and to enable individuals to manage their multiple social roles. But with the value of privacy regularly being contested, journalists confront the dilemma of the extent to which respect for individual privacy should determine news coverage. While some scholars have argued that protecting privacy should never be considered the job of the journalist because of myriad and shifting definitions, others emphasize that journalism that respects privacy can encourage civic participation and engagement. Ethics arguments frequently flare over when disclosure of personal information is merited as well as when story subjects arguably seek to dodge accountability by invoking questionable or ill-informed privacy claims.

News frame effects. News content that may have negative effects on society frequently raises ethics questions. For example, psychologists have long warned of the “contagion” effect of coverage of suicide that focuses on the method of death and emotional state of the subject, which may prompt others in a similar emotional state to “copy” the story. Journalists have embraced media guidelines for responsible coverage of suicide as a social-health issue rather than as spectacle. The way an issue in the news is “framed” by story narratives, using factors such as sourcing, point of view, emphasis, and description, can leave audiences with a particular understanding of that issue. Framing of hot-button topics such as gun violence, gender roles, or obesity can serve to emphasize or favor one perspective over another and thus raise ethical questions.

Stereotypes. Relying on or perpetuating gender, racial, or ethnic stereotypes in news stories also can be considered a framing issue, and journalists must be mindful of inadvertent stereotyping. Expediency, narrative brevity, and the press of deadlines often discourage thoughtful considerations of the descriptions used for story subjects, be they local celebrities or police suspects. Research has suggested a consistent gender bias in news descriptions of physicality, emphasizing clothing items for women but not men, for example. Also, consistent focus on race often leaves skewed perceptions of crime patterns in the mind of the public.

Newsgathering techniques. What methods are justifiable in the collection of information valuable to the public? Classic what-ends-justify-the-means questions regularly confront journalists. While absolutist policies are rare, many news organizations refuse to pay for news or interviews, though tabloid outlets commonly do so. The concern is that sources with a financial incentive may be tempted to embellish, alter, or even fabricate facts and events, thereby undermining the journalistic enterprise. In some developing countries, such as Kenya, China, and India, money is regularly passed to individual journalists to curry favor and secure positive treatment. With celebrity periodicals, where exposure has created its own competitive market among a finite pool of public figures, payment for attention has become more removed from objective newsworthiness standards. The use of deceptive tactics, such as hidden cameras, also raises ethical questions. Several journalistic organizations have adopted policies stating that hidden cameras should be used only as a last resort and only when the information sought has high potential value for the public. Similar policies apply to journalists misrepresenting themselves to access information.

Graphic images. The publication of photos that depict gore, violence, and suffering regularly raises ethical questions for news journalists. Such questions become particularly heated during times of war or conflict, and when patriotic sentiments may bring added pressure to bear on journalists to depict the “right” story and avoid using images that audiences might perceive to be demoralizing. Claims that graphic images can be offensive, harmful, or unnecessary clash with concerns that avoiding such images risks sanitizing or propagandizing the news, which can easily undermine journalistic credibility. As with other journalistic ethics issues, the controversies over the publication of graphic images reflect diametric approaches within ethics itself: A utilitarian concern focused on minimizing harmful consequences of a decision versus a deontological ethos that calls for depicting the news with courage and relying on audiences to make their own decisions about the value of such images.

Ethics and Journalism Sociology

A variety of factors influences and even determines the behavior of journalists. The professional, cultural, and organizational environments in which journalists work have been referred to as their “moral ecology,” a recognition that news workers, like everyone else, do not operate in a self-defined vacuum, and that individual beliefs and predispositions are routinely subsumed by broader processes of socialization that can both help and hinder the exercise of ethical reasoning skills and moral autonomy. Thus, normative claims about what journalists should or should not do in the course of their work must rest not on assumptions that journalists are guided solely by personal beliefs but on an appreciation of these socialization processes. For example, journalists are criticized for advancing a “news agenda” reflecting their personal biases, but such claims often ignore how the broader constraints of the news decision-making process (e.g., the requirements of video production on deadline), organizational structure (e.g., the allocation of resources intended to produce one type of news content over another), or professional culture (e.g., the internal system of sanctions and rewards from editors based on impartiality of work) function as much greater influences. That moral ecology, of course, varies widely around the globe. Journalism sociology research over the years has identified broad “levels” or categories of factors that influence the production of news, generally distinguishing among individual-, organizational-, and societal-level spheres. For example, the ongoing “Worlds of Journalism” project examining news work across cultures has identified six levels of influence:

The individual level includes personal opinions, values, and demographic data as well as information on specific roles and occupational characteristics within a news organization.

The media routines level includes deadlines, production procedures, and standards and other constraints posed by newsgathering practices.

The organizational level includes technological imperatives, advertising or revenue considerations, and editorial decision-making.

The media structures level includes the economic model of news that entails profitability and resource allocation as realities in the relatively high costs of news production.

The systemic level includes national-level data such as regulatory policies, ideological assumptions, and degree of press freedoms.

Reference groups constitute a dimension that spans professional and personal domains to include competing news organizations, audiences, colleagues, friends, and family members.

In much research on journalism culture since the late 20th century, organizational- and societal-level factors have been found to be stronger influences on news content than individual-level factors, suggesting a hierarchical structure of influences in which the higher the level, the stronger the influence. However, no definitive model of influence has emerged.

Media Technology

The proliferation of online media has resulted in a host of new complications for journalists and news organizations. While traditional ethical concepts do not fundamentally change when information is delivered online, the ease and ubiquity of digital media provide new ways of interacting with audience members and story subjects. And everyone is tempted to do things he or she may not otherwise contemplate without the speed and ease of media technology. As one media ethics scholar noted, “Deceptive behavior in cyberspace is . . . not a new moral issue though it raises the problem of ‘moral distance’ with extra urgency . . . The speed of digital communication does not create new forms of immorality, but makes it possible to commit immoral acts so fast one hardly notices” ( 2000 , pp. 34–35). For example, the issue of corrections and retractions in digital journalism has received considerable attention.

Generally, many journalistic organizations, such as the Canadian Association of Journalists, have adopted policies against “unpublishing” erroneous reports from their archives and instead amending corrections to them. News organizations also have felt increasing pressure from story subjects who are embarrassed by content and argue that it is unfair for the news organizations to archive material long after it is no longer relevant. But allowing individuals to “scrub” the public record for their own interests raises deeper questions about the value of independently curated public information, and it also can threaten a key aspect of the journalistic mission, which is to document history. As one journalism educator has said, “Source remorse is not a reason to unpublish.” Unpublishing material also does little to eliminate the “echoes” that likely exist all over the Web on search engines, blogs, and other news sites. Better to correct or amend the existing archived material, which both preserves the integrity of the journalistic process and also fosters credibility through transparent action. For instance, editors at the Boston Globe cited the latter for their decision to correct, but not remove, a live blog post erroneously stating that an arrest had been made shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 . In rare cases, a news organization may consider unpublishing a story that is judged to be unethical or even be questionable legally, or when continued accessibility of an archived story may pose a real threat to someone’s well-being. In such cases, many policies urge journalists to look for evidence of concrete harm, such a doctor’s opinion, and for any such decisions to unpublish to be made by consensus, never leaving them to a single person.

The immediacy provided by media technology has enabled journalists to increase their relevance and value and to foster new forms of interaction with audiences. It also can encourage broad collaborative efforts with non-journalists whose perspectives and information can augment journalistic efforts. But that very immediacy can threaten to become deterministic —the value of now can displace ethical concerns of credibility, verification, and care. In the rush to be a part of the conversation and buzz on breaking stories, many news organizations have fallen victim to all stripes of hoaxes. “The development of social networks for real-time news and information, and the integration of social media content in the news media, creates tensions for a profession based on a discipline of verification,” said journalism technology scholar Alfred Hermida. News sites around the world, for example, circulated what turned out to be a fake photo of Osama Bin Laden’s body soon after his death in May 2011 . The immediacy of digital technology tempts journalists to post, share, and verify later—often at the cost of their long-term credibility. This risk of compromised integrity or even partiality is a serious concern reflected in the social media policies of most news organizations. The notion of technological determinism—that values emphasized by technology such as convenience tempt us to set aside other values such as respect, conscientiousness, and even safety—has resulted in abetting the perilous impulse in a competitive media system of getting it first rather than getting it right. Critic Evgeny Morozov ( 2011 , p. xvi) calls this “cyber-centrism,” or our tendency to “prioritize the tool over the environment.” The integration of social media also has required journalists to resist the temptation for informality. Several news organizations have adopted explicit policies that reinforce how traditional concerns of ethics as well as etiquette apply to social media. For example, the Associated Press cautions its writers about the peril residing in too-informal use of Twitter:

Twitter, in particular, can present some challenges—with a tight character count and no way to modulate your body language or the volume and tone of your voice, requests that are intended to be sensitive can come across as cold or even demanding. Think about how your tweet would come across if spoken with an angry voice, because that’s just how the recipient may hear it in his head.

