Though journalism remains an unlicensed profession, and standards do vary across news outlets, some rules are very broadly accepted. The most common reference point is the code of ethics of the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ), which compiles guidelines that aim to keep practitioners honest, minimize unintended harm, and build trust.

For example, journalists are supposed to write under their real names. They are supposed to verify information before reporting it, and they should take particular care when dealing with juveniles. For a news outlet to report unconfirmed criminal allegations against a minor under a fake name—again, for example—would be atypical at best, if not a blatant violation of journalistic ethics. 

Last month, that is exactly what happened when The Dallas Express published an article about a son of state Representative Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat. 

For those unfamiliar, The Dallas Express is an unusual news outlet in a number of ways. Formed in 2021, the nonprofit repurposed the brand of a historic progressive Black newspaper that went defunct in the 1970s. It purports to produce spin-free, fact-based news, though it has consistently operated as a right-wing outlet. The Express’ own ethics code states that the outlet “does not use anonymous sources,” but it does not specify whether it uses fictitious bylines. Its founder, publisher, and board member, Monty Bennett, is a Republican megadonor and hotelier who lives in the Dallas area, and its current CEO, Chris Putnam, is a former Republican congressional candidate and ex-Tarrant County GOP officer. The Express sometimes discloses Bennett’s ties to local political and business issues in relevant articles and sometimes does not, including in articles about astroturf advocacy groups that Bennett helped seed.

Early on, the Express website was found to share technical infrastructure with a network of partisan pay-to-play websites that purport to produce local news. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit—a tax status that comes with a prohibition on political campaigning—the outlet has run advertisements for Republican candidates.

X post from Bennett criticizing other media (Courtesy/Monty Bennett X)

On March 16, The Dallas Express published an article reporting allegations about one of Wu’s two sons. In addition to being a state rep, Wu is the House’s Democratic caucus leader. 

Titled “Controversial Texas Rep. Gene Wu’s Son’s ‘Concerning’ Behavior At Prominent Private School Reported To DPS After Knife Incident,” the article was quickly spread by Republican politicians and right-wing influencers on social media. “Denaturalize and deport,” wrote Bo French, former chairman of the Tarrant County GOP and current primary runoff candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), in a post on X sharing the article. Yahoo News, which has a syndication partnership with The Dallas Express, distributed the article to its readers. 

The article cites unspecified reports and unnamed “law enforcement officials” in reporting that Wu’s son, a minor who attends a private school in the Houston area, allegedly showed an approximately 10-inch plastic knife to classmates after school hours, among other supposed behavioral issues. 

The author of the article is listed as “J Galt,” the only staff member on The Dallas Express organizational chart who lacks a headshot. According to a former Express employee, who worked there when the name “J Galt” began appearing on articles and who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal due to signing a non-disclosure agreement, the byline does not correspond to a real person.

“Galt was a fake name we could use on the byline when we got assigned stories we didn’t want to write,” the staffer told the Texas Observer in late March. “It started when Chris Putnam was CEO, but there wasn’t an announcement or anything about it. It kind of just started happening.”

John Galt is a central character named in the opening line of Atlas Shrugged, the well-known novel by Ayn Rand, a favorite writer of many on the political right.

Bennett and Putnam did not respond to the Observer’s requests for comment for this article. Wu and his wife, journalist Miya Shay, also did not provide comment.

“The Dallas Express ‘news story’ about Texas state Representative and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Gene Wu’s juvenile son does not pass the ethical sniff test, from its newsworthiness to its use of anonymous sources and a fake byline,” Dan Axelrod, a journalist and professor who chairs the SPJ’s ethics committee, told the Observer.

Two other professors echoed Axelrod’s concerns.

“The idea of writing under a pseudonym is really problematic,” said the University of Texas at Austin’s John Schwartz, who described the article as “an incredible hit job” as well as “gossip and sleaze.” 

Schwartz said there are certain exceptions when author pseudonyms might be permitted, such as when journalists live in dangerous places where identifying them could pose imminent security risks, in which cases the reason should be disclosed. No disclosure or justification is present in the Express article.

“This appears to be using a pseudonym because they’re doing something underhanded,” Schwartz said. “For a reader to trust you, they have to know who you are. And to create a fake name, as opposed to a no-byline, adds another level of subterfuge to this.”

Texas A&M journalism professor Mariano Castillo also questioned the article’s reliance on anonymous sources, which is prohibited by the Express’ own code of ethics.

“The best practice when characterizing unnamed and anonymous sources is to always be as specific as possible,” said Castillo, who told the Observer the article is “problematic” and raises serious ethical questions. “In this story … a lot of stuff gets attributed simply to officials.” 

SPJ’s ethics code states that anonymity should only be used when information can be obtained in no other way, the source faces danger, and an explanation is given (as the Observer did above with the former Express employee). In practice, some outlets are more liberal in granting anonymity.

In addition to unnamed law enforcement sources, the Express article cites unspecified “reports” from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Houston Regional Intelligence Service Center, which consolidates data from local, state, and federal agencies. Neither responded to the Observer’s requests for comment for this story. The Observer has filed related public information requests.

Various laws typically shield minors from the release of educational and criminal records outside exceptional circumstances. Moreover, The Dallas Express did not report that Wu’s son had been charged with any crime.

The Express article effectively identifies the juvenile, who can be one of only two individuals, through circumstantial information. The Express’ own code of ethics states that “Juvenile suspects can only be identified when they have been charged as adults.” 

Axelrod said: “Despite not naming the child or the school, the prominence of the student’s father and The Dallas Express’s mