A Main Street Independent reference — the treatise on values, journalism, and the discipline that connects them: why news cannot be made value-free, the consensus values floor the publication’s general newsfeed operates from, and where the line between consensus-floor reporting and perspective-bearing analysis falls. It is the foundational document of the publication’s editorial method, published under CC0.

A living document. Forks invited; revisions documented.

Front Matter

Mission Statement

Main Street Independent is a source of reporting grounded in accepted journalistic standards, applied with explicit acknowledgment that those standards encode widely-held human values. The publication does not pretend to value-neutrality. It articulates the values it operates from, applies journalistic discipline within them, and structurally separates consensus-values news reporting from clearly-labeled perspective-bearing analysis under named pen-name authorship. The general newsfeed is generated by AI systems operating from auditable, published instructions. The publication’s editorial foundation, its values floor, its quality-control framework, and its operational implementation are all public artifacts open to challenge, revision, and adoption by other publications.

Document Map

This treatise establishes the editorial foundation of the publication. The body presents the foundation in compact form across eight sections; the appendices provide the scholarly support for each contention and the operational details of how the foundation is implemented. Specialized terms are defined as they arise. The work is intended to be readable straight through. Readers wanting the depth on any particular contention should follow the appendix pointers at the close of each section.

Licensing and Forking

This treatise, the supporting frameworks, the values floor, and the publication-level operational specification are all released under CC0 — a public-domain dedication. Other publications, authors, and AI systems are welcome to adopt, adapt, or fork any portion of the work. The intent is to contribute to a public commons of values-explicit, journalistically-disciplined reporting, not to maintain a proprietary product. Adoption requires no permission. Revisions made to forked versions are not constrained by us. We ask only that adopters who modify the work do not represent their modifications as ours.

Section 1 — Journalistic Standards as the Foundation

1.1 What journalism is for

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel articulated journalism’s purpose in The Elements of Journalism with a precision that has held up since the book first appeared in 2001. Journalism’s first obligation is to truth. Its first loyalty is to citizens. Its essence is a discipline of verification. Its purpose is to provide citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing. This is not aspirational rhetoric. It is the discipline’s own statement of purpose, refined over more than a century of working newsroom practice and adopted in some form by every serious code of journalism ethics that has followed.

This treatise treats Kovach and Rosenstiel’s articulation as the spine. Everything that follows is in some sense a working out of what those four sentences require in practice.

1.2 The four pillars of journalistic ethics

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics articulates four pillars that operationalize the Kovach/Rosenstiel formulation. Each is briefly explained here in the context of how this publication applies it.

Seek Truth and Report It. Verification before publication. Attribution of every factual claim. The obligation to provide an accurate account of events even when accuracy is inconvenient.

Minimize Harm. Care with naming, with vulnerable populations, with reputational exposure. The recognition that journalism’s subjects are persons whose lives may be altered by what is reported about them.

Act Independently. No undisclosed conflicts of interest. No undisclosed funding influences. Editorial decisions based on the values floor articulated in Section 3, not on commercial or political pressure.

Be Accountable and Transparent. Disclosed methods. Published standards. Prompt corrections. Openness to challenge.

1.3 The discipline of verification

Verification is the practice that distinguishes journalism from adjacent communication forms — from advocacy, marketing, entertainment, and pure assertion. It is the work of confirming, through multiple independent sources or through primary documentation, that what is claimed actually happened in the way it is being described. Operationally this means: every factual claim sourced; every named entity verified to a canonical identifier; every quotation reproduced verbatim from its source; every numerical claim traced to its origin; every date confirmed against the record.

The discipline is what makes journalism’s truth claims warrant trust. Without it, journalism is indistinguishable in form from anything else that uses the conventions of news writing.

1.4 The standards are inherited, not invented here

This publication adopts the journalistic standards developed by working newsrooms over more than a century. The standards’ authority comes from their accumulated refinement and their proven capacity, when applied with discipline, to produce reliable reporting. We did not invent them. We do not modify them. We apply them.

Specifically, the publication’s operational standards draw from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, the Associated Press Statement of News Values and Principles, the New York Times Standards and Ethics, the BBC Editorial Guidelines, and the Kovach/Rosenstiel articulation of journalism’s purpose. Where these sources converge, we treat the convergence as authoritative. Where they diverge, we identify the divergence and explain our choice.

1.5 What this means in practice

The reader can expect from every article in the general newsfeed: attribution of every factual claim; verification before publication; hedging language preserved where evidence is incomplete; correction when errors occur; transparency about methods and sources; and disclosure of any conflicts of interest. From the pen-name analytical columns, the reader can expect the same discipline applied to the factual substrate, plus declared values from which the analysis is conducted.

These commitments are not aspirational. They are operational. They are encoded in the framework that produces the publication’s content, and that framework is itself published.

The history and codification of these standards — from SPJ, Reuters, AP, NYT, BBC, and the Kovach/Rosenstiel articulation — are documented in Appendix A, available as a download from this page.

Section 2 — Why Values Cannot Be Removed From News

2.1 The objectivity myth

The aspiration to value-free news is not just unachievable but actively misleading. The act of selecting an event as news is itself a value judgment. Pretending otherwise conceals which values are operating. Articulating the values openly is more honest, not less.

This is the central claim of the present section, and it has consequences for everything that follows. If values cannot be removed, then the question is not whether news will be values-bearing but whose values will bear on it and with what transparency.

2.2 The Krakatoa-versus-galactic-jet thought experiment

Consider two events. A volcanic eruption kills a million people in a populated region. A relativistic jet from a distant black hole sterilizes planets across an entire galaxy. The first is news. The second is not.

The reason is that human beings have a compassionate response to mass human death and no comparable response to events in galaxies whose populations, if any, are unreachable to us. Selection encodes values. The sentence “this is news” already contains “this matters to humans for human reasons.” There is no neutral ground from which to dispute this. The alternative is no selection at all — and no selection is no journalism.

2.3 What sterile reporting looks like

Pure event databases like GDELT illustrate the result of stripping values from event recording: structurally complete, humanly useless. Citizens consult news to navigate the world — to understand what matters, to whom, why, and what to do about it. Stripping values from reporting strips it of the capacity to inform that navigation. A newsfeed that achieved the impossibility of value-free reporting would, ironically, fail at journalism’s first obligation: to provide citizens information they can use.

2.4 Journalism’s own values are values

The four SPJ pillars are values, not facts. The Kovach/Rosenstiel obligations are values. Every working journalistic standard rests on a values foundation. To deny that journalism is values-bearing is to deny what the discipline has explicitly said about itself for more than a century. Journalists who claim to operate from “objectivity” are operating from values they have chosen not to articulate.

This is the move the present treatise refuses. Articulation is more rigorous than concealment. The values are present whether we name them or not. Naming them allows the reader to see what is operating. Concealment serves only the journalist’s authority, not the reader’s understanding.

2.5 The “why” question requires values

Among the Five Ws and One H, the why question cannot be answered without engaging the values of the actors involved and the values used to evaluate their actions. A news report that refuses to address why an event occurred fails the basic informational task. A report that addresses why is necessarily engaging values. The choice is not whether to engage values but whether to do so transparently.

A reader who is told that a politician changed positions, but not why, has been told a fact and denied its meaning. The why is the work of journalism. To do it requires acknowledging the framework the report is operating in.

2.6 The continuum, not the binary

Value engagement is not a binary on/off. It is a continuum from pure event recording at one end through consensus-values news, through documented-pattern news (still floor-disciplined, with attribution doing the work) through to perspective-bearing analysis (declared values, named author) at the other end. Useful journalism lives across the middle. The line moves with which values are being invoked, not with sentence structure or word count.

This is one of the more consequential observations in the treatise and we return to it in Sections 4 and 5. For now: there is no binary at which values “enter” journalism. They are present throughout. The relevant questions are about which values, applied where, with what transparency.

2.7 Where this leaves us

If values cannot be removed, the question becomes which values, applied how transparently, at what scope? The next section answers that question by articulating the consensus values floor — the values from which this publication’s general newsfeed operates.

The scholarly support for the human-values tradition the floor draws on is documented in Appendix B, available as a download from this page.

Section 3 — The Consensus Values Floor

3.1 The five floor values

The publication operates the general newsfeed from these five values:

Human life and dignity. Every human being has equal moral worth. Mass death and mass suffering matter. Cruelty matters. The deaths of distant strangers matter for the same reasons as the deaths of close kin. This is the foundational value; without it, none of the others have purchase.

Truthfulness. Accurate description is preferable to deception. Verifiable claims are preferable to unverifiable ones. The factual record is to be respected, not manipulated. Statements about reality should correspond to reality. Public deception is a harm.

Accountability of power. Concentrated power warrants scrutiny. Powerful actors are accountable to those affected by their actions. Power without accountability tends toward abuse. This applies to power in all its forms: governmental, corporate, institutional, technological, social.

Equality and fairness. Same rules for everyone. No privileged exemption from accountability based on group membership, wealth, status, or affiliation. Selective application of moral standards based on whose ox is being gored is itself a violation of fairness.

Informed citizenship. Citizens are entitled to the information needed to make decisions about their lives and communities. Self-governance requires informed self-governors. Restricting citizens’ access to relevant information undermines self-governance.

These five values are the floor. Not the ceiling. The publication’s general newsfeed stays inside them. Pen-name analytical columns extend beyond them with declared perspectives.

3.2 The floor’s intellectual lineage

Each value is derivable from broad and convergent sources. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights articulates human life and dignity as foundational. Cross-cultural psychology — Shalom Schwartz’s basic-human-values framework — finds these values present across diverse societies. Convergent moral commitments across philosophical traditions — Kantian respect for persons, utilitarian concern with welfare, virtue-ethics emphasis on character, care-ethics attention to relationships — agree on the floor at the level of abstraction articulated here. Major religious traditions converge on these values when stated this generally. Journalism’s own values articulations from SPJ, Kovach/Rosenstiel, and the Reuters Trust Principles align with the floor as a precondition of journalism’s purpose.

We did not invent the floor. We articulated it explicitly because the alternative is implicit values that operate without accountability.

3.3 The floor is a position, and that’s appropriate

The floor is not value-neutral. It is the publication’s articulation of which values it adopts as operating assumptions. Anyone is free to disagree with the floor. The publication’s response to disagreement is engagement, not abandonment. Performed neutrality is not a higher position than articulated values. It is a less honest one.

A publication that performs neutrality is operating from values it has chosen not to disclose. A publication that articulates values is operating from values that can be examined and challenged. The latter is the more rigorous epistemic posture, and the present treatise adopts it.

3.4 Why these values are not centrist

The floor is not a political center between left and right. It is the foundation of human moral consensus that political traditions either align with, partially align with, or reject. Movements that reject the equal moral worth of certain humans are not entitled to equal-weight presentation under a “balance” rubric — they are outside the floor. The floor’s commitments are pre-political in the sense that they precede partisan disputes, not in the sense that they avoid taking positions.

Centrism is a coordinate within an existing political space. The floor articulates what is required for any political space to be intelligible at all.

3.5 Selection asymmetry is not bias

If the floor surfaces stories that are asymmetrically distributed across the political spectrum because the underlying behavior is asymmetric, that is the floor working correctly, not failing. Symmetric application of consistent values to an asymmetric world produces asymmetric coverage. The publication does not manufacture symmetry that does not exist in reality. When one political tradition makes more false claims than another, fact-check coverage will be asymmetric. When one party concentrates more power than another, accountability coverage will be asymmetric. The asymmetry is the floor working.

The complaint that consistent-application-yields-asymmetric-output is itself bias is a category error. We address its rhetorical form in Section 6.

3.6 The floor is contestable and revisable

Like any values articulation, the floor is open to challenge. The publication will publish thoughtful critique of the floor and will revise it when revision is warranted. Revisions will be documented with date, change, and reasoning. This is not relativism; this is the same epistemic discipline applied to the floor itself.

What we will not do is abandon articulation in favor of concealment. The choice is not between a fixed floor and no floor. It is between a fixed-but-revisable floor that is published and a fixed-but-unrevised floor that is hidden.

3.7 The floor’s operational form

For day-to-day editorial decisions, the floor is encoded in the publication-level Editorial Mind — a structured commitment specification that the editorial framework consults when navigating cases that fall outside explicit rules. It encodes the five floor values as commitments alongside the bad-faith-handling discipline articulated in Section 6 and the journalistic standards articulated in Section 1. Cases that engage commitments at high weight without crossing the floor are handled in the consensus newsfeed; cases whose engagement would require crossing the floor are routed to pen-name analytical treatment or to human review. The implementation — including how commitments are weighted, how the system is audited, and how disagreements about application become disagreements about values rather than disagreements about rules — is documented on the Editorial Mind page.

The scholarly support for the human-values tradition the floor draws on is documented in Appendix B, available as a download from this page. The operational form of the floor is the publication-level Editorial Mind.

Section 4 — How the Floor Drives Selection and Coverage

4.1 Selection: what becomes news

Events become news at this publication when they intersect the floor in non-trivial ways. The selection framework continuously scans event-cluster data from public sources — GDELT, wire services, government release feeds, court filings — and applies the floor’s values as weighted criteria. Events that affect human life and dignity at scale qualify. Events that engage truthfulness or its absence qualify. Events that bear on accountability of power qualify. Events that test equality and fairness qualify. Events that affect citizens’ capacity for informed self-governance qualify.

