With less than a week to go before Election Day, the country once again feels hopelessly fractured. Over and over, media reports are showing us an electorate with entrenched and immovable ideological views. News outlets everywhere are grappling with how to cover stories fairly and accurately in this environment — and how to reach a readership that’s increasingly turning to nontraditional, partisan media for its information.

For Fox News, obviously, the answer has been to go all-in on behalf of Donald Trump. For many closer to the center and left, a second Trump victory would be nothing less than the start of a slide into fascism. The Washington Post declined to endorse either candidate, and in a reaction that clearly seemed to be in support of Kamala Harris, readers started canceling their subscriptions in droves — 250,000 at last count. Former Post editor Martin Baron, writing on X, called the decision “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Meanwhile, many outlets in the space we occupy — online news — seem poised to be part of a journalistic resistance movement on behalf of democracy if Trump prevails. Also writing on X, Donna Ladd, editor and co-founder of the Mississippi Free Press, used the site and her personal feed to express a sincere dread that Trump will start rounding up political opponents and imprisoning them if he regains office. “By using the Nazis’ exact language,” she wrote, “Trump, his stooges and supporters are loudly telegraphing that they will do the same things. Believe them.”

Of course, Ladd didn’t mean the Free Press will start sounding monotone. “We report the truth regardless of party, which angers both sides,” she added in a statement sent to Searchlight New Mexico. “We believe a free press must guard democracy no matter where the attacks on the First Amendment come from.”

The second comment is perfectly in tune with Searchlight’s position. When we first began publishing in 2018, we were halfway through the Trump Administration and at the start of a new Democratic governor’s first term in New Mexico, after eight years of Republican leadership. Given the turmoil of the time, the architects of Searchlight went out of their way to put distance between our newsroom and the increasingly partisan landscape in which we were operating. The opening line of our mission statement, written by founding editor Ray Rivera, read: “Searchlight New Mexico is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative reporting.”

But in today’s hyperpartisan world, what does it mean to be nonpartisan?

The answer is the same now as it was then. We’ve never covered politics in and of itself. Rather, our reporting focuses on government accountability, abuses of power, and betrayals of the public trust by politicians, businesses, or other institutions in positions of influence — regardless of the political beliefs of the people we’re writing about. We believe that when investigative journalism shines a light on wrongdoing, it has the ability to create real change for citizens who suffer when authority is abused, wherever and however it happens.

Putting the word nonpartisan front and center was intentional. These days, New Mexico is solidly blue in national elections. But huge swaths of our state are reliably red. As Searchlight’s founders set up a newsroom that covers the entire landscape, they wanted to make clear that no matter where we focus our efforts, the approach is consistent: using documents, data, and human sources, we find individuals or entities who are harming New Mexicans and shine a light on their wrongdoing. We also strive to inform and explain in ways that, we hope, can lead to better public policies.

The result has at times drawn the ire of both Democrats and Republicans, and that’s as it should be. Sara Solovitch, who served as Searchlight’s executive editor from 2018 until this June, put it well when she said: “You piss off both sides of the table, and that’s great — that’s when we know we’re doing our job.”

In fact, because New Mexico’s state government has been dominated by Democrats since we launched, our investigations have disproportionately focused on officials from that party.

My reporting on the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, for example, revealed how that agency’s Democratic leadership was methodically destroying documents related to foster children’s time in state custody — a practice that likely violated the law, and that kept children’s attorneys from adequately representing their clients in court. Joshua Bowling, Searchlight’s criminal justice reporter, showed that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s plan to take back the privatized prisons in New Mexico served to further enrich out-of-state, billion-dollar corporations like CoreCivic. Environment writer Lindsay Fendt reported that the governor’s plan to make New Mexico a hub for hydrogen production would actually serve as a hidden subsidy for the oil and gas industry. The list goes on.

But we’ve also written stories that have held to account individuals or businesses who are not political at all — such as reporter Ike Swetlitz’s exposé on Modern Vascular, a company that was enriching itself by performing unnecessary and harmful medical procedures on patients. Alicia Inez Guzmán, Searchlight’s nuclear reporter, has written extensively about federal policy spanning decades of both Republican and Democratic administrations, including her award-winning story about a Truchas woman who was illegally autopsied after dying with extreme amounts of plutonium in her body.

One thing that drives Guzmán’s work is the notion of informed consent. “There is so little of it around this issue that I often feel like I’m trying to give readers the tools they need to build critical awareness,” she says. “Especially in communities that traditional news outlets have left behind or even antagonized. My hope is that, in a minority-majority state, that critical awareness does lead to some form of democracy.”

So, as we brace for next week’s election and its aftermath, our strategy going forward will remain unchanged: we will seek to hold those in positions of power accountable to the public, no matter who they are.