The Texas Observer

The Texas Observer is a nonprofit news organization that strives to make Texas a more equitable place by exposing injustice through investigative journalism, narrative storytelling, and cultural coverage. Rather than chase “breaking news,” we dig beyond the headlines and contextualize news events. Our political commentary, essays, reviews, and criticism seek to create a new cultural canon and challenge existing mythologies.

Since its founding in 1954, the Observer has focused on communities whose stories are too often ignored or poorly told. We hope not only to inform, but to empower our readers, as we work to hold public officials and corporations accountable. Our reporters recognize that oppressed people are experts on their own lives and trust their expertise.

Our journalism is fact-based and rigorous, and we prize writing that entertains as it informs. We value history as a reporting tool that allows us to interrogate the origins of policies and to correct narratives that whitewash exploitation, dispossession, and genocide.

Our founding mission statement continues to guide our work:

“We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit.”