On Journalism, Integrity, and True Crime

As some of you already know, although we mostly cover crime, only one of us actually has any real interest in the genre. Although I am intimately involved in everything we do as both Editor-in-Chief and staff writer here, I prefer other fare…

From XKCD, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language…

Likewise, I am not the one of us that majored in journalism; I have always been very happy about that decision. I considered it - I wanted to study creative writing initially, but my family encouraged me to study a “real field,” never mind that half of them were writers.

My late Uncle Nick was one of them. Nick had an ABD (an all but dissertation, meaning just shy of a doctorate) in poetry. He was a brilliant poet who also taught creative writing (in prison, oddly enough).

He was one of my earliest mentors so naturally I sought out his advice. When I told him I was thinking of studying creative writing or journalism to become a better writer, he smirked.

“You’re already a great writer,” he told me, “just keep writing. And reading. Studying writing won’t help someone like you; there’s nothing to really teach you, you just have to keep going until you find your voice. Study something you think is interesting.”

That’s exactly what ended up doing and journalism wasn’t it. I mention all of that because it’s foundation for the fact that I don’t believe you have to study something to be good at it or even to follow the basic ethics of a field.

That being said, there are people I’ve become aware of, as the Editor-in-Chief of a small independent media outlet, who really probably should have studied journalism. If you're here because of our Keyes coverage you likely know who I’m referring to.

Israel Keyes

At heart, there’s not that much to journalistic ethics. You could boil them all down to a few basic principles:

1. report the truth,

2. try be considerate of victims, but…

3. with fidelity to the public interest, and the free press

I have heard some bizarre claims since we started this enterprise. One of those claims is that we’re “just as bad as” serial killers, mass murderers, rapists, and terrorists.

I’ve also witnessed a metric shit ton of wild speculation and conjecture masquerading as journalism, along with wild criticisms of people who publish the truth.

This has always been true to some degree; Joseph Pulitzer, namesake of the esteemed Pulitzer prize, was one of the leading figures associated with Yellow Journalism.

Joseph Pulitzer

Pulitzer later bequeathed funds to Columbia University to establish both their journalism school and the Pulitzer awards, which are offered in 21 categories, including 14 in journalism, 6 in “letters” [writing], and 1 in music.

The Pulitzer prize is now considered the highest honor in journalism, and has high esteem in the other fields it represents as well.

Pulitzer once famously quipped that, “…every reporter is a hope, and every editor is a disappointment," perhaps a touch of dry humor given that he essentially was an editor. Maybe he only meant other editors besides himself.

Pulitzer is known for publishing sensational stories, particularly stories about crime and scandal. He also advocated for legal reforms; despite growing up in a relatively wealthy family, he saw himself as a crusader for the working man.

He was also very political - he even served briefly in the House of Representatives, elected by New York's ninth district. He entered office on March 4, 1885 and resigned on April 10, 1886; he felt he was more influential as a newsman than a congressman.

What would Pulitzer, champion of the working man, make of his legacy today? What would "Jewseph,” as he was sometimes called, make of anti-Semitic protests held at the school he donated a large fortune to ($2 million in 1912; over $50,000,000 in 2025 dollars)?

Nathan Thrall won a Pulitzer in 2024 for writing a book ostensibly about the politics of Gaza and the West Bank, and what NPR called “American Complicity in Israel’s ‘System of Domination’.”

In 2025, a Pulitzer prize was awarded to Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, for a series of essays on Gaza. In a 2024 article in The New Yorker, Abu Toha described his move to Syracuse, New York in 2023.

He criticized the secondary screening he was selected for at Logan airport in Boston, comparing the TSA to the IDF. He claims that he told the TSA agent swabbing his palms for explosives during a layover:

“I was kidnapped by the Israeli army in November… Today [in June], you come and separate me from my wife and kids, just like the army did a few months ago.”

Toha was detained by the IDF on November 19, 2023 while heading to the Rafah border crossing in an attempt to evacuate from Gaza to the United States with his family; his three-year-old son is an American citizen. He was released just two days later on November 21, 2023. The TSA let him go immediately after his screening.