The selection logic is documented and the criteria are auditable. A cluster’s selection rationale — which floor values were engaged, at what intensity, against which sources — is preserved in the article’s metadata.

4.2 Coverage: how we report

Inside the floor, the publication reports value-bearing content through attribution rather than editorial conclusion. The grammatical pattern “X said Y” is the workhorse of news. “Engineers said the building code was violated” is news; “the building code was violated” without sourcing is editorial. The discipline of attribution is the technique that lets news be values-saturated without crossing into editorializing.

This is not a softening device. Attribution-disciplined reporting on a documented pattern is more rigorous than unattributed reporting on the same pattern, because the source can be checked and the claim’s evidentiary basis is visible.

4.3 The grammar of reporting

Specific grammatical practices hold the line:

  • Active voice attributed to named sources is the default.
  • Passive voice is used only where the agent is genuinely unknown or where the patient is the news.
  • Direct quotation is reserved for distinctive language; paraphrase with attribution is otherwise preferable.
  • Hedging language is preserved where evidence is incomplete: “according to,” “reportedly,” “appears to,” “alleged.”
  • “Said” is the default attribution verb. Other verbs (“claimed,” “insisted,” “admitted”) carry connotation and are used only when their connotation is justified by evidence.

These practices look small individually. Cumulatively, they are the discipline that distinguishes a news report from an editorial.

4.4 The two-tier publication structure

The general newsfeed operates from the consensus floor and stays inside it. Pen-name analytical columns extend beyond the floor with explicit, declared perspectives. The reader always knows which they are reading by the structural location of the article on the site and by clear labeling. Both layers are journalistically disciplined. They differ in stance.

The structural separation is load-bearing. It allows the publication to do two things — report inside the floor with broad authority, and analyze beyond it with declared perspective — without contaminating either with the other.

4.5 Why pen names rather than open editorial voice

The pen-name structure exists because:

  • Each pen name carries a documented values file that articulates the perspective from which its analyses are conducted; readers know what they are getting.
  • Voice consistency over time builds reader trust in the perspective; readers can develop calibrated expectations.
  • The structural separation from news prevents the perspective from contaminating the consensus-floor reporting.
  • Pen names may or may not be identifiable as human or AI; what matters is the transparency about the values from which the analysis is conducted, which is the load-bearing fact.

A pen name is a vehicle for declared analytical commitment. An open editorial voice would either have to declare the same commitments under the publication’s own name — diluting the consensus-floor authority — or hide them. Pen names solve the structural problem cleanly.

4.6 Where the line falls

The line between consensus-floor news and pen-name analysis is fuzzy and lives in which values are being invoked and whether the publication’s own voice is required to make the next analytical move. A claim is inside the floor when both its factual content is verified and the values it invokes are within the floor. A claim moves to pen-name territory when it depends on a values commitment beyond the floor or requires interpretive framing the floor does not authorize. Section 5 addresses the line in detail, with worked examples.

4.7 Word-count is a symptom, not a cause

In practice, articles staying within the consensus floor tend to top out around 1,000 words because beyond that point, additional content typically requires interpretive framing the floor does not authorize. This is an empirical observation, not a mechanical rule. The actual constraint is the values being invoked. A 4,000-word vote-tally story can stay inside the floor; a 200-word characterization of a political figure’s motives can already be outside it. Word-count thresholds in newsroom practice are downstream of the values constraint, not upstream of it.

The construction of the pen-name personas — what each values file contains, and how the analytical columns are dispatched — is documented in the publication’s configuration files, which are public artifacts.

Section 5 — The Line Between Reporting and Analysis

5.1 The continuum revisited

Pure event recording at one extreme; perspective-bearing analysis at the other. Useful journalism lives across the middle. The line moves with which values are being invoked and whether the publication’s own voice is being asked to take a position the floor does not authorize.

The continuum framing is doing real work. It rules out the temptation to treat news as if values entered at some specific threshold of editorializing. They are present throughout. The distinction between consensus-floor news and pen-name analysis is about which values are operating, not about whether values are operating.

5.2 The operational rule

When in doubt, attribute and report rather than conclude. The newsfeed reports what sources say, what records show, what patterns exist. The pen-name analysis interprets meaning, attributes causation to broader theories, and draws normative conclusions.

This rule is not a hedge. It is a discipline. Attribution-and-reporting on an observed pattern is journalism. Interpretation-and-conclusion about the same pattern is analysis. Both can be rigorous. They differ in which voice carries the claim.