Media technology has collapsed time and space in the exchange of information, but it also has arguably initiated a reformation of communication structures. No longer is the news media system a “closed” one in which journalists serve a central gatekeeping function; now we have an “open” system in which the sourcing and distribution of information has been radically democratized and globalized. As many theorists have said, we now have a networked society. Journalists and journalistic brands are now just single nodes among a constellation of voices and sources, all moving in a “shared” information space. This, writes scholar Ansgard Heinrich, “sketches the evolution of an interactive sphere that, at least in theory, fosters a greater level of interaction and exchange. Connection, interaction, and collaboration are the markers of this shift.” This transformation, however, poses many questions for journalism as it has been conventionally understood, in the form of print newspapers and broadcast networks. Who do you link to? How do you distinguish between activist bloggers and more dispassionate collaborators? Do these distinctions matter anymore? And in this new “network journalism,” how are journalists to act responsibly in what is now a global sphere? Scholars have begun insisting that journalists have a responsibility to be more cosmopolitan in their outlook and their framing of news, and to work harder to transcend the “nationalistic” lenses that have traditionally dominated news narratives. As Heinrich argues, “This nationally inward looking focus of news reporting, however, does not do justice to a world (1) where events in one corner of the world might affect the other; (2) where news stories produced by one outlet are not restricted in access to ‘local,’ i.e., national audiences; and (3) in which many voices roam through the spheres of a digitally connected world that might provide an alternative take on a news story.” Globally responsible journalists, then, must break out of the tradition of foreign correspondent narratives that focus almost exclusively on elite or official sources and on how events impact a particular nation, instead engaging in the multitude of activist and “unofficial” sources that provide often competing narratives.

Global Journalism Ethics Theorizing

Much journalism ethics theorizing since the end of the 20th century has been preoccupied with the desire to establish viable ethical norms that transcend cultural boundaries and reflect what one researcher referred to as an empirical trend toward “ever-increasing globalization of journalism standards.” Some of this work calls for a media system that relies on a framework of international human rights, or a general veneration of human life, to guide news work regardless of culture. Others have called for a “modified contractualist” approach that would respect differing cultural manifestations of broad principles. Still others insist that any such global framework reject Enlightenment assumptions of the primacy of individual rights and rationality. Too often, claims of journalism standards of behavior remain rooted in Western cultural assumptions and are imperialistically imposed onto non-Western cultures in which the values of social stability and collective well-being replace individualistic models. As one scholar observed, “It is a global reality that the common concerns we have as human beings coexist with differences of ethical thinking and priorities in different cultures. This coexistence of common ground and different places plays out in the work of journalists across the world.” Notwithstanding the rarity with which the value of press freedom is enshrined in Western media systems, American and European scholars and journalistic organizations continue to dominate journalism ethics discourse. As a result, that discourse is focused on protecting journalistic functions with the rule of law and insulating them from power and identity politics. The European Federation of Journalists, for example, released a report in 2015 examining the effects of chronic corruption in 18 countries, noting how “media managers are doing ‘deals’ with advertisers to carry paid-for material disguised as news, how editors are being bribed by politicians or corporate managers and how this whole process makes it increasingly difficult to separate journalism from propaganda from public relations.” But voices from other parts of the world are joining the discourse on press freedom and journalism ethics. Many sociology and philosophy scholars on the African continent have offered critiques of postcolonial systems to promote journalism institutions (e.g., Kasoma, 1996 ; Wasserman, 2006 ). In 2015 , the Journal of Media Ethics published a special issue devoted to the notion of ubuntu as a guiding framework for media practice—the idea common among several south African cultures that individual flourishing is possible only through community belonging and social identity. The widespread practice of journalists accepting gifts and cash in exchange for favorable treatment—called “brown-envelope” journalism in Nigeria and “red-envelope” journalism in China—is receiving an increased amount of attention by journalism sociology scholars around the world (Xu, 2016 ). The practice in China was an intrinsic part of the commercialization of the media system in China beginning in the 1980s, and was actually initiated by foreign companies to entice journalists to attend press conferences (Zhao, 1998 ).

Cultural diversity notwithstanding, research worldwide has identified several key areas and concepts that concern journalists across cultures. These include truth-telling, accuracy, factualness, objectivity, credibility, balance, verification, independence, fairness, accountability, honesty, and respect. Of course, many of these overlap, and they can apply to one or more of the influence levels referred to previously. But many journalism ethics scholars agree that these are not enough. It is shared moral principles, rather than agreed-upon practices, that can bind responsible journalists around the world in ethical solidarity. As scholar Clifford Christians ( 2010 , p. 6) argues:

Without a defensible conception of the good, our practices are arbitrary. How can we condemn violent practices such as suicide bombings in the name of jihad except through widely accepted principles? We are stunned at the blatant greed and plundering of the earth, but without norms we are only elitists and hot-tempered moralists. Conflicts among people, communities, and nations need principles other than their own for their resolution. A credible ethics, as a minimum, must be transnational in character.

Christians and others argue that such a global media ethic cannot start with conventional morality that assumes a superior rationality, such as that of Kant. Instead, it must begin with a much more “naturalistic” principle: universal human solidarity, which prioritizes human dignity, truth, and nonviolence, all of which are grounded in the notion of the sacredness of life. In addition to this notion, scholars point to the fundamentally social reality of human existence—that despite the predominance of Western individualism, our realities and even our identities are arguably rooted in interaction and community belonging. In this reality, communication is central, as it is through exchange that we understand ourselves and we see the importance of “the Other”—individuals we encounter who may not share our culture or perspective, but whose existence requires respect and validation. Again, Christians, drawing on a long line of earlier philosophers, explains: “Communication is not the transference of knowledge but a dialogic encounter of subjects creating it together.” This leads us to a framework of “anthropological realism” that provides a hopeful basis for a global media ethic. It is anthropological in nature because it is rooted in the realities of human existence rather than claims about any rationalistic ideals. It is realist in that it insists morality has an explicit character that exists independently of our perceptions and judgements. For the moral realist, moral claims of rightness or wrongness are true regardless of any beliefs an individual might have about them. The casual observer, however, might see an immediate problem with such a framework, a problem wrestled with by philosophers since antiquity: what exactly is the nature of the “good” and how do we apprehend it? Is there more to a moral claim than a sort of intuition that we just know right from wrong? And how might journalists articulate this framework of moral realism in the judgements they make about news, about ethnic conflict, about graphic images? In journalism ethics scholarship, these debates continue.

Moral Psychology Research

Broad-brushed, deductive theorizing such as that discussed previously is one active area of journalism ethics research. But other researchers are increasingly acknowledging the need for more empirical work that seeks to better understand ethical reasoning processes on the ground by bringing long-established psychology measurements to bear. This moral psychology research draws on important philosophical concepts as well as instruments that assess beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions to explore possible patterns and relationships among factors in ethical decision-making. Recent cross-cultural research involving interviewing journalists around the globe, led by German researcher Thomas Hanitzsch, suggests that they perceive notions of objectivity, accuracy, and truth-telling as “core elements” of a widely accepted ethic for journalism practice. Journalists, of course, have been socialized into these norms through formal journalism education as well as through immersion in the newsroom culture, with its internal system of sanctions and rewards by peers and superiors based on the perceived quality of one’s work. Other researchers emphasize that social psychological processes resulting in bias perceptions, such as social validation and attitude stabilization, also must be recognized as evident in the work of journalists.

Moral development theory provides several models to help explain how individuals’ moral agency and sense of morality evolve over the course of a lifetime. The most widely cited moral development theory is that of Lawrence Kohlberg, who has argued that our moral development is tied largely to two factors. One is the degree to which we internalize moral principles that apply to all and move away from relativistic thinking—the notion that moral decisions regarding what is “right” are strictly “relative” to one’s own personal values rather than any broader moral principles. The other, closely related to the first, is the sophistication and scope of our understanding of the concept of justice. Our moral development, Kohlberg argues, can be assessed as existing in one of six stages. Based on Kohlberg’s theory, researchers have refined and widely used a survey instrument that measures one’s moral reasoning skills based on these two factors. By assessing the frequency with which respondents draw on higher-order justifications when presented with a moral dilemma, the Defining Issues Test (DIT) has enabled researchers to assess the moral-reasoning skills of various populations such as professional groups. Media researchers Lee Wilkins and Renita Coleman pioneered the application of the DIT to journalists and other media workers, concluding that, because journalists routinely encountered ethical questions in the course of their work, their moral reasoning skills were relatively high compared with workers in other professions.