In social media posts uncovered by watchdog Honest Reporting, Toha singled out hostage Agam Berger, 28, calling her a “killer”. Berger, a surveillance soldier in the IDF, was held captive inside of private homes belonging to Palestinian “civilians” for 482 days.

Berger, after her release, playing the 130-year-old violin she was gifted. The violin belonged to a Jewish musician from a Polish orchestra before he was murdered in the Holocaust

Referring to Emily Damari, a 29-year-old who was kidnapped from her apartment, Toha asks, “How on earth is this girl called a hostage?”

Damari was shot, held for nearly two years, and lost two fingers as the result of a festering wound Hamas treated “like a pin cushion,” according to her mother.

Toha calls someone abducted from their home, “a soldier who was close to the border.”

He alleges a disparity between Israeli’s who were kidnapped from their homes to be held hostage as human shields and Palestinian’s who are arrested from “inside hospitals and school shelters.”

Toha taught English at United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools in Gaza from 2016 until 2019. His rhetoric ignores that Al-Shifa Hospital was found to house a secret Hamas command center as we discussed in our 2023 article on the ways in which Islamists gaslight the West.

Obfuscating Allah by Gaslighting the West

Toha also ignores that many of his fellow UNRWA employees were directly involved in the October 7 attacks, and many more are directly involved with Hamas.

UNRWA has repeatedly denied any connection at all to Hamas, but the UN agency was forced to admit that a top Hamas commander killed in Lebanon was one of its employees but had been suspended. Fatah Sharif was allegedly the head of the UNRWA teachers association in Lebanon.

Others facilitated kidnappings, munitions, and logistics support for the terrorist pogrom. When Yahya Sinwar was killed in Rafah, the apparent passport of an UNRWA teacher - Hani Zourob — was reportedly discovered on the body of the terrorist leader.

Phillippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, addressed Zourob’s passport on X.

“I confirm that the staff member in question is alive. He currently lives in Egypt where he traveled with his family in April through the Rafah border,” he wrote.

According to the December 2024 report “The Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas and Islamic Jihad” from UN Watch in Geneva, officials from UNRWA meet “routinely” with terror groups, “mutually praise each other for ‘cooperation’ and describe each other as ‘partners.’”

The report accuses Lazzarini “and his colleagues” of “knowingly [allowing] Hamas and other terrorist groups to infiltrate UNRWA’s employee base, indoctrinate impressionable Palestinian children to pursue a path of terrorism against Israelis and Jews and install military infrastructure underneath or next to UNRWA facilities.”

The UN ordered the UN's top watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight (OIOS), to investigate. Intelligence estimates suggest that at least 10% of UNRWA's 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas, as we discussed in our 2024 report about the UN and it’s direct material support of terrorism.

UN Support of Terrorism: Hamas, Hostages, and the UN's RWA

Of the ~1200 employees suspected of having links to Hamas, the UN’s OIOS investigated just 19 UNRWA staff members alleged to have been directly involved in the October 7 attacks despite the fact that Lazzarini said he had received a letter with the names of some 100 people allegedly linked to Hamas.

In nine of the cases they did investigate, evidence obtained by OIOS was “insufficient,” but in another nine, “the evidence obtained by OIOS indicated that the UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the armed attacks of 7 October 2023.”

UNRWA previously fired an additional 12 staff members and put seven more on administrative leave without pay over the allegations they have consistently denied were ever happening in the first place.

UNRWA have not clarified how many people they have fired in total over these claims; Lazzarini has claimed that UNRWA needs more information to launch more investigations.

It isn’t known whether or not Toha has any links to Hamas; he says he "wouldn’t justify” Hamas responding the way the IDF has; he says he does not speak for Hamas. He also says he wouldn’t bring up something he then brings up.

Children suffer the most in any war, but in modern conflicts conducted by professional militaries, children tend to be “collateral damage”; if children are killed, it is usually accidental, incidental to high value military targets.

