Mission Unheard begins with a foundational claim in Western journalism: “We just report.”
The phrase signals professional legitimacy and the belief that journalists are neutral observers, capable of producing reliable journalism simply by following established routines.
What is often overlooked in American mainstream journalism, however, is who defines those routines. For decades, news production has been dominated by White, elite newsrooms, shaping coverage through topic selection, sourcing practices, and narrative framing. When editorial cultures remain largely homogeneous, journalism’s democratic requirement of representation becomes structurally constrained.
Mission Unheard emerged from the work of investigative journalist Dr. Bette Dam, whose reporting changed once she expanded her practice to include new co-narrators and long-excluded sources. These collaborations led to fundamental rewrites of dominant elite media narratives. Through more representative sourcing, Dam discovered that the Afghan war, America’s longest war, had in practice already ended in 2001 following the U.S. invasion. Her PhD documents many additional missed stories linked to newsroom homogeneity.
Mission Unheard intervenes at the core of journalism: sourcing. Rather than using AI as journalism, Mission Unheard uses AI to report on journalism itself, its ethics, professional norms, and blind spots. Built with funding from the Pulitzer Center and developed with the assistance of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the project uses large language models to conduct source audits of the news.
The tool is designed to identify, extract, and categorize quoted sources in news articles. In a preliminary experiment, the model identified 230 of the 251 quotes manually labeled by Dam in a sample of twenty articles, a promising result. Beyond evaluating past coverage, this approach enables real-time source audits, allowing news organizations to detect imbalances as stories unfold and consider alternative sources to improve accuracy, accountability, and representation.
We envision Mission Unheard as more than a tool. It is designed as a shared platform that brings together journalists, editors, researchers, and other stakeholders to engage in scientific, data-driven conversations about professionalism in American mainstream journalism. By grounding these discussions in empirical analysis rather than accusation, Mission Unheard aims to foster a constructive, forward-looking dialogue that strengthens journalistic practice.