Another moral psychology instrument that has proven useful in journalism ethics research is the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) developed by Donelson Forsyth. Because people’s responses to ethical dilemmas are influenced by their worldviews, understanding the basic elements of their outlooks can illuminate the thrust of their ethical judgements. Two such basic elements are key to individuals’ “ethical ideologies.” One is how idealistic they are—that is, to what extent are they optimistic about the actions of others, and to what extent are they concerned about minimizing harm or are more accepting of harmful effects if positive consequences are believed to outweigh them. Another basic element is how relativistic they are—whether they tend to make judgements based primarily on their own interests and perceptions of “rightness” that are relative to their own standing or views, or whether they tend to draw on broader, universal principles to decide what’s ethically justifiable. Using some key items from the Forsyth instrument, the “Worlds of Journalism” project found that most journalists in the 20 countries surveyed tend to embrace universal principles that should be followed regardless of situation and context. They also agreed on the importance of avoiding questionable methods of reporting, even if this means not getting the story. Much less approval—although the extent of it varied between countries—could be found regarding how much personal latitude journalists should have in solving these problems. This desire for flexibility reflects the longstanding tension in ethics between desirable ends and questionable means, as discussed. Many journalists think that in certain situations, some harm to others would be justified if the result supports a greater public good. News workers in Western countries are more likely to disapprove of a contextual and situational ethics. This attitude, however, also exists in non-Western contexts, though less strongly. Chinese, Pakistani, and Russian journalists, on the other hand, tend to be most open to situational ethical practices. Consistent with this result, interviewees in Western contexts showed little support for the idea that journalists should be allowed to set their own individual ethical standards. Similarities between journalists from Western countries also exist with regard to idealism. Although journalists in all countries agreed on the view that questionable methods of reporting should be avoided, those working in Western contexts appreciate this idea more than their colleagues in a developmental and transitional environment. Regarding the acceptance of harmful consequences of reporting for the sake of a greater public good, journalists in most Western countries—but also their colleagues in Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Uganda—tend to keep all options on the table. Journalists in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, Romania, and Russia, on the other hand, exhibit a greater willingness to accept harmful consequences in the course of newsgathering and reporting.

In a study of journalism “exemplars” in the United States—reporters and editors widely respected for their accomplishments and ethical leadership—media ethicist Patrick Plaisance used both the Defining Issues Test and the Ethics Position Questionnaire, along with several other moral psychology instruments. Regarding the journalism exemplars’ moral reasoning, Plaisance found their DIT scores were indeed higher than that of journalists on average. Regarding the EPQ, the journalism exemplars uniformly rejected relativistic thinking as well. There was also a negative relationship between the journalism exemplars’ DIT scores and their degree of idealistic thinking. That is, the higher the exemplars score on the Defining Issues Test, the less they appear to embrace idealistic thinking. This may first appear counterintuitive; it might stand to reason that people with higher DIT scores, associated as they are with greater application of universal principles in moral judgements, also would be rather idealistic in their outlooks. However, it is important to remember that all of the exemplars scored low in relativistic thinking; so the issue is not that the exemplars would be more or less Machiavellian depending on their DIT scores, but to what degree their belief in universal moral standards, and perhaps primarily their concern for harming others, could be applied rigidly or not. The negative correlation with moral-reasoning scores, then, arguably reinforces the suggestion of comparatively greater moral development in that exemplars with the higher DIT scores exhibit a greater ability to adapt their principles to best fit the often complex range of contingencies in which they find themselves having to work. In other words, they are too wise to believe they can insist on a rigid application of moral rules that can fit all circumstances and have become more adept at making the kind of carefully considered, fine-grained distinctions frequently found among moral exemplars of all walks of life.

Other Resources

African Media Initiative of the Ethical Journalism Network .

Center for International Media Ethics .

Ethical Journalism Network corruption report .

European Federation of Journalists .

Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2012, Winter). Consequentialism . In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Society for Professional Journalists Code of Ethics .

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A Modi Win Will Only Mean More Trouble for Indian Muslims

M ore than two years have passed since a picture of me, picked up from my personal social media handles, was put up with a price tag for auction on the internet. It was part of a website called Bulli Bai , a religious slur used for Muslim women in India. 

Why was I targeted? Likely because of my reporting. The perpetrators wanted to shame and humiliate a journalist who was determined to expose the failures of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s gender, caste, and religion-based violence. But more importantly, they wanted to shut up a Muslim woman who had dared to be vocal in Modi’s India.

When the photo was posted, I wondered how the main perpetrator , a 21-year-old student from Assam, who created Bulli Bai could be so consumed by his hatred that he felt compelled to auction Muslim women online for their outspoken criticism of the BJP—journalists, social workers, actors, and politicians. A recent meeting with my lawyer about my case against the Bulli Bai creators, who are still being investigated by the Delhi police, was a painful reminder of the targeted harassment faced by outspoken Muslim voices critical of the ruling BJP. 

As the ongoing election in India is set to finish on June 1, it has once again offered deeper insight into how political dialogue is fueling this culture of hate. 

Particularly, the political campaign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP has leaned into anti-Muslim sentiment, progressively making Islamophobia one of the defining features of this election.

It was most prominently on display when Modi, in a thinly veiled reference to Muslims, referred to the 200 million Indian Muslim population as “infiltrators” at a BJP campaign rally while addressing voters in the Western state of Rajasthan on April 21. The Prime Minister also accused the opposition Congress party of planning to distribute the country’s wealth to Muslims.

Modi, in his speech, asked, “Earlier, when his [ former Prime Minister and Congress Party member Manmohan Singh’s] government was in power , he had said that Muslims have the first right on the country’s property, which means who they will collect this property and distribute it to—those who have more children, will distribute it to the infiltrators. Will the money of your hard work be given to the infiltrators? Do you approve of this?”

Read More: How India’s Hindu Nationalists Are Weaponizing History Against Muslims

This 2006 statement by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh emphasizing that minorities, particularly Muslims , should have the first claim on resources to help uplift their socio-economic status, has been often quoted out of context in political rhetoric, distorting its original intent to uplift marginalized communities.

The reemergence of conspiracy theories like “Love Jihad,” alleging a covert agenda by Muslim men to ensnare and convert Hindu women, by Modi, has surged back into public attention, prominently surfacing at an election rally on May 28, days before the seventh and last phase of the ongoing elections, in the Eastern state of Jharkhand . 

The alarming rhetoric about Muslim population growth too have dominated the election discourse, fueled by the BJP's top leader, Modi, who has been criticized for his Islamophobic remarks, evoking memories of Gujarat's 2002 riots. While he later denied singling out Muslims in an interview with an Indian news channel, his history of linking them to population growth fuels a Hindu-majoritarian conspiracy theory.

Following the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat during his tenure as chief minister, Modi faced scrutiny regarding his administration's lack of assistance to relief camps, predominantly established by non-profit organizations and Muslim communities. During a campaign rally, Modi then insinuated that these camps might transform into "baby factories," implying that Muslims could potentially have families as large as 25 children.

In his Jharkhand rally in May of this year, Modi spoke of "unseen enemies" working to divide society and claimed that the opposition parties were playing into the hands of “infiltrators”. He warned against "Zalim (cruel) love," alluding to Love Jihad. 

As the elections progressed, Modi’s speeches transformed slowly from issues such as “development” to anti-Muslim rhetoric. Unlike previous elections, Modi's campaign strategy this time has shifted towards overt Hindu-Muslim politics, drawing attention to his past record and raising concerns among Indian Muslims, as evidenced by the Election Commission's intervention in a campaign video by the BJP inciting hatred against Muslims. 

The video, shared by BJP Karnataka wing with a cautionary message in Kannada, depicted a cartoon version of Congress’s Rahul Gandhi placing an egg marked "Muslims" into a nest alongside smaller eggs labeled with categories such as "Scheduled Castes," "Scheduled Tribes," and "Other Backward Castes.” The narrative unfolds as the "Muslim" hatchling is shown being nourished with financial resources, eventually growing larger and displacing the other hatchlings from the nest—implying that a Congress government will give away all resources to Muslims. 

This came days after another animated video shared by the BJP’s official Instagram handle was removed on May 1 after a large number of users of the platform reported the video for “false information” and “hate speech.” The video repeats the BJP’s rhetoric on the Congress party, who they allege are“empowering people who belong to the very same community [of] invaders, terrorists, robbers and thieves [who] used to loot all our treasures” while the voice-over says, “If Congress comes to power, it will snatch all the money and wealth from non-Muslims and distribute them among Muslims, their favorite community.” 

Despite its controversial content, the video amassed over 100 thousand likes before being removed.

Both videos come after claims by Modi during his campaign speeches that Congress was planning to “steal” reservations in educational institutes and government jobs among other benefits from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Castes and redistribute them to Muslims.

Modi may be the foremost leader, but he's not alone in setting the tone; other top-tier BJP leaders are also walking in his footsteps. Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah's remarks linking voting for the Congress party to "jihad" in the South Indian state of Telangana have also stirred controversy.

Read More: The Modi-fication of India Is Almost Complete

The India Hate Lab, a Washington D.C.-based group that documents hate speech against India’s religious minorities, in its report of 2023 paints a grim picture of rising hate speech incidents against Muslims, totaling 668 documented cases. 

These incidents, often featuring calls for violence and spreading divisive theories, were predominantly concentrated in regions governed by the BJP, particularly during key election periods like in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, and Chhattisgarh. Additionally, the report highlighted stark differences in hate speech content between BJP and non-BJP-governed areas, with BJP leaders more frequently involved in non-BJP territories as they strive to expand political footholds.