Toha doesn’t see it this way; he encourages people to “spit the blood of Gaza kids” in the faces of those who would justify an armed response to acts of terror that slaughtered children in the same the way that serial killers do.

The Kedem Siman Tov family, who had a joint funeral for all six members of the family after they were shot and burned alive on October 7

Emily Damari responded directly to the Pulitzer prize board on X over their selection, sharing her story and questioning why Mosab Abu Toha was awarded the prestigious prize, calling him a modern day holocaust denier.

Toha would have us believe that this conflict began in 1948; “Hamas was not there until 40 years after the occupation of Palestine,” he claims. “…everyone has the right to defend themselves against military occupation.”

These arguments rely on the historical ignorance of the people who receive them; this conflict in the region around Gaza dates back far before 1948 to the founding of Islam and the Islamic colonization of Greek Byzantium.

The “Palestinians” are a remnant population from the Ottoman empire which engaged in genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, which ended in 1922 when the Ottoman empire was dissolved.

On Ignorance and Islamism

Since he’s long dead, it’s impossible to know what Pulitzer might make of all this. The country he was born in, Hungary, was ruled by the Ottoman empire until 1718; he was born in 1847.

Pulitzer, who died in 1911, was no peacenik; a veteran of the American civil war, his newspapers helped build public support for the Spanish-American War. He was reportedly eager to be a soldier, and earned his citizenship fighting for the union.

He was extremely progressive, although that meant something different in the 1800s; Pulitzer’s causes included poor living and working conditions, contaminated water and milk, and a 12-hour work day.

He also helped raise the funds to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, and falsely accused Roosevelt of profiting from the sale of the Panama canal.

Roosevelt has him charged with criminal libel under the Assimilative Crimes Act of 1898, which applied state laws to federal enclaves within those states.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Pulitzer the same year he died, arguing that the charges were illegitimate since libel was not a federal crime; the federal government can not bring prosecutions under state laws.

My father, despite being the son of an Ivy League attorney, was a working man; ostensibly Pulitzers demographic. During my life, he worked as a salesman, as a retail manager at an ACE hardware store, and then as a maintenance manager in a 3M water filter factory.

He has been politically independent my entire life, never buying into any party or politician, and he taught me a lot about integrity and independent thought.

He raised me in a house without censorship; I could read and watch pretty much whatever I wanted to, and I could think whatever I wanted, too, although he would always tell me if he thought I was playing fast and loose with the truth. Dear ole Dad was big on facts.

He used to quip “Just the facts” like Joe Friday from Dragnet when I was a difficult teenager who was often in trouble and trying to get out of it. It’s easy to know what my father thinks; besides the fact that I grew up with him, he’s also still around to ask.

What would Joseph Pulitzer make of podcasts and “citizen journalists” that simply make up facts, or present conjecture and speculation as truth?

As we’ve already established, Pulitzer was well known for doing this himself. He is also credited as one half of the speculation-and-conjecture machine that led to the Spanish–American War (the other being his rival, William Randolph “Rosebud” Hearst).

He later distanced himself from this kind of journalism. In his will, Pulitzer wrote, "A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself."

Looking around, it’s hard not to think he was prophetic in this warning, although of course, he had lived through much the same. Then again, this too shall pass, as it might have for Pulitzer if he hadn’t died before the Great Wars.

Or does it ever really pass? Is it all just some cycle of history, replaying the same frictions, spinning out different expressions of the same conflicts again and again?

As we have widely discussed in our coverage of serial killer Israel Keyes, Crime Culture Media believes that, armed with the facts and the full evidence, you are smart enough to make up your own minds.

Unfortunately for society, that’s only true if the facts and evidence you’re armed with are also the unflinching truth. People are often not what they make themselves out to be.

The dishonest rarely announce themselves; people who call themselves ethical or unbiased are often neither. Character is revealed through action and behavior, not announced like a winning lottery number.

Anyone who spends too much time telling you what kind of person they are is probably trying to sell you something it would be better not to buy.