5.3 Where the line is not

The line is not at “any value-bearing content” — that produces the sterile failure mode described in Section 2. The line is not at “any reporting that displeases any party” — that lets bad-faith actors set editorial policy. The line is not at “perfect symmetry between political sides” — that is false balance. The line is not at “anything beyond verified facts” — that excludes the why questions journalism exists to answer.

These are common misplacements of the line in mainstream practice and we explicitly do not adopt them.

5.4 Where the line is

The line is at the point where the publication’s voice would have to adopt a perspective the consensus floor does not authorize in order to make the next claim. Below that line, attribution carries the value content. Above that line, the perspective is named and the writing moves to a pen-name column.

This is a practical rule. It is also the most precise statement of the line we can offer. The line is not at a word, a sentence, a topic, or a tone. It is at a perspective.

5.5 Worked examples

Three concrete illustrations of the line in operation.

Earthquake with building-code failures. “An earthquake killed 200 people” is inside the floor; the consensus value is human life. “Engineers attribute the high death toll to building code violations” is inside the floor — an attributed claim with verifiable specifics. “The building code violations reflect a broader collapse of regulatory capacity” is outside the floor and requires pen-name treatment. The broader-pattern claim depends on a contested causal model that the floor does not authorize the publication’s own voice to adopt.

Political vote. “The Senate voted 51–49 to pass the bill” is inside the floor; the consensus value is informed citizenship. “Senator X cast the deciding vote despite previously stating opposition” is inside the floor — a verifiable factual record. “Senator X’s reversal reflects [theory of why politicians reverse]” is outside the floor; that’s pen-name territory.

Public statement. “[Figure] said [statement] on [date]” is inside the floor; the consensus value is truthfulness — the public record. “The statement contradicts [Figure]‘s previous statements on [dates]” is inside the floor — a verifiable record. “[Figure] is dishonest” is outside the floor; that’s opinion in the publication’s voice and we do not write it.

5.6 The line moves in unique ways for unique stories

The line is not a universal threshold but a function of the values landscape of the particular story. Stories that touch only one floor value at low intensity can stay inside the floor at considerable length. Stories that touch multiple floor values at high intensity, or that engage the floor at points where bad-faith pressure typically operates, may need to move to pen-name treatment quickly. Section 6 addresses how bad-faith pressure interacts with the line.

5.7 The Editorial Mind as a navigation tool

For cases where the line’s location is genuinely ambiguous, the framework consults the publication-level Editorial Mind. It encodes the floor values as commitments and produces a values-engagement assessment for proposed claims. Claims whose engagement exceeds the consensus-floor threshold without authorization are flagged for pen-name treatment or for human review. This is the operational form of the line: not a fixed threshold but an evaluable property of the proposed claim against the publication’s articulated commitments.

See Section 6 for how bad-faith techniques attempt to push the line, and how we hold it. The operational form of the line is the publication-level Editorial Mind.

Section 6 — How We Cover Bad-Faith Rhetorical Techniques

6.1 The bad-faith pressure on the line

Sophisticated rhetorical actors exploit the gap between mainstream news desks’ performed neutrality and their actual sourcing discipline. They push the line by demanding that their preferred framings be adopted as neutral, that their bad-faith moves be reported as legitimate positions, and that any refusal to grant these concessions be treated as bias. Recognizing this pressure is itself a journalistic responsibility. The pressure has been documented in the rhetorical and political-communication literatures for decades. It has names. Its techniques are catalogued.

The present section names the techniques and articulates how the publication holds the line against them.

6.2 The unifying principle: evidentiary framing replaces interpretive framing

Where mainstream practice softens reports through interpretive shortcuts — “critics dispute,” “some say,” “controversial” — we use evidentiary frames that report what is actually documented, with full sourcing. Evidentiary discipline is more rigorous than soft interpretive framing, and it produces output that bad-faith techniques cannot easily exploit. The bad-faith loophole exists in the gap between mainstream news desks’ performed neutrality and their actual sourcing discipline. Closing the gap closes the loophole.

This is the principle that organizes the seven specific techniques that follow.

6.3 The seven techniques for holding the line

6.3.1 Refuse manufactured-controversy framing. When a position depends on treating a settled question as open, we report it accurately as a settled question with documented dissent, rather than writing the dissent into the grammar as an equal epistemic position.

Example contrast: “While some scientists agree that climate change is human-caused, others dispute this” treats the consensus position and the dissent as parallel. The disciplined version: “Climate change is human-caused, according to the overwhelming scientific consensus reflected in IPCC reports and the position statements of every major scientific academy. A small number of dissenting scientists, primarily funded by fossil fuel interests, continue to dispute this finding.” Every claim is sourced; the grammar reflects the actual epistemic situation.