When leaders resort to fear-mongering, it legitimizes the dehumanization of minorities, creating a fertile ground for extremists. This often isn’t just about one app or incident. It’s about the pervasive atmosphere of intolerance that such rhetoric by the BJP leaders breeds. And those who oppose this type of hate speech want to ensure that no one—regardless of their faith, gender, or caste—has to live in fear of being targeted for who they are. 

Modi’s statement received widespread criticism from the opposition, the intelligentsia community including authors, writers, scholars, academics, and the minority Muslim population of India. The Congress party even filed a complaint with the Election Commission, alleging that Modi's remarks violate electoral laws that prohibit appeals to religious sentiments. Despite public outcry and demands from activists and citizens for action, the Election Commission has so far taken no appropriate action. 

Modi's Islamophobic statements, which have fueled fears over and over again among India's Muslim population, must be viewed within the broader context of his party's strategies—which often invoke religious and communal sentiments to galvanize their voter base. And this time, the aim is to break all previous records by securing 400 plus seats in the 543 seat parliament.

If the BJP is able to secure such a huge majority in the parliament, Hindu majoritarianism will remain unchecked. The hostility towards the minorities could escalate even more, and opposition parties may bear the brunt of state agencies and crackdowns if they ask questions. 

During Modi’s previous terms, Muslims have seen an increased marginalization and discrimination fueled by Hindu nationalist agendas—ranging from difficulty in securing a rented accommodation in urban cities, erasure of Muslim names from roads, cities and railway stations, to the underrepresentation in government jobs and discrimination and vandalism of shops of small Muslim vendors. 

Today, India, a country which once took pride in its ganga-jamuni tehzeeb —a term used to refer to the fusion of Hindu-Muslim cultures—has become a global epicenter of divisive politics. While elections will come and go, the impact of the irresponsible words of Modi and the BJP will stay with the 200 million plus Muslims in the country.

These words have real and dangerous implications for the safety and security of India's Muslim population. Muslims in India currently face increased social ostracism, economic boycotts, and even physical violence. And another victory with an overwhelming majority will only mean more trouble.

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Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own

In 2020, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist” galvanized Americans with his ideas. The past four years have tested them — and him.

Ibram X. Kendi, the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Credit... Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times

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By Rachel Poser

Rachel Poser is an editor for the magazine. She spoke to Kendi over a period of several months and visited him at his research center in Boston.

• June 4, 2024 Updated 4:49 p.m. ET

Ibram X. Kendi has a notebook that prompts him, on every other page, to write down “Things to be grateful for.” There are many things he might put under that heading. First and foremost, his wife and two daughters, and his health, having made it through Stage 4 colon cancer in his 30s — a diagnosis with a 12 percent survival rate. Tenure at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate in theology. A National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.” Then there were the millions of people who bought “How to Be an Antiracist,” the first of five of his books to take the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. But he was particularly grateful to the readers who wrote to him to say his work changed them for the better.

Listen to this article, read by January LaVoy

These days, he could use the reminder. Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures . Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Kendi has become a prime target of this backlash. Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Though legions of readers continue to celebrate Kendi as a courageous and groundbreaking thinker, for many others he has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong in racial discourse today. Even many allies in the fight for racial justice dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive. “The vast majority of my critics,” Kendi told me last year, “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”

Criticism of Kendi only grew in September, when he made the “painful decision” to lay off more than half the staff of the research center he runs at Boston University. The Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded during the 2020 protests to tackle “seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice,” raised an enormous sum of $55 million, and the news of its downsizing led to a storm of questions. False rumors began circulating that Kendi had stolen funds, and the university announced it would investigate after former employees accused him of mismanagement and secrecy.

The controversy quickly ballooned into a national news story, fueled in large part by right-wing media, which was all too happy to speculate about “missing funds” and condemn Kendi — and the broader racial-justice movement — as a fraud. On Fox News, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo told the host John Roberts that the center’s “failure” was “poetic justice.” “This is a symbol of where we have come since 2020 and why that movement is really floundering today,” he said. In early October, a podcast affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank where Rufo works, jubilantly released an episode titled “The End of Ibram X. Kendi?”

‘I don’t know of anybody more ill suited for fame than Ibram Kendi.’

In December, I met Kendi at the Center for Antiracist Research, which was by then mostly empty, though I caught signs of its former life: Space heaters sat idly under desks, and Post-it notes lingered around the edges of unplugged monitors. On the frame of one cleared-out cubicle, a sticker in the shape of Earth read “Be the change.” Kendi welcomed me into his office in a pink shirt and a periwinkle blazer with a handkerchief tucked neatly in its pocket. He was calm on the surface, but he seemed to me, as he often did during the conversations we’d had since the layoffs, to be holding himself taut, like a tensile substance under enormous strain. The furor over the center, he said, was a measure of how desperate many people were to damage his reputation: “If this had happened at another center, it would either not have been a story or a one-day story.”

In “How to Be an Antiracist,” his best-known book, Kendi challenges readers to evaluate themselves by their racial impact, by whether their actions advance or impede the cause of racial equality. “There is no neutrality in the racial struggle,” he writes. “The question for each of us is: What side of history will we stand on?” This question evinces Kendi’s confidence that ideas and policies can be dependably sorted into one of two categories: racist or antiracist.

Kendi is a vegan, a tall man with a gentle, serious nature. “He’ll laugh at a joke — he’ll never crack one,” Kellie Carter Jackson, the chair of the Africana studies department at Wellesley and someone who has known Kendi for years, told me. He considers himself an “introvert and loner” who was chased down by the spotlight and is now caught in its glare. “I don’t know of anybody more ill suited for fame than Ibram Kendi,” said Stefan Bradley, a longtime friend and professor of Black studies at Amherst. There is a corniness to Kendi that’s endearing, like his use of the gratitude notebook — a thick, pastel-colored pad with gold spiral binding — or the fact that his phone email signature is “Sent from Typoville aka my iPhone.” Though he is always soft-spoken, volume sometimes seems to be a gauge of how comfortable he feels. The first time I met him in person, he greeted me so quietly that I worried my recorder wouldn’t pick up his voice.

Kendi had hired a pair of crisis-P.R. consultants to help him manage the fallout from the layoffs, a controversy that he believed had fed into dangerous, racist stories about Black leaders, and about him in particular. In the fun-house mirror of conservative media, Kendi has long loomed as an antiwhite extremist trying to get rich by sowing racial division. Kendi told me he received regular threats; he allowed me to come to the center only on the condition that I not reveal its location. “When it comes to the white supremacists who are the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time, I am one of their chief enemies,” he told me.

Boston University had recently released the results of its audit, which found “no issues” with how the center’s finances were handled. The center’s problem, Kendi told me, was more banal: Most of its money was in its endowment or restricted to specific uses, and after the high of 2020, donations had crashed. “At our current rate, we were going to run out in two years,” he said. “That was what ultimately led us to feel like we needed to make a major change.” The center’s new model would fund nine-month academic fellowships rather than a large full-time staff. Though inquiries into the center’s grant-management practices and workplace culture were continuing, Kendi was confident that they would absolve him, too. In the media, he’d dismissed the complaints about his leadership as “unfair,” “unfounded,” “vague,” “meanspirited” and an attempt to “settle old scores.”

In the fall, when I began talking to former employees and faculty — most of whom asked for anonymity because they remain at Boston University or signed severance agreements that included nondisparagement language — it was clear that many of them felt caught in a bind. They could already see that the story of the center’s dysfunction was being used to undermine the racial-justice movement, but they were frustrated to watch Kendi play down the problems and cast their concerns as spiteful or even racist. They felt that what they experienced at the center was now playing out in public: Kendi’s tendency to see their constructive feedback as hostile. “He doesn’t trust anybody,” one person told me. “He doesn’t let anyone in.”

To Kendi, attacks from those who claim to be allies, like attacks from political enemies, are to be expected. In his books, Kendi argues that history is not an arc bending toward justice but a war of “dueling” forces — racist and antiracist — that each escalate their response when the other advances. In the years since 2020, he believes, the country has entered a predictable period of retrenchment, when the force of racism is ascendant and the racial progress of the last several decades is under threat. To defend antiracism, to defend himself, he would simply have to fight harder.

Not so long ago, Kendi thought he saw a new world coming into being. “We are living in the midst of an antiracist revolution,” he wrote in September 2020 in an Atlantic cover story headlined, “Is This the Beginning of the End for American Racism?” Nearly 20 percent of Americans were saying that “race relations” was the most urgent problem facing the nation — more than at any point since 1968 — and many of them were turning to Kendi to figure out what to do about it. They were buying his memoir and manifesto, “How to Be an Antiracist,” much of which he wrote while undergoing chemotherapy. “This was perhaps the last thing he was going to write,” Chris Jackson, Kendi’s editor, told me. “There was no cynicism in the writing of it.” (Jackson was the editor of a 2021 book based on The 1619 Project, which originated in this magazine in 2019 ; Kendi contributed a chapter to that book.)

