The Minnesota Star Tribune’s lead story on October 3 was a startling scoop: The newspaper reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth considered sending the army’s elite 82nd Airborne division – a legendary strike force that has been deployed to combat zones around the world – to Portland, Oregon, in response to protests at an ICE facility.
As the story explained, the Star Tribune learned of the potential plan to deploy active U.S. troops to a U.S. city from an anonymous source who witnessed a White House official exchanging text messages with other high-ranking Trump officials in a crowded public place. The source, who, according to the Star Tribune, was “troubled by seeing sensitive military planning discussed so openly,” photographed the official’s text exchanges and shared them with Star Tribune investigative reporter Andy Mannix.
From a journalism ethics perspective, a 600-word editor’s note that accompanied the scoop was almost as startling as the story itself. The note, signed by Star Tribune investigations editor Tom Scheck, told readers why the newspaper believed the text messages were newsworthy, even though the Trump administration did not end up sending the 82nd Airborne to Portland. Scheck walked readers through his team’s process of verifying the authenticity of the text messages and vetting the source who supplied photographs to the Star Tribune. He also explained that the story omitted details about where and when the test messages were sent in order to shield the source’s identity.
In short, the editor’s note spotlighted the ethical and journalistic infrastructure supporting its big story. That kind of radical transparency remains rare, even as media outlets around the world debate whether news audiences will trust them more if they disclose more information about their reporting and editing processes.
Scheck, for one, believes that transparency can rebuild trust, which is the main reason why the Star Tribune decided to run its extensive editor’s note.
“Media distrust is really high, especially when it’s a polarizing topic around politics,” he said in a phone interview. “We did a lot of work to make sure that what we came up with was right. We verified the source, we backgrounded the source, we backgrounded a lot of the materials. We went to the White House. We reached out to a lot of people. And so we felt like that was one way to really illustrate the work that we did, to get the audience to understand that this wasn’t just like, ‘Hey, someone approached us and gave us some information and then we published it right away.’”
Based on reader comments, Scheck’s note was a hit. Dozens of readers praised the Star Tribune’s careful reporting. A few even thanked the newspaper for the detailed description of its processes. “Excellent work, and appreciate the transparency on display here with an explanation of your methods and vetting,” wrote one. “Thank you for the explanation, and the efforts you’ve taken to protect your source,” wrote another reader, in a comment liked by 76 others.
No one who posted a comment about the editor’s note was critical of the Star Tribune’s description of its reporting and editing process, although the newspaper took some shots from Trump supporters on the social media platform X when it posted a link to the main story. “Oh yeah, the RAG of the Minnesota Star Tribune,” wrote one X user. “A propagandist rag spreading its bullshit.”
Scheck also posted his editor’s note on Facebook. The responses he received there were also encouraging. “Good work showing your work,” one friend wrote.
That work was, as Scheck’s note said, extensive. The source who sent the photos of texts exchanged by an apparent White House official was not known to Mannix, the investigative reporter who fielded the tip. (Mannix, according to Scheck, said it was as if a marlin jumped into his fishing boat.)
Scheck and his team wanted to be sure that the source wasn’t peddling false information and had no private agenda. So even as Mannix worked on figuring out who the photographed official was and whether the texts were legitimate, Scheck asked another member of the investigations team to research the source. Scheck also asked the source to agree to a video call to be sure the person’s appearance matched the research.
The source, Scheck said, ended up appreciating the Star Tribune’s efforts to verify their identity – and to protect it in the eventual story.
Mannix, meanwhile, used clues from the text messages and a photo of the White House official who was sending and receiving them to figure out that the official was Anthony Salisbury, a deputy to Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller. Another reporter verified Salisbury’s identity using facial recognition software.
Ultimately, the White House confirmed that Salisbury had been in Minnesota for a relative’s funeral. A spokesperson did not comment on the substance of the text messages but accused the Star Tribune of “shamefully reporting” on private conversations. The Defense Department also did not respond to the newspaper’s questions about the messages except to say that the texts showed officials were “working around the clock.” The Pentagon criticized the Star Tribune for declining to share photographs of the texts.
The source, Scheck said, told Mannix after the story ran that they appreciated the newspaper’s efforts to get the story out while protecting their identity.
Few stories, Scheck told me, would justify the kind of lengthy editor’s note he wrote to accompany the Pentagon planning scoop. But publishing this note, “reminded me that it’s okay every once in a while to tell the public: This is how we did this work,” Scheck said. ““They may not like the story because they perhaps agree with the president and the president’s policies, but we felt like they needed to know that we did as much as we possibly could to confirm every fact out there.”