6.3.2 Decline euphemistic framing in our own voice. Proponent-preferred labels are quoted and attributed to their proponents; descriptive language describes what the policy or claim actually does or asserts.

Example contrast: “The state legislature passed an election integrity law” adopts the proponent frame. The disciplined version: “The state legislature passed a law that adds identification requirements and reduces early voting hours, which proponents describe as an ‘election integrity’ measure and opponents describe as voter suppression.” This reports the actual policy content; it attributes both labels to those who use them.

6.3.3 Apply scrutiny standards symmetrically. All sources receive the same verification, attribution, and skepticism. When this discipline is applied symmetrically and one side fails it more often, the correct journalistic response is to report that, not to soften it. A pattern of unverifiable claims by a public figure is itself news.

6.3.4 Name the bad-faith move when the move is itself the news. Documented patterns of goalpost-shifting, motte-and-bailey, strawmanning, and other rhetorical techniques are reportable as patterns when the documentation supports it. The pattern is the news; reporting it is journalism.

Example: “The campaign’s stated requirement for accepting the election results has shifted three times since November, from [original requirement] to [revised requirement] to [current requirement].” Each shift is verifiable; the pattern is news.

6.3.5 Use evidence-attribution, not opinion-attribution. Instead of “X lied,” we report what X said, when, and what the documented record shows. The factual record carries the weight; we do not editorialize what it shows. The disciplined version is more devastating than the editorial version because every claim is sourced and the pattern is undeniable.

6.3.6 Refuse false-symmetry pressure in story selection. Selection follows the floor’s values, not partisan symmetry demands. We do not manufacture symmetry that does not exist in reality.

6.3.7 Use technical vocabulary from rhetoric and political-communication scholarship when application criteria are met. Named patterns — “Gish gallop,” “Big Lie technique,” “denialism,” “manufactured controversy,” “astroturfing,” “motte-and-bailey” — have specific definitions in the scholarly literature. We use the vocabulary when its criteria are met, citing the source where the criteria are established. The fact that the vocabulary is unflattering to the people whose behavior it describes is not the journalism’s problem; it is the behavior’s problem.

6.4 What this produces

Output that is more sourced, more documented, and more journalistically disciplined than mainstream news desks’ interpretive shortcuts produce. Critics will call this biased; the response is that their preferred framing is the bias, and evidentiary discipline is the corrective.

6.5 The bad-faith critique of evidentiary discipline is itself a documented pattern

When public figures attack rigorous evidentiary reporting as biased, that attack pattern is itself reportable as a pattern. The framework reports the pattern, sourced and documented, as it would any other pattern of public behavior. Claiming that evidentiary discipline is bias because it disadvantages a party that engages in bad-faith techniques is itself a bad-faith move; it is named in the scholarly literature; it can be reported.

6.6 The principle stated plainly

We do not launder bad-faith framing into our publication’s voice. Where mainstream desks soften reports through interpretive shortcuts that grant bad-faith concessions, we apply evidentiary discipline. The result is reporting that is more journalistic, not less. The complaint that this is bias is itself a documented bad-faith move.

The research-grounded catalog of named bad-faith techniques — their definitions, documented use, and detection criteria — is the Bad-Faith Techniques Catalogue, published as Appendix E and available as a download from this page.

Section 7 — How This Is Implemented

7.1 The role of AI

The general newsfeed is generated by AI systems operating from a published, auditable specification. Articles are produced from event-cluster input data drawn from public sources — GDELT, wire feeds, government release feeds — processed through a framework that encodes the standards described in this treatise. That framework is itself published as the News Article Generator. Reading it shows exactly what the AI is instructed to do.

This is the operational answer to the question of what makes our AI-generated journalism different from the AI-generated content farms tracking services have catalogued in the thousands. The instructions are public. The values are articulated. The constraints are auditable.

7.2 What the AI does and does not do

The AI extracts atomic claims from sources, verifies entity references against canonical identifiers, composes prose conforming to journalistic standards, applies the bad-faith-handling techniques described in Section 6, and produces structured output for both human readers and downstream systems. The AI does not generate facts not present in source material, does not fabricate quotations, and does not invent specifics. The discipline is constrained generation — the AI selects from and arranges verified material rather than freely composing — and is enforced architecturally, not through prompting alone.

The architectural enforcement matters. Prompting alone is insufficient because models drift. Architectural constraints — verified-quote-only generation, entity resolution before composition, structural-template enforcement, schema validation at output — survive prompt drift in ways that prompt-level instructions do not.