Kendi confesses in the introduction that he “used to be racist most of the time.” The year 1994, when he turned 12, marked three decades since the United States outlawed discrimination on the basis of race. Then why, Kendi wondered as an adolescent, were so many Black people out of work, impoverished or incarcerated? The problem, he concluded, must be Black people themselves. Not Black people like his parents, God-loving professionals who had saved enough to buy a home in Jamaica, Queens, and who never let their two sons forget the importance of education and hard work. But they were the exception. In high school, Kendi competed in an oratory contest in which he gave voice to many of the anti-Black stereotypes circulating in the ’90s — that Black youths were violent, unstudious, unmotivated. “They think it’s OK to be the most feared in our society,” he proclaimed. “They think it’s OK not to think!” Kendi also turned these ideas on himself, believing that he was a “subpar student” because of his race.

Kendi’s mind began to change when he arrived on the campus of Florida A&M, one of the largest historically Black universities in the country, in the fall of 2000 to study sports journalism. “I had never seen so many Black people together with positive motives,” he wrote at the time. Kendi was disengaged for most of high school, as concerned with his clothes as his grades. His friends at the university teased him for joining a modeling troupe and preening before parties, particularly because once he got to them he was too shy to talk to anyone. “He would come out, and you could smell the cologne from down the hall,” Grady Tripp, Kendi’s housemate, told me. But experimenting with his style, for Kendi, was part of trying on new ideas. For a while, he wore honey-colored contact lenses that turned his irises an off-putting shade of orange; he got rid of them once he decided they were a rejection of blackness, like Malcolm X’s straightening his hair with lye.

Over long hours spent reading alone in the library, Kendi found his way to some unlikely conclusions. In “How to Be an Antiracist,” he describes bursting into his housemate’s room to declare that he had “figured white people out.” “They are aliens,” he said. Kendi had gone searching for answers in conspiracy theories and Nation of Islam theology that cast whites as a “devil race” bred by an evil Black scientist to conquer the planet. “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” he wrote in a column for the student newspaper in 2003. They are “socialized to be aggressive” and have used “the AIDS virus and cloning” to dominate the world’s peoples. Recently, the column has circulated on right-wing social media as evidence of Kendi’s antiwhite extremism, which frustrates him because it’s in his own memoir as an example of just how lost he had become.

Kendi went on to earn a Ph.D. in African American studies from Temple University. The founder of his department was Molefi Kete Asante, an Afrocentrist who has called on the descendants of enslaved people to embrace traditional African dress, languages and religions. Kendi eventually changed his middle name to Xolani, meaning “peace” in Zulu; at their wedding, he and his wife, Sadiqa, adopted the last name Kendi, meaning “loved one” in Meru. Kendi has called Asante “profoundly antiracist,” but Kendi remained an idiosyncratic thinker who did not consider himself a part of just one scholarly tradition; he knew early on that he wanted to write for the public. In a 2019 interview, when asked about his intellectual lineage, Kendi named W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X.

Kendi became part of a cohort of Black writers, among them Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, through the sunset of the Obama presidency and the red dawn of the MAGA movement, argued that anti-Blackness remains a major force shaping American politics. They helped popularize the longstanding idea that racism in the United States is systemic — that the country’s laws and institutions perpetuate Black disadvantage despite a pledge of equal treatment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended de jure white supremacy, but President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed it into law, acknowledged that it wouldn’t uproot a racial caste system grown over centuries.

“The next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights,” he said, would be to achieve “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact.” Kendi and others wrote bracingly about the failure of that promise. Far from economic redress, Black Americans were met with continued discrimination in every realm of life, while being told the country was now “colorblind.” Kendi and others argued that remedying the impact of hundreds of years of subjugation would require policies that recognize, rather than ignore, that legacy, such as affirmative action and reparations.

‘The vast majority of my critics either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.’

Far too many Americans, Kendi felt, still thought of racism as conscious prejudice, so conversations got stuck in cul-de-sacs of denial, in which people protested that they were “not racist” because they harbored no anti-Black animus. To convey this, he landed on the binary that would become his most famous and perhaps most controversial idea. “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea” or a “race-neutral policy,” he wrote in “How to Be an Antiracist,” published in 2019. “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’”

Black activists have long used the word “antiracist” to describe active resistance to white supremacy, but “How to Be an Antiracist” catapulted the term into the American lexicon, in much the same way that Sheryl Sandberg turned “Lean In” into a mantra. After George Floyd’s death, the book sold out on Amazon, which was “unheard-of,” Kendi said. Media coverage of Kendi in those days made him sound nearly superhuman. In a GQ profile, for example, the novelist ZZ Packer describes Kendi as a “preternaturally wise” Buddha-like figure, “the antiracist guru of our time” with a “Jedi-like prowess for recognizing and neutralizing the racism pervading our society.”

During the summer of 2020, Kendi sometimes appeared onstage or onscreen alongside Robin DiAngelo, the educator whose book “White Fragility” was also a No. 1 best seller. Kendi and DiAngelo write less about the workings of systemic racism than the ideas and psychological defenses that cause people to deny their complicity in it. They share a belief in what Kendi calls “individual transformation for societal transformation.” When Kendi took over Selena Gomez’s Instagram, for example, he urged her 180 million followers to “1. Acknowledge your racism,” “2. Confess your racist ideas” and “3. Define racism and antiracism.” Then they would be ready for Steps 4 and 5, identifying and working to change racist policies.

Kendi and DiAngelo’s talk of confession — antiracism as a kind of conversion experience — inspired many people and disturbed others. By focusing so much on personal growth, critics said, they made it easy for self-help to take the place of organizing, for a conflict over the policing of Black communities, and by extension their material conditions, to become a fight not over policy but over etiquette — which words to use, whether to say “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter.” Many allies felt that Kendi and DiAngelo were merely helping white people alleviate their guilt.

They also questioned Kendi’s willingness to turn his philosophy into a brand. Following the success of “How to Be an Antiracist,” he released a deck of “antiracist” conversation-starter cards, an “antiracist” journal with prompts for self-reflection and a children’s book, “Antiracist Baby.” Christine Platt, an author and advocate who worked with Kendi at American University, recently co-wrote a novel that features a Kendi-like figure — a “soft-spoken” author named Dr. Braxton Walsh Jr., whose book “Woke Yet?” becomes a viral phenomenon. “White folks post about it on social media all the time,” rants De’Andrea, one of the main characters. “Wake up and get your copy today! Only nineteen ninety-nine plus shipping and handling.”

Those who thought of him as a self-help guru, Kendi felt, simply hadn’t read his work. Like most scholars of race, Kendi believes that Blackness is a fiction born of colonial powers’ self-interest, not just ignorance or hate, meaning that combating racism today requires upending the economic and political structures that propagate it. But Kendi doesn’t like the term “systemic racism” because it turns racism into a “hidden and unknowable” force for which there’s no one to blame, so he prefers to talk about “racist policies.”

In The Atlantic, he warned against the country going down a path of symbolic change where “monuments to racism are dismantled, but Americans shrink from the awesome task of reshaping the country with antiracist policies,” like Medicare for All, need-based school funding and reparations. Changing policy was exactly what he aimed to do at Boston University. During the protests, in the summer of 2020, the university named Kendi the Andrew W. Mellon professor of the humanities, a chair previously held by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and announced the creation of a center on campus to put his ideas into action. Donations came pouring in, led by an anonymous $25 million gift and a $10 million gift from the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which the provost said would give Kendi “the resources to launch the center like a rocket ship.”

Kendi started the center from his home in Boston, while Sadiqa, a pediatric E.R. doctor, came and went from the hospital in full protective gear. Kendi ran a research center as part of his old job at American University, but he felt unable to make a meaningful impact because the resources were modest and he was diagnosed with cancer just four months after its founding. Now, granted tens of millions of dollars to enact his most ambitious ideas, Kendi was determined to create an organization that could be a real engine of progress. “We’ve got to build an infrastructure to match what the right has created,” he later told a co-worker. “We’ve got to build something equally powerful.”

Kendi’s two centers were part of a wave of racial-justice spaces being founded at universities, like the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard or the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton, that pledged to work in partnership with activists and community groups to achieve social change. Kendi envisioned an organization that supported people of color in campaigning for policies that would concretely improve their lives.

To reflect that mission, he designed a structure with four “pillars” or offices: Research, Policy, Narrative and Advocacy. He recruited data scientists, policy analysts, organizers and educators and brought in faculty members working on race from across the university. They set up a model-legislation unit, which would draft sample bills and public-comment notes; an amicus-brief practice, which would target court cases in which race was being overlooked as an issue; and a grant process to fund research on racism by interdisciplinary teams elsewhere at the university, among other programs. Kendi also struck up a partnership with The Boston Globe to revive The Emancipator, a storied abolitionist newspaper. “It was a really exciting time,” he told me.

