Mila Tanghe is a multilingual journalist and policy analyst whose professional life has taken her through elite newsrooms in Europe and the United States. She brings distinctive cross-cultural insight to her stories. Her background involves creating content for CNN’s Amanpour show in London, covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for Belgian broadcaster RTLTVI, and writing for L’Echo financial newspaper. She now analyzes foreign policy and security matters at the Center for European Policy Analysis in New York. Outside of her reporting, Mila Tanghe is an Ambassador for Human Rights Watch’s NextGen Initiative, having recruited dozens of new supporters, in addition to contributing to the initiative’s newsletter. She is fluent in English, French, and Dutch and has a special talent for distilling complex geopolitical events into understandable, engaging narratives.
In a period of information abundance, algorithm-driven news dissemination, and declining public trust in institutions of media, the characteristics of great journalism have never been more important. As a journalist who has covered from Brussels to New York, made content for broadcast networks with an audience of millions, and written about everything from geopolitical tensions to corporate power behind policymaking, Tanghe has seen how specific core qualities uniformly separate effective journalism from content manufacturing.
These five essential qualities transcend technological skills or specialized. They represent the foundational characteristics that determine how effectively journalists fulfill their core mission in an increasingly complex information landscape. Whether one is a student journalist just beginning their career or a seasoned reporter navigating industry transformation, cultivating these attributes will significantly enhance their ability to serve audiences with meaningful, trustworthy journalism.
- Rigorous Intellectual Honesty
The foundation of honest journalism is unshakeable intellectual honesty—a trait that goes far beyond mere factual accuracy. This involves staying committed to seeking the truth even when conclusions defy early assumptions, preferred storylines, or personal beliefs.
This trait necessitates frequent self-scrutiny in matters of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and untested assumptions. In her coverage of politics in Europe, Mila Tanghe has made it a disciplined habit to proactively pursue credible views challenging her current knowledge. Covering the Belgian separatist movement for Nplus2, she went out of her way to purposefully frame interview panels with reflective experts presenting fundamentally divergent opinions, on all sides of the divide. These challenging but enlightening dialogues always generated more nuanced coverage than would have resulted from only interviewing voices which reinforced her initial paradigm.
Intellectual honesty also equates to clear communication regarding the unknown. In the midst of rapidly changing circumstances, admitting what is not known and clearly differentiating between confirmed facts, sound inferences, and conjecture establishes long-term credibility with the public. This policy can forgo the fantasy of expert certitude in the short run, but it gains durable trust through authentic portrayal of intricate realities.
- Ongoing Curiosity
The best reporting revelations usually don’t come from such clear sources or initial questioning. Great reporting often occurs as a product of tenacious wonder—continual searching for more, relentless seeking to understand beyond easy or available answers.
Mila Tanghe has developed tenacity by creating personal reporting principles—never wrapping up research until she’s chased at least three lines of investigation past what appears adequate, and always inquiring one additional question after she believes an interview is finished. These discipline-helping habits routinely provide information that redefines her understanding of complicated circumstances.
Persistent inquisitiveness also involves continually pushing past a comfort zone and pre established subject matter expertise. By staying intellectually engaged with a wide range of subjects, journalists build the cross-disciplinary linkages that tend to lead to the most innovative reporting insights. This ability to make intellectual cross-pollinations becomes ever more important as specialized areas of knowledge become more compartmentalized.
- Contextual Intelligence
As news cycles speed up and audience attention splinters, contextual intelligence—the capacity to situate isolated developments within larger historical, cultural, and institutional contexts—has become more and more essential. Without it, reporting threatens to be a disconnected string of apparently unrelated events instead of a cohesive narrative that sheds light on significant patterns and systemic dynamics.
On her internship at CNN, Mila Tanghe saw how Christiane Amanpour’s mastery of context enabled her to do interviews that broke the instantaneous news cycle and produced content that remained relevant long after the moment. Amanpour’s questions always demonstrated a sense of historical precedent, institutional limitation, and cultural background that informed current events, allowing for discussions that uncovered underlying truth instead of just producing sound bites.
Mila Tanghe has cultivated this ability intentionally by keeping up a disciplined reading habit covering academic journals, historical analysis, and local literature in addition to regular consumption of daily news. This more extensive knowledge base offers the interpretive context needed to separate truly meaningful developments from fleeting diversions.
Contextual intelligence also allows journalists to convey complex realities to non-specialist audiences effectively. Having insight into multilayered forces shaping events, they are able to pinpoint the most vital contextual factors to cover in reports and make complicated circumstances understandable without reductionism.
- Empathetic Listening
Empathetic listening—creating genuine connections with sources across different backgrounds and perspectives—distinguishes perfunctory information gathering from truly illuminating journalism. This requires suspending judgment long enough to authentically understand someone’s experience and reasoning, even when the journalist ultimately may not share their conclusions.
In covering Ukrainian refugees for RTLTVI, Mila Tanghe discovered that her most insightful interviews only emerged after she had established genuine human rapport outside of the transactional journalist-source relationship. By showing real interest in their entire experience instead of pulling out only the parts that served her preconceived narrative framework, she was able to gain access to strong stories and observations that would have been lost in a more formulaic style.
Mila Tanghe has strengthened this ability with formal interview training, but also with ongoing exposure to unfamiliar communities in which she must navigate as an outsider searching for understanding. Through these experiences, she has been reminded that good listening demands technical competence, but also sincere human interest in the experiences that are not like one’s own.
Empathetic listening also creates space for complexity and contradiction in reporting. By truly hearing diverse perspectives without immediately filtering them through personal interpretive frameworks, journalists can more accurately represent the multidimensional nature of most significant stories.
- Ethical Courage
Arguably the most basic of the qualities of great journalism is ethical courage—the ability to take tough professional stands on the basis of fundamental journalistic principles and not convenience, consensus, or career benefit. In an era when the media business is under financial stress and divided by politics, upholding lofty ethical standards has never been tougher or more crucial.
Ethical courage also involves owning up to errors immediately and openly when they are made. This accountability strengthens credibility instead of destroying it, showing dedication to journalistic standards even when upholding them is personally or professionally inconvenient.
These five qualities—intellectual honesty, persistent curiosity, contextual intelligence, empathetic listening, and ethical courage—form the essential foundation for meaningful journalism regardless of medium, beat, or career stage. While technological tools and platforms will inevitably evolve, these fundamental attributes determine whether journalists’ work ultimately illuminates or obscures the realities they seek to convey.
Building these traits takes conscious effort and constant self-evaluation. Finding mentors with these qualities for early-career reporters can offer useful pointers. For seasoned professionals, reassessing consistently how well they’re embodying these traits helps avoid complacency and refresh their style of coverage on established beats.
By putting these core values ahead of technical proficiency or content metrics, journalists reaffirm the fundamental mission of journalism: assisting citizens in making sense of the complicated realities that inform their world. In an increasingly algorithm-driven and partisan-crenched information environment, this emphasis on core journalistic values has never been more crucial to democratic culture.
