The Journalist
by Michael Kelman Portney
It was a grim Tuesday night, and the city lights were drowning in a thick fog that rolled in like a bad omen. I sat in my cramped office, the neon sign outside painting my walls in sickly shades of red and blue. A half-empty tumbler of whiskey stared me down. The typewriter on my desk taunted me with its silent keys, waiting for me to spill the truth. See, journalistic integrity isn’t just some fancy phrase they teach in schools. It’s a moral code carved in blood and sweat, demanding that if a story’s worth digging up, you’d better dig up every last goddamn bone.
In this line of work, you get your leads from back alleys and dim-lit bars. The bartender knows something about a scandal that’d make the front page, maybe tear down a few VIPs in the process. You start pulling threads, and before you know it, you’re buried in a nest of lies so big it’d make the devil himself blush. But here’s the kicker: once your shovel’s in the dirt, you can’t just walk away when you strike oil. Journalistic integrity says you shine that flashlight into every dark crevice. You don’t withhold the messy details because they might rattle the wrong cages or make your editor sweat. You don’t bury the lead because you’re afraid of who might come knocking on your door with a loaded .38.
The public? They’ve got a right to know every skeleton hiding in City Hall’s closet, or every shell company that’s robbing folks blind. Hell, once you start peeling back layers, you don’t get to pick and choose what you reveal. This business is cutthroat: you piss off politicians, tick off mobsters, and make yourself a bullseye for every smooth talker in town. But if you’ve got integrity, you square your shoulders, look the devil in the eye, and say, “I’m printing it all.” Because that’s the job—delivering the truth, raw and unfiltered, no matter whose skin it crawls under.
People like to flap their gums about “doing the right thing,” but real integrity means you’re in for the whole ride—no seatbelt, no brake pedal. You get the story, you verify it, and then you lay it all out for the world to see. Half-truths? They’re as useless as a broken streetlamp in this city. They leave the public stumbling around in the dark, open to the next slick con artist who crosses their path. Once you commit to exposing a story, you blow the entire lid off, consequences be damned.
So yeah, you might lose some friends along the way—maybe even make enemies in high places. But in the end, that’s the price for shining a flashlight into shadows where no one else dares to look. Because if you’re not in this game for the truth, from start to finish, you’re just another hack typing hollow words. And we’ve already got plenty of those choking the newsroom.
So take it from a stiff with ink-stained fingers and a sixth sense for bullshit: if you’re going to crack open a scandal, you don’t get to toss a blanket over it mid-reveal. You follow the trail until it leads straight to the heart of the beast, and you show people exactly what you found. That’s journalistic integrity in the neon-lit underbelly of this city. No half-steps, no compromises, no mercy.
—Michael Kelman Portney