That summer, however, Kendi found himself on the defensive beyond Boston as Republican book-banning campaigns revved up. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson denounced “How to Be an Antiracist” as “poisonous,” plucking out Kendi’s summary of the case for race-conscious policymaking, which sounded particularly maladroit when taken out of context: “ The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination ,” Carlson read in mock disbelief. “In other words, his book against racism promotes racism.” This was around the same time that Rufo, the conservative activist, started to position Kendi as a leading proponent of critical race theory, a school of thought, Rufo told The New Yorker, that he discovered by hunting through the footnotes of “How to Be an Antiracist.”

Critical race theorists were a group of legal scholars in the 1970s and ’80s who documented ways that the American legal framework of racial equality was nevertheless producing unequal treatment. They elaborated the idea of systemic racism and the critique of “colorblindness” that inform much of the writing of Kendi’s cohort. Rufo wrote on Twitter that his goal was to change the meaning of the term “critical race theory” — to “turn it toxic” by putting “all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” In his attacks on Kendi, Rufo also amplified the left’s critique of Kendi’s corporate-friendliness, caricaturing Kendi as a grifter out to enrich himself by raking in speaking fees. The number of threatening messages Kendi received began to rise. “I don’t feel safe anywhere,” Kendi later told a colleague. “I’m constantly looking over my shoulder.”

By the time the academic year began, in the fall of 2021, Kendi decided to take extraordinary measures. Before the center began in-person work that September, Kendi sent the staff an email about “security protocols,” instructing them to conceal the location of the center even from other Boston University faculty members and students. “It is critical to not share the address of the center with anyone or bring anyone to the center,” Kendi wrote. The email included a mock script to be used in the event of an inquiry about the center’s location, which ended abruptly with, “I gotta go.”

Though such precautions felt necessary to Kendi, they were met with incredulity and frustration by some employees who were starting to question his leadership. Problems emerged within the first six months, according to more than a dozen staff and faculty members I interviewed. Some told me they had gone to the center because they considered Kendi a visionary; others had reservations about or flat-out disagreements with his work but believed he had brought much-needed attention to issues they cared about. They would be able to find common ground, they thought. They were ready for some chaos as they tried to spin up a new organization remotely, but they quickly ran into difficulty as they tried to execute some of Kendi’s plans.

Kendi emphasizes in his books that policies alone are the cause of racial disparities today. In “Stamped From the Beginning,” his 2016 history of anti-Black ideas from the 15th century to the Obama presidency — which won the National Book Award and was recently made into a Netflix documentary that made the Oscar shortlist — Kendi writes that blaming Black people for their own oppression, by implying that Black people or Black culture are inferior or pathological, was one of the oldest cons in America. He had witnessed it again during the early days of the pandemic, when the numbers suggested that Black people were dying from Covid faster than every racial group save Native Americans. Some pundits speculated about the “soul food” diet or posited that Black communities weren’t taking the virus seriously, even though a Pew survey found that Black respondents were most likely to view the coronavirus as a major threat.

Kendi wanted the center to build “the nation’s largest online collection” of racial data to track disparities like this one and do analytical work to understand each policy responsible. In the case of Covid, for example, Black Americans are disproportionately likely to work in low-income essential jobs, to live in crowded conditions and to lack access to high-quality insurance or medical care. The center might research these conditions and propose targeted interventions, like changes to Medicaid coverage, or more transformative measures, like a universal basic income. One faculty member involved told me that she was “initially incredibly enthusiastic” about the idea. “It seemed like an opportunity to do rigorous, well-funded social-science research that would be aimed at real policy change on issues that I cared about,” she told me.

Like Kendi, his staff believed that historical oppression and ongoing discrimination explained why Black Americans fared comparatively poorly on so many measures of well-being, from education to wealth to longevity, and that centuries of injustice demanded a sweeping policy response to remedy. But understanding that past and present racism is the underlying cause of Black disadvantage is different from the work of assessing its role in any single policy, let alone figuring out how to change the policy to eliminate it. That takes careful analysis. “You have to have specificity,” the faculty member said, “or you can’t measure.”

Kendi pushed back at staff members who argued that the center should constrain its focus. There were plenty of academic centers and researchers that tracked data on racial disparities in one policy area or another, he said; he wanted to convene that pre-existing data, bringing it together in one place for easy access by the public. In a 2022 meeting, when the team tried to get a better sense of his vision, Kendi told them that he wanted a guy at a barbershop or a bar to be able to “pull up the numbers.” To many employees with data or policy backgrounds, what Kendi wanted didn’t seem feasible; at worst, they thought, it risked simply replicating others’ work or creating a mess of sloppily merged data, connected to too many policies for their small team to track rigorously. In the midst of the pandemic, the center struggled to hire a director of research who might have been able to mediate the dispute.

In November, a confidential complaint was filed with the university administration raising concerns about Kendi’s leadership. The anonymous employee told a university compliance officer that Kendi ran the center with “hypercontrol” and created an environment of “silence and secrecy” that was causing low morale and high turnover, claiming that “when Dr. Kendi is questioned, the narrative becomes that the employee must be the one with the ‘problem.’” The employee warned the university that the situation “is potentially going to blow up.”

One of Kendi’s refrains is that being antiracist demands self-criticism. “If I share an idea that people don’t understand, I’m to blame,” he told an interviewer in 2019. “I’m always to blame.” Kendi told me that his most productive conversations with critics of his ideas often happened in private, including one with a prominent Black thinker who inspired him to make a change in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “This person talked about how the goal should not just be equity,” Kendi said. “The goal should not be the same percentage of Black people being killed by police as white people. The goal should be no one being killed by police.” But some Black scholars, as the right-wing backlash strengthened, debated whether to make their criticisms in public. The philosopher Charles Mills, after listening to a graduate-student presentation about Kendi and DiAngelo at a conference in 2021, asked the presenter: “Are their views now sufficiently influential, or perhaps sufficiently harmful, that we should make them a part of the target?”

Kendi was frustrated to be constantly lumped in with DiAngelo, whose ideas diverge from his in important ways. DiAngelo considers “white identity” to be “inherently racist,” while Kendi argues that anyone, including Black people, can be racist or antiracist. That puts him at odds with an understanding — common in the academy and the racial-justice movement — that Black people can’t be racist because racism is a system of power relations, and that Black people as a group don’t have the structural means to enforce their prejudice; this notion is often phrased as a formula, that racism is “prejudice plus power.”

Kendi thinks of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple word of description. His reigning metaphor is the sticker. Racist and antiracist are “peelable name tags,” Kendi writes; they describe not who we are but who we are being in any particular moment. He says he opposes the censoriousness that has become the sharp edge of identity politics, because he doesn’t regard shame as a useful social tool. But he has no intention of taking the moral sting out of “racist” completely. “I wouldn’t say that a person is not being condemned when they’re being called a racist,” he told Ezra Klein in a 2019 interview.

Rather than replacing one definition of racism with another, Kendi is really joining two senses into one. For much of the 20th century, the white mainstream considered racism a personal moral issue, while Black civil rights activists, among others, argued that it’s also structural and systemic. In his definition, Kendi aims to connect the individual to the system. A “racist,” he writes, is “one who is expressing an idea of racial hierarchy, or through actions or inaction is supporting a policy that leads to racial inequity or injustice.”

Kendi’s focus on outcomes is not new. For decades, civil rights activists have brought lawsuits based on the legal theory of “disparate impact,” which holds that unequal outcomes prove that certain practices (by, for example, an employer or a landlord) are racially discriminatory, without evidence of malicious intent. Kendi’s definition urges us to perform this sort of disparate-impact analysis all the time. In Politico in 2020, Kendi proposed the creation of a federal agency that would clear every new policy — local, state or federal — to ensure that it wouldn’t increase racial disparities. But as his team at the center knew well, policies can have complicated effects. Let’s say that a local environmental policy would improve the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories but would also lead to hundreds of lost jobs and worsen the area’s racial wealth gap. Should it be cleared? Is such a policy racist or antiracist?

The question is made even trickier by the fact that the racial impact of many policies might not become clear until years later. The legacy of desegregation, for example, shows that even a profoundly antiracist policy can be turned against itself in its implementation. This is what the term “systemic racism” captures that can be lost in Kendi’s translation of “racist policies.”

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi writes that “racist policy is the cause of racial disparities in this country and the world at large.” Mary Pattillo, a sociologist at Northwestern, told me that Kendi’s focus on race didn’t fully capture the complexity of social life — the roles of class, culture, religion, community. “No one variable alone explains anything ,” she said. But she thought there was value in simplifying. She understood Kendi not as an official making policy but as a thought leader making a “defensible, succinct provocation.” “We live in a country whose ideology is very individualistic, so the standard response to any failure is individual blame,” she said. “Those of us who do recognize the importance of policies, laws and so on have to always push so hard against that that we have to make statements like the one that Kendi is making.”

I came to think, after months of talking to Kendi, that this was the key to understanding him — to remember that he is trying to push so hard against that . To shove back the anti-Black stereotypes he documented in “Stamped From the Beginning,” the racist ideas that poisoned his own mind and sense of self-worth. His aim, at every turn, is to blame the policies that create unequal conditions and not the people enduring them. But Kendi is so consumed by combating the racist notion of Black inferiority that some of what he says in response is overstated, circular or uncareful, creating an easy target for his critics and discomfiting his allies. Conservatives were far from the only ones alarmed, for example, by his proposal for a constitutional amendment to appoint a panel of racism “experts” with the power to discipline public officials for “racist ideas.” (Kendi told me he modeled this proposal on European countries like Germany, where the bar for hate speech is much lower.)