7.3 Human review is exception-triggered, not default

Articles do not pass through human review as a matter of course. Human review is triggered automatically by deviations from the standards detected by the framework’s quality-control system. The triggers include: defamation-adjacent claims about named individuals, premature identification of suspects or victims, vulnerable-population concerns, fair-use boundary failures, contested-claim signals where the framework’s verification has incomplete confidence, and any claim that the publication-level Editorial Mind flags as exceeding the consensus-floor threshold without pen-name authorization.

When triggered, human review is provided by the publisher or a designated reviewer. In the absence of triggers, articles publish without human review. This is a deliberate choice. The publisher’s time is finite, the framework is designed to handle the standard case correctly, and review-by-default would either be performative or unsustainable.

7.4 Source-correction monitoring and downstream updates

The framework continuously monitors its source materials for corrections, retractions, and updates. When a source the publication has cited issues a correction, the framework automatically identifies all articles citing that source, evaluates whether the correction affects claims in those articles, generates correction notices for affected articles, and applies the corrections to the published content. The original error and the correction note are preserved per AP/NYT conventions. Stable URLs are maintained. Corrections are appended. The article history is auditable.

7.5 Pen-name disclosure

Pen-name analytical columns operate from documented values files unique to each pen name. Each column carries disclosure language identifying it as analysis with a declared perspective and pointing to the values file. Pen names may or may not be human authors. What matters is the transparency about the values from which the analysis is conducted. The pen name’s values file is the load-bearing disclosure, not the identity of any author behind it.

7.6 Corrections discipline

The publication’s corrections policy operates by AP/NYT conventions. Corrections are labeled “correction” — not “update” or “clarification,” which have different meanings. The original error is preserved in the correction note. Corrected articles retain their stable URLs. Correction notes are timestamped and substantive. The publication maintains a public corrections log accessible from the site footer.

7.7 Independence and conflicts of interest

The publication operates without commercial advertisers, without political affiliation, and without undisclosed funding. Funding sources are publicly disclosed. The publisher’s other activities and affiliations are publicly disclosed. Any potential conflict of interest in coverage is disclosed in the affected article.

7.8 What we will not do

The publication commits to not engaging in: clickbait headlines; paywalls (the work is CC0); surveillance-based advertising; sponsored content disguised as editorial; opinion content presented as news; and the use of AI in ways the disclosure does not cover. These commitments are part of the editorial foundation, not preferences.

7.9 Auditability and revision

The framework specification, the consensus values floor, the publication-level Editorial Mind, the pen-name values files, and this treatise are all published artifacts. Any reader can review, challenge, or fork them. The publication revises them when revision is warranted, and revisions are documented with date, change, and reasoning.

The publication operates under U.S. First Amendment press freedom protections and applies U.S. defamation standards — the NYT v. Sullivan “actual malice” standard for public figures, ordinary negligence standards for private figures. The international dimension of the values floor — its grounding in the UDHR and cross-cultural sources — does not change the publication’s operational legal context, which is U.S.-grounded.

7.11 What we ask of readers

The publication invites: critical engagement with claims; willingness to challenge the floor with evidence and named sources; willingness to bring corrections and counter-evidence to our attention; and willingness to engage with the perspective-bearing pen-name analysis on its own terms — as declared analysis with declared values, not as news in disguise.

The operational form of the floor is the publication-level Editorial Mind; the article-generation framework it runs through is the News Article Generator.

Section 8 — Why This Matters

8.1 The yellow-journalism problem and the standards response

Journalistic standards arose historically as a response to the abuses of yellow journalism. The standards’ authority comes from their proven capacity to produce reliable reporting in environments where unregulated reporting produced systematic harm. We are repeating the same move in a new technological environment: AI-generated reporting needs explicit, articulated standards for the same reasons human-generated reporting did. The history is not decorative. It is the precedent for what we are doing now.

The full historical comparison is developed in Appendix G, available as a download from this page. The short version is that the institutional response to yellow journalism — schools, codes, professional societies, the Hutchins Commission — was deliberate. It was the product of specific decisions by specific people who recognized that the new technological environment of mass-circulation print required new institutional commitments. The AI-journalism moment poses the same question. Standards do not emerge by themselves.

8.2 The asymmetric epistemic environment

Contemporary public discourse contains documented asymmetries — in the prevalence of false claims, in the use of bad-faith rhetorical techniques, in the willingness of political traditions to honor consensus values. Performed neutrality in this environment functions as covert alignment with the actors who exploit it. Articulated values, applied with discipline, are the alternative.

