Our Ethics

This project has been months in the making. And over those months we’ve made thousands of ethical decisions. We can’t possibly recount all of them. But we can tell you about our guidelines and a few critical choices.

We Are (Student) Journalists

As journalists, we are called to a high-ethical standard.

The classic book, “Elements of Journalism” by Tom Rosenstiel lays out 9 core tenants of proper reporting. They are as follows:

Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.

Its first loyalty is to citizens.

Its essence is a discipline of verification.

Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.

It must serve as an independent monitor of power.

It must provide a forum for criticism and compromise.

It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.

It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.

Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

We’ve tried our best to abide by these ideals throughout our research, interviewing, writing, editing, and fact-checking processes.

We Are Committed To Truth

We think our story is true. That means we think it actually happened the way we are describing it. We’ve taken great pains to think through every line and interrogate it to make sure we are not knowingly publishing assertions that are false.

This series is heavily edited. That means that we’re stitching together hundreds of parts from dozens of interviews into one cohesive storyline. Editing is not journalistic mal-practice. Editing is our job. People — us included — talk in circles. We use metaphors and hypotheticals to get our ideas across. As reporters, it’s our duty to try and make the truth as rich, while also as straightforward, as possible. That involves taking bits and parts from one interview, and placing them right next to bits and parts from another interview to weave one coherent story.

We’ve taken a lot of time to make sure that everyone’s quotes are situated in the proper context. If you’re worried about that, we’d love to answer any questions you may have. Email us your questions at hello@revokedpodcast.org and we’ll do what we can to give you a little more insight into our process!

We didn’t mis-represent ourselves to get information. The people who spoke with us knew they were speaking with journalists. We recorded our interviews, so that you can hear first-hand from the sources themselves. We’ve also been in touch with them since the interview, to check facts and information and make sure what they said was true.

This project, however, is not the whole truth. We’ve talked to dozens of sources for this story. But there are hundreds we didn’t speak with. This series gets at a slice of reality, we think it’s a very telling slice. But it’s very likely that you experienced something slightly different during the Spring 2025 semester. That doesn’t mean either of us is wrong. It means that the story of life is bigger than we can grasp in a multi-part podcast series. And in the end, that’s a good thing.

Even so, we’re still human. We probably made a few mistakes. There may be a fact in this project that we got wrong. If you catch it, contact us, please! Email us at hello@revokedpodcast.org. We’re committed to publishing correction notices so no one goes on believing a lie.

You can find a running list of the corrections we’ve issued on this page here.

Our Loyalty Extends Beyond Borders

Our first loyalty is not just to American citizens, but citizens across borders. Our loyalty is not to one nation’s government or another. But to all people, to the public, regardless of the location of their birth, or the nationality of their family.

This project is a deep-dive into the thoughts, feelings and experiences of students, staff, faculty and administration at Fordham University. Many of those that we talked to do not have American citizenship. We feel obligated to do no harm through our reporting. And in most cases, that means keeping their names confidential. That decision was made alongside them. They asked for anonymity, and we decided to grant that based on the divisive nature of this issue. 

We do not want to be the reason someone loses their status. We have no resources to help. We’re broke college students. 

So, we’ve decided that if they are worried, at all, about losing their status or being deported because of this project, we can’t — in good faith — publish their name.

With their permission, you’ll hear their actual voice — but not their actual name. If they feel weary even about us publishing their voice, we’ll come up with a work around and tell you about our process in each chapter.

We are going to try our best and remind you why we’re keeping a source anonymous in each chapter they appear. That might get repetitive. But it's worth it.

We Fact-Checked This Thing

We wanted to make sure we are not just publishing comments and assertions without some kind of verification. When the facts are disputed over a given issue, we’re going to try and tell you. And when we come to a determination of the facts, we’re going to try and tell you why we came to the conclusion we did. Sometimes, we'll publish a deep dive into a specific fact. Like how Colby came to his conclusions about the number of SEVIS terminations and visa revocations.

If you ever want to know more about a specific fact, ask us! Just email your question to hello@revokedpodcast.org and we’ll do our best to respond. We don’t want you to be uninformed. We want you to both know the truth of the matter, and how we got to the truth of the matter.

We Are Independent

This is an independently-published podcast. That means that it’s all on us to keep it factual. We are the reporters, producers, and editors and publishers of this series.

We have relied on a group of close friends and advisors to listen to each part before we publish and give us feedback. In the end, however, it’s really on us. But we think we’re trustworthy. We all have experience in news, in both radio and print mediums. This isn’t our first rodeo.

It’s also important to note that we are independent from Fordham University, and our sources. They don’t get to decide what we publish. We have been in contact with them, asking questions and getting their responses to our conclusions.

But although we’re all students at Fordham University, that institution has no say over what we publish. 

Reach Out If You Have Questions!

If you haven’t already guessed, we want to hear from you. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us over email at hello@revokedpodcast.org.