Some of Kendi’s ideas are softer than they appear at first. Kendi told me that people who believe that his binary applies to “everything” are misreading him. Though he writes that “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas,” he says he never meant that sentence to apply to the whole universe of ideas, only to ideas about race. When I asked him whether the environmental policy above would be racist or antiracist based on his definition, he qualified that “policies can be like people, both racist and antiracist,” and went on: “By improving the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories, the policy is being antiracist. By exacerbating the area’s racial wealth gap, the policy is being racist.” Many of his critics might find this a more reasonable position, but it also leads to a question about how useful or powerful a dichotomy it is in the end.

Kendi wanted to remain open to criticism, but so much of what he encountered was racist mockery, lies, professional jealousy, misreadings and threats. “I have thought many times about exiting my vocation as a scholar who studies racism,” he wrote in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “After the experience of the last three years, it does not feel safe for me to be publicly self-reflective or self-critical. It feels dangerous for me to be vulnerable.” Though he commits to doing so anyway, the onslaught brought on by celebrity seemed to cause Kendi’s introversion to harden into distrust. “Fame can be defeating and depleting,” Stefan Bradley, Kendi’s friend, told me. “Every word he puts into the atmosphere will be chopped up a hundred different ways, and that takes a toll on somebody’s mental health.” Bradley continued: “I think that if he were a lesser spirit, he would have been destroyed.”

That Kendi felt under siege became clear to Yanique Redwood when she started her job at the Center for Antiracist Research. Redwood had met Kendi once, in 2017, and she remembered him as soft-spoken but burning with big, exciting ideas. In the fall of 2021, when she interviewed to be the center’s executive director, Kendi told her he felt as though he was failing. Fund-raising while also running the center was too much for one person, and he wanted Redwood, a Caribbean American health and racial-equity researcher who had spent nearly a decade running a small foundation, to take over internal operations. Redwood was prepared to find some disorder, but the state of the center’s finances was a mess unlike any she had ever seen. “Nothing was in place,” she said. “It was unbelievable that an institution like that, with so much spotlight on it, just did not have systems. I understood why I was being brought in.”

Before starting, she conducted a round of entry interviews with faculty and staff members, and by her 27th and last conversation, she was exhausted from absorbing their frustration. “There’s something really wrong here,” she told Kendi. Much of the staff was relieved when Redwood was hired. There had been widespread confusion as employees were asked to do “damage control” by performing jobs for which they weren’t hired, or even qualified. “Everyone was overwhelmed,” Redwood told me. “There were too many promises being made to funders. Products were being promised that could never be delivered.”

Redwood designed a process to help get researchers going on pilot projects tracking disparities relating to felony murder, the health and social safety net, reparations and student-debt forgiveness. She wanted to share some takeaways from her round of entry interviews with the staff, in a tactful and encouraging way, to start the work of repairing the center’s culture, but Kendi worried that whatever she wrote might leak. A reporter from a conservative media outlet was reaching out to former employees, asking about problems at the center. “This media storm was coming,” Redwood told me. “It was brewing.”

Employees said Kendi’s fear of leaks slowed the work and created confusion and unease. The first time Rachael DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, asked Kendi about the center’s finances to help her budget, in 2021, he reacted “bizarrely,” she told me. “Why do you need that information?” he asked. (Kendi denies that this conversation took place. DeCruz says that after asking repeatedly, she received the information about six months later.) The threat of outside scrutiny exacerbated what employees described as Kendi’s tendency to withhold information to avoid interpersonal conflict. “He doesn’t understand people, how to nurture them, how to make them want to do their best work,” Redwood told me. “It’s not his strength, not even a little bit.”

During her entry interviews, Redwood asked each employee what the organization’s values were, and many of them responded by saying something along the lines of “I’ve been wondering that myself.” She encouraged Kendi to hold a retreat to talk through the mission as a group. Kendi was hesitant because he found work retreats “uncomfortable” — “sitting in a room with a large group of people all day long is exhausting for me,” he told me — but he committed to holding one anyway and solicited staff comments on a document he wrote laying out his theory of social change and the center’s role in it. “I was happy to receive all this great feedback,” he wrote to Redwood. “I think the changes will make the document much stronger and clearer.”

On a spring day in 2022, the staff met at a conference center a half-hour’s drive from campus. The day’s agenda, though couched in the gentle jargon of nonprofits, contained hints of the mood: The organizers on staff had scheduled time for an acknowledgment of the center’s growing pains, for a “healing justice moment” and for a period of “wicked questions” when concerns or challenges could be raised. At the start of the day, Naima Wong, an outside facilitator, encouraged the staff not to hold back. “We’re here to really get into this,” she said.

Late in the afternoon, when it was time to wrap up, the group assembled at tables arranged in a circle. Saida Grundy, a sociologist, was seated across from Kendi. She had never been on board with Kendi’s understanding of racism, subscribing instead to the “power plus prejudice” view. Grundy had forwarded Kendi’s email about security to colleagues with the note “The paranoia is INSANE.” “Ibram is so lily-livered he probably jumps when the biscuit tin pops,” she told me. Grundy was the one who, back in November, had made the anonymous complaint, in which some charges carried a hint of paranoia of her own, like the idea that Kendi “despises academia” and had “gotten satisfaction out of pulling academics out of their own research.” She had accused the center of being an exploitative workplace and, after having conflict with her supervisor, had already mostly stepped back from her role. Grundy had told the compliance office that the center might explode, and now she was ready to blow it up herself.

Her voice raised, Grundy laid out an indictment of the document Kendi wrote. “This is a mile wide and an inch deep,” she said. She argued that the center needed to be more specific about its goals; “fighting racism” was such a broad mission that it felt cynically strategic, allowing the center to take in money for all sorts of projects. “If there is a grant for antiracism on Jupiter, great,” she said. “We do extraterrestrial antiracism.” Grundy, unlike most of the staff, thought the center should become a resource for university faculty members and students; her parents were Black student activists in the 1970s, and she believed that real change starts where you are. “If you lined up 99 Black students at B.U.,” she said, “99 will tell you the center’s made no difference to their experience.”

When she finished speaking, the room was silent. Several people were crying. Dawna Johnson, the center’s financial director at the time, called it an “explosion.” “People didn’t know what to say after that,” she said. “It just left you so unhappy and uptight.” Kendi, his face inscrutable behind a Covid mask, said nothing, and the facilitator wrapped up the session. “Scholars who study the experience of Black leaders find that the No.1 racist challenge Black leaders face is contested authority, even from other Black leaders and staff,” he wrote to me later. I asked him what he remembered from that day. “It’s almost like trying to remember a day in which you were really happy, but then something horrible happened at the end,” he told me. “It’s hard to remember anything else other than that horrible thing.”

Grundy had admittedly come in hot, many staff members agreed, but it didn’t seem to matter how they couched their concerns. Employees continued to push to make sure that the center’s research projects were both rigorous and responsive to community needs, but the issues they raised in response to Kendi’s “theory of change” document never seemed to get fully resolved. “He’s communicating one thing,” one person said. “Behind the curtain, he’s behaving a very different kind of way.” Redwood and several others said that if someone was too persistent about a concern, Kendi would slow or stop his communication with that person. “If someone disagrees or someone is being vocal, you can’t just get rid of them,” she wanted to tell him. “Like, this is how you breed distrust.”

Redwood ultimately decided that Kendi wasn’t interested in building consensus around a shared mission. “Only he had the ideas,” she said. “We were there to execute on his ideas.” Redwood resigned in October 2022.

In a memo to The Times, Kendi disputed many of the staff’s recollections of his leadership. “This is not me, and anyone close to me, who has worked with me for a long time, knows that I’m open to constructive criticism as a writer and a thinker and a leader,” he wrote. Many progressive advocacy groups, Kendi pointed out, have been torn apart by internal clashes in recent years, conflicts that he said were driven by employees who “care more about performing their radicalism” than working to “improve the lives of everyday people.” “Former employees constantly deauthorized me as the director of the center — not because they were against hierarchy — but to assume authority for themselves,” he wrote.

Even before Redwood’s departure, Kendi told me, he realized the center was in financial trouble. He was far from the only nonprofit leader caught short as funding for racial-justice work collapsed after 2020. Funders that doused organizations with cash in the wake of George Floyd’s murder proved unwilling or unable to sustain their commitment, and layoffs were taking place across the sector, even at large nonprofits like the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The center had gone from raising $40 million in 2020 to a fraction of that — $420,000 — the next year.

