By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
We find ourselves in a world where news media thrives on crises. Headlines are designed to scare, intimidate, divide, and most of all, keep us clicking. Across the world and he political spectrum, people are quick to claim “the other side” is full of lies. In this post-truth reality where even objectivity feels slippery, what is our responsibility as journalists? What might it mean to “speak truth to power,” when that act might get you detained or even killed? And how can journalism help rebuild trust, especially with people who disagree?
When I was 12, I joined a summer school journalism program. One of the first things I learned is that journalism isn’t only about reporting facts, it’s also a business. An interesting lead often took priority over the dull yet important work. At the time, this lesson was painful and disappointing; it deterred me from a career in journalism. Today, it’s what drives my writing — to critique, not just in theory but also in practice, how political and economic forces shape, and are shaped by technologies that produce information.
In a way, the task for journalists today is a Sisyphean endeavour. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a man punished by the gods to roll a huge boulder up the hill, only for it to roll back down every time. An eternity spent trying. Finding, let alone telling, the truth today is like pushing that boulder uphill. With each issue, we might think we’ve clarified something previously overlooked. But, with each moment after publication, new storms emerge and undo the work we’ve done. Yet, we persist. Why? Because, if journalism is to be a tool for solidarity, we must gladly spend eternity trying.
Why we stopped trusting the news
Amid the ideals of democracy, journalism has been called the “fourth estate” by Burke when referring to the division of power between the three estates of the British parliament. Journalism, a powerful watchdog holding the government accountable. It was meant to foster an informed citizenry — one equipped to participate in democracy — by providing citizens access to factual information; an always imperfect ideal. After all, who determines these facts? Who has been allowed to be a voice of knowledge? Whose stories get centred, and who is expected to provide the pain? The spectacle? The statistics? Whose version of truth gets published, and whose gets edited, mistranslated, silenced, erased?
News organizations don’t work alone — they are embedded within broader systems that include governments, corporations, social norms, and societal structures. Prominent scholars, from Michel Foucault on the entanglement of power and knowledge to Noam Chomsky’s Still Manufacturing Consent, have shown how the media often supports those in power, even when disguised in “neutrality” or “objectivity.” Now, more than ever, this hollow ideal of journalistic objectivity is exposing the cracks in the foundations of the field. They remind us that truth isn’t neutral, it has a history tied to power. However, I don’t think this is something to lament. Perhaps it is only when we move beyond this performance of objectivity, which ultimately serves those in power, that we may begin to rebuild trust across political lines. If we want to rebuild journalism to serve democracy, we must begin by asking: democracy for whom?
By giving people access to facts, it was meant to foster an informed citizenry, so people could be better equipped to participate in democracy.
A journalism of care
In envisioning this journalism of care, I wonder, what might it look like if we replaced breaking news with slowing down, sensationalism with listening deeply, commodification of people’s stories with empathy and respect for lived experiences? Perhaps this is what real democratic accountability looks like: a journalism of care that acknowledges biases, that recognizes truth can look different depending on where one is standing.
The journalism we need today must confront epistemic injustices, a concept coined by Miranda Fricker to describe the ways in which people are wronged in their capacity as knowers. In many newsrooms, this plays out as the repeated erasure or tokenization of Indigenous communities, racialized immigrants, 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals, and others whose voices have been historically silenced — what postcolonial theorist Chakravorty Spivak calls the subaltern. When journalism speaks for rather than speaking with people, it reproduces the very silence it claims to challenge. In her seminal essay, Spivak famously asked, “Can the subaltern speak?” — a challenge to how dominant institutions can represent the oppressed without reinforcing their marginalization. To answer yes, journalism must begin with listening — not for quick quotes but for context, history, and power. It means treating community knowledge like oral traditions, lived experiences, and collective wisdom not as “human interest” stories but as legitimate forms of expertise rooted in ways of knowing that have often been dismissed.
In doing so, transparency and reflexivity become vital. Transparency to explain how stories are sourced, whose voices are centred, and the editorial choices made behind the scenes. Reflexivity to turn the lens back on the journalist and their positionality: to ask how our identities, assumptions, and institutional ties shape the stories we tell. As scholar Linda Martín Alcoff wrote for The New York Times, truth is better reached through “a receptivity that holds back on disagreement long enough to try out the new ideas on offer,” rather than through adversarial arguments. This kind of openness is what builds trust, not by claiming authority but by inviting accountability.
In contrast to corporate media cycles that chase immediacy, journalism of care resists the pressure to produce viral content at the expense of depth. This is the kind of work we see in independent outlets like IndigiNews in Canada or People’s Archive of Rural India. This kind of slow journalism is often rooted in the community. It is relational and cumulative. It might not “break” the news, but it does build understanding over time. In building trust as a news platform, it is vital we learn to sit with sorrow, and resist the capitalist drive to turn human suffering into headlines to be forgotten by the next news cycle.
This is why I imagine this journalism of care as co-created and participatory. When done ethically, citizen journalism and community media offer a model of participatory storytelling that builds trust from the ground up. In India, for instance, Khabar Lahariya, a rural women-led news outlet trains local women to report on issues affecting their own communities. From covering caste-based violence to the lack of rural infrastructures, these journalists are not “parachuting in” but are already embedded in these struggles. It is only when journalism can thus redistribute power, by insisting that people are agents of knowledge, that we can foster solidarity.
The culture of distrust and distortion in today’s media is a cry for help, a demand for better. Readers are looking for news publications to move beyond rage into understanding. They want stories that challenge injustice but also help them make sense of a world in crisis. Journalism of care is not soft or sentimental. Instead, it confronts injustice with clarity, compassion, and care. It recognizes that even though there isn’t a neutral truth, examining and unpacking it still matters. The boulder is heavy, and the hill is steep. But in inviting the community to support and co-create with us, we might just push it uphill a little easier, a little further.