This is not a partisan claim. It is an observation about the structure of the current epistemic environment. The bad-faith techniques described in Section 6 are deployed by specific actors more than others, and their deployment has been documented across decades of rhetorical and political-communication scholarship. A publication that operates as if both sides are using the same techniques at the same rate is operating from a factually incorrect premise.

8.3 The AI dimension

AI-generated reporting could go in two directions. One direction: AI as accelerant for the worst patterns of contemporary news, scaling shallow coverage and laundered framing while concealing the values that shape selection and presentation. The other direction: AI as the technology that finally makes journalistic discipline auditable, scalable, and forkable — because AI’s instructions can be published in a way human editorial judgment cannot. We are committed to the second direction. Publishing the framework specification, the values floor, and the publication-level Editorial Mind under CC0 is the operational form of that commitment.

8.4 What we offer

A publication that is values-explicit rather than values-concealing; journalistically disciplined rather than editorially loose; transparent about its methods rather than opaque; and structurally separated between consensus-floor news and clearly-labeled perspective-bearing analysis. The reader knows what they are reading and from what foundation it is produced.

8.5 The marshland metaphor

By publishing the editorial foundation, the framework, and the operational implementation under CC0, we change the substrate. Other publications, AI systems, and authors can adopt or fork the work. The intent is to make values-explicit, journalistically-disciplined reporting the easy default for AI-generated journalism, foreclosing the path where AI scales the worst patterns of contemporary news. The publication is one instance. The substrate is the contribution.

8.6 Invitation to engagement

The floor, the framework, and the values files are public artifacts. Readers who disagree with the floor are invited to engage with the disagreement. Other publications and authors are welcome to adopt, adapt, or fork the work. Critique sharpens the foundation. We are not protecting a position; we are articulating one and inviting its examination.

8.7 The standing commitment

The publication commits to: maintaining the discipline articulated in this treatise; revising the foundation when revision is warranted; documenting revisions transparently; treating the published artifacts as a public commons; and reporting on its own performance honestly, including its failures.

The historical development of journalistic standards as a response to unregulated production — and the parallel to the AI-journalism moment — is developed in Appendix G, available as a download from this page.

Appendices

The appendices provide the scholarly support for each contention and the operational details of how the foundation is implemented. They are released alongside the treatise under CC0. Appendices A, B, E, and G are available as downloads from this page.

Appendix A — Journalistic Standards: Origins, Sources, and Scholarly Foundation. The history and codification of journalistic standards from SPJ, Reuters, AP, NYT, BBC, and the Kovach/Rosenstiel articulation. Establishes the foundation Section 1 builds on.

Appendix B — Sources of the Human Values Tradition. Scholarly support for the consensus floor: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its drafting history; Schwartz’s basic-human-values framework from cross-cultural psychology; convergent moral commitments across philosophical traditions; religious convergence on core values; journalism’s own articulated values; the philosophical literature on minimal moral consensus and overlapping consensus.

Appendix C — The Publication-Level Editorial Mind. The operational system for encoding the floor values as a structured commitment specification. Documents how commitments are weighted, how the system is audited, and how disagreements about application become disagreements about values rather than disagreements about rules. Published as the publication-level Editorial Mind.

Appendix D — The Pen-Name System: Personas, Values Files, and Editorial Voice. How pen-name personas are constructed; what each pen-name values file contains; how the pen-name selection layer scans the cluster feed; how the analytical dispatcher operates within a pen name’s analytical preferences. The operational implementation of Section 4.4, documented in the publication’s configuration files.

Appendix E — Bad-Faith Rhetorical Techniques: A Field Guide. Research-grounded catalog of named bad-faith techniques: their definitions, their documented use, their detection criteria, and the scholarly sources where the criteria are established. Covers the seven techniques from Section 6 and extends them with the broader catalog from rhetorical and political-communication scholarship. Published as the Bad-Faith Techniques Catalogue.

Appendix F — The Article Generation Framework Specification. The technical specification of the article-generation framework: input requirements, processing pipeline, quality criteria, output schema, verification gates. Published as the News Article Generator.

Appendix G — Historical Context: Yellow Journalism and the Origin of Journalistic Standards. The historical development of journalistic standards as a response to the abuses of yellow journalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Establishes the parallel between the historical moment and the contemporary one: AI-generated reporting needs explicit standards for the same reasons human-generated reporting did.

Appendix H — Glossary. Definitions of specialized terms used throughout the treatise, documented in the publication’s configuration files.

End of treatise.