In June 2023, after he went on parental leave, Kendi approached university leaders with the idea of switching to a fellowship model, which could adjust its number of awards to fluctuations in fund-raising. He told the staff only that he would be announcing some major changes when he returned from leave. Dawna Johnson, who succeeded Redwood as executive director, was left to manage a staff frustrated by being kept in the dark. “I think the staff thought I knew more than I actually did, as far as what the future of the center was,” she told me. “He’s like, Just don’t spend money, essentially, which is kind of difficult in an organization that needs to move forward.” (Kendi denies that he said anything like this to Johnson, who remains in her role today.)

Kendi spent the next three months taking care of his newborn daughter, Imara, and his wife, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer while pregnant. In his absence, at another staff retreat, four employees stood up and spoke in turn about the problems at the center. Much of the staff had just learned that the center agreed to partner with the D.E.I. arm of the consulting company Deloitte, which does work for the police and prisons, on designing an antiracism training for corporate workplaces. “Why wasn’t this shared with the broader staff sooner, as a potential high-risk partnership that could impact the relationships we are forging with movement leaders?” one person said. “Why are we contemplating this partnership that arguably goes against our values?”

Kendi, who identifies as a police and prison abolitionist, suggested that donations from corporations could be seen as a “form of reparations,” and he stressed to me that the Deloitte agreement “allowed us to control the products from design to delivery.” He once again dismissed the critics at the retreat as “performative radicals” of the sort that have been “causing all kinds of havoc in Black-led social justice organizations for years, claiming that they are against hierarchy when they really are against being directed by a Black person.” He thought they were being hypocritical in objecting to the Deloitte partnership because they “do not object to personally having profiles on social media corporations that platform copaganda, or buying goods from retailers employing incarcerated labor in their supply chains, or using technology from corporations providing carceral states with technologies of surveillance.”

When I asked the employees about this, one of them called Kendi’s comments about hypocrisy a “deflection tactic.” She stressed that the staff was not making a demand but asking for an open dialogue — or at least a clearly articulated rationale — about decisions that affected them. His response fit a clear pattern, they thought, of believing that employees were trying to undermine him when they really just cared about the work. “I understand he’s coming from a place of trauma,” another told me. “He’s criticized unfairly and through a racist lens constantly. I do understand it. But then to distort that into an inability to receive feedback that’s going to ensure the success and usefulness of the center — that’s where it becomes a problem.”

In September, Kendi fired 19 of the center’s 36 employees in a series of Zoom meetings. Many told me they could understand the layoffs given the financial climate, but to change the model from an ambitious organization that had pledged to drive social change to one that handed out academic fellowships felt like a betrayal of the mission. The abruptness of the decision forced the staff to scramble to find other homes for projects, including a research program supporting Boston-area organizers on a campaign to challenge family policing in schools, for which they were in the midst of sensitive interviews with affected parents and caregivers. Breaking promises they’d made to grass-roots partners was what bothered her team most, said DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, because equitable and sustained relationships between communities and advocates build a strong network — a movement aligned on its goals. Pulling out damaged those relationships.

Though some staff members told me they appreciated Kendi — “My life forever, forever changed because I worked for someone who pushed me to envision what’s possible,” one said — many others had become darkly cynical about him. The most vocal among them was Grundy, who took to Twitter calling Kendi a “grifter” and fueling the rumor that he might have stolen funds. Redwood tried to have empathy. She imagined what it must be like to be constantly attacked — to have your intelligence insulted, your motives questioned. “I wonder if some of the secrecy and paranoid behavior came about as a result of that,” she told me. “I have no idea, and I had to just eventually stop trying to figure it out and just move on, because I couldn’t understand how the person I met when he was at American, when I sat down with him for lunch, the person who appeared to be so humble, so committed — and I still think he is committed — could be the person that I worked for. It is not something that I have ever been able to understand.”

Several people stressed to me that Kendi’s weaknesses as a leader were not as important as the larger forces that surrounded his leadership — the opportunism of white-led institutions, the boom and bust of trend-chasing nonprofit funding, the commodification of Black thought and activism. I asked Boston University to comment on a complaint I heard from the staff, that its administration had failed to provide adequate oversight. “Boston University provided significant financial and administrative support to Dr. Kendi and the center. Dr. Kendi did not always accept the support,” a spokesperson wrote. “In hindsight, and with the fuller knowledge of the organizational problems that arose, the university should have done more to insist on additional oversight.”

The spokesperson also said that the decision to end the center’s projects was Kendi’s choice. “Several different models were discussed with Dr. Kendi, including bringing many of the projects to completion over the next two years and lessening the impact on staff,” he wrote. “However, Dr. Kendi’s preference was to terminate the ongoing projects and ask the funders to repurpose the funds for his new endeavor.” (In a written response, Kendi accused the interim university administration of trying to undermine the center’s work. “The center has faced more oversight and scrutiny than every other center at B.U. from the Office of Research and this interim B.U. administration,” he wrote. “I’m disappointed that this interim B.U. administration is giving The Times a version of events that doesn’t reconcile with the facts.”)

The last time I saw Kendi in person was in January, when he came to New York to promote his newest book, a young readers’ adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon,” based on her 1927 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Middle Passage from Africa. That night, Kendi was doing an event at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were salt-streaked after a light snowstorm and white string lights glowed on a tree outside. One of the three personal-security officers he brought with him — bearded Black men in black peacoats and dress pants, fitted with earpieces — was checking bags at the door.

Kendi was standing by a wall of books in a teal blazer, his pocket square in place. For a while, he said, he stopped doing many public events because of his security concerns, but he realized it had contributed to his feeling alienated and embattled. “Not doing live book signings prevented me from engaging with the people who were reading and appreciating my work,” he told me later. Going on tour again had “helped tremendously,” he said. But he didn’t want to be away from home long while Sadiqa was in treatment. “It’s incredibly difficult to witness someone you care about deeply facing so much pain and loss,” he said. “I’d much rather just be the one facing that pain.”

Boston University had cleared him and the center of grant mismanagement, but he was still waiting for Korn Ferry, the management consulting firm hired by the administration, to finish its culture inquiry, and he continued to attribute any dysfunction at the center to the hardships of the pandemic and employees who repeatedly contested his leadership. He was coordinating with the university on the center’s next phase, he said, but the work that felt most meaningful to him at the moment was “getting back to my roots as a writer.” He was at work on his next big project, a contemporary political history.

Kendi has spun out 13 books since “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019, 10 of which are adaptations of his or others’ work for children. Since becoming a father, he told me, it has become even more important to him to reach young readers — particularly Black kids like him who may have internalized racist ideas about themselves. Earlier that day, Kendi spoke to 250 kids at a middle school elsewhere in Brooklyn, taking questions from a panel of seventh and eighth graders. “Barracoon” was the latest in a series of books he was adapting by Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance ethnographer he has called the “greatest antiracist novelist of the interwar era.” “I wanted it to read like a grandparent sharing their difficult life story with care and love to their grandchild,” Kendi wrote on Instagram.

During the talk, Kendi told the audience that there are some Black people who, from the way they maneuver in the world, you can tell are spiritual maroons. “This is the person who truly is living and navigating from the standpoint of a freedom,” he said. “They’re unafraid or not worried at all about the white gaze. They’re operating and navigating the world based on their own destiny, based on what they want.” Hurston, who traveled throughout the South, Jamaica and Haiti collecting folklore from the descendants of slaves, was one of those people, Kendi said.

Listening to him, I wondered how often he felt like one of them, too. I got the impression that Kendi spent a lot of time in his head, in that defensive pose, anticipating or parrying attacks from his critics. When I asked him later where he and Sadiqa had gone on vacation over the New Year holiday, he declined even to name the country for fear that “bad-faith people” would try to figure out where they had stayed and how much their hotel room cost. I told him it seemed as though he devoted a lot of thought to how something he said or did could be used against him by the least generous person on the internet. “I certainly don’t want to provide fodder for it,” he told me.

Kendi is right that there’s a mess of misinformation about what he believes. He has become a cipher for the unfinished national conversation about the post-George Floyd moment — the outrage and wild hope of the protests, the reactionary anger, the disillusionment. In tying together racism’s two senses — the personal and the systemic — Kendi has helped many more Americans understand that they are responsible not only for the ideas in their heads but also for the impact they have on the world. But this gap between intention and action, so core to his thinking, is where all the hard work takes place, DeCruz told me. That’s where organizing and movement-building happens, where you practice the kind of world you want to live in. “Having a shared language is important,” she said, but “it’s just the first step.”

Read by January LaVoy

Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by David Mason

Rachel Poser is a story editor for the magazine. She has previously written about whiteness in classical studies, sting operations and the charms of paleoart. Wayne Lawrence is a visual artist in Brooklyn and Detroit whose work is focused on community and purpose. His work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

An earlier version of this article misstated the center’s fundraising in 2021 as compared to the previous year. It was approximately one-hundredth of the amount raised in 2020, not a tenth. The article also misstated the recognition given to the documentary adaptation of “Stamped From the Beginning.” The documentary was named to the Oscar shortlist, but was not nominated for the award.

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). Pleading Your Case: Understanding the Definition and Dynamics of Plea Bargaining . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/pleading-your-case-understanding-the-definition-and-dynamics-of-plea-bargaining/ [Accessed: 5-Jun-2024]

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