What Actually Makes for Excellent Journalism

I’ve been learning, researching and writing articles for literally decades. I’ve written many thousands. And I’ve been a professional reporter / journalist. There is a very particular issue I want to address today. And that is how you can tell if a piece of journalism is quality, or not. For example in many of the articles I’ve written lately, I express a personal view once or twice. However, doing so does not diminish the validity of the article or the reporting. If anything, it enhances it – and sometimes it is morally required.

The Myth of Neutrality

The obsession with neutral journalism can be a cancer on the truth. We’ve been bombarded to believe that a reporter’s job is to stand in the middle of a burning house and give equal time to the arsonist and the fireman. But that isn’t journalism.

Real journalism isn’t about being a sterile, emotionless conduit. It’s about verification. It’s about looking at the world, finding the facts, and having the integrity to call a lie a lie when the evidence demands it.

The Hersey Standard

The ultimate benchmark for this isn’t found in a modern classroom, but in the ruins of Hiroshima. After the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs in 1945, the government went into full-scale damage control. They didn’t just spin the story; they actively suppressed the reality. General Leslie Groves testified to Congress, before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy on November 28, 1945, that radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.” Here’s the actual transcript of the testimony, check page 37, half way down.

The official narrative was that there was no “lingering radioactivity” and that the bomb was just a bigger version of what people already understood.

To maintain this lie, the government banned reporters from entering the blast zones. They knew that if the American public saw the true scale of the horror, support for the nuclear program, and the administration itself, would evaporate. They wanted a sanitized war. Here’s a full 1 hour 30 minute historical account of it:

But in 1946, one guy went anyway.

John Hersey didn’t go to Hiroshima to give the U.S. government “fair and balanced” coverage of their claims that radiation sickness didn’t exist. He defied the blackout, found six survivors, and documented the reality of skin sliding off bone and the slow, agonizing deaths of thousands from a “pleasant” poison. He wrote a piece for The New Yorker that took up the entire magazine. It didn’t offer a “rebuttal” from the Pentagon. It offered the truth. (Here is the article.)

Was he “biased”? If being on the side of reality is a bias, then every great journalist in history is guilty. Hersey’s work wasn’t powerful because he was neutral; it was powerful because he was honest.

From the pamphleteers of the American Revolution to the investigative reporters who broke Watergate, the goal has never been to hide the author’s perspective. The goal has been to ensure that the author’s perspective is anchored in undeniable, verifiable fact. If you have the receipts – the video, the documents, the forensic data – then your “bias” isn’t a flaw. It’s a conclusion. This is why all of my articles are heavily researched, and hyperlinked to references so you can “trust, but verify”.

Truth vs. Balance

There is no “other side” to a factual contradiction.

If a government agency says a man was “brandishing” a weapon, and high-resolution video shows that weapon was holstered while he was prone on the pavement, a “balanced” report that gives both claims equal weight is a lie by omission. By entertaining a falsehood as a valid “perspective,” you are participating in the deception. I will not do that. You should not accept information from anyone who does.

A good journalist doesn’t ask Jeffrey Dahmer why he liked the taste of human flesh and raping dead bodies just to be “fair.” You report the murders. You report the evidence. You report the reality. If that reality makes people “freak the fuck out,” that isn’t the journalist’s fault, it’s the fault of the people committing the acts.

The Honest Broker

The requirement for great journalism isn’t the absence of a soul or a viewpoint. It’s the presence of honesty. The willingness to keep an open mind, pursue the facts, consider the alternatives, refrain from judgement, commitment to eliminating bias and fallacies, and the pursuit of truth – or at times the acknowledgement that there is no particular truth.

Some people are simply good at this. Some are not. It’s a skill honed over years and years, which requires a dedication to listening, learning, observation, and analysis. And track records speak volumes.

Injected commentary or outrage is situationally fair, provided it isn’t misused to sway a viewpoint that is factually inaccurate.

The public doesn’t need “neutral” robots. They need “honest brokers” – people who will do the work, look at the footage, read the law, and then tell them exactly what is happening without sugarcoating the truth to protect anyone’s feelings.

Final Thoughts

Objectivity is a tool for gathering facts, but the Truth is the final destination. If you aren’t willing to take a stand once the facts are in, you aren’t a journalist. You’re a stenographer.

And if you’re a reader – and the author has earned trust through a long history of fact based reporting, you literally owe that person a debt for doing something you are unwilling or unable to do yourself. Whether the conclusions simply reinforce your own beliefs, or contradict them.

Socrates famously likened himself to a gadfly stinging a “large and well-bred horse” (Athens) that had become sluggish and lazy. By relentlessly questioning the city’s leaders and assumptions, he forced the state to examine its own virtue, proving that a healthy society requires the constant, often annoying irritation of dissent to prevent intellectual and moral decay.

He was the first journalist as far as I’m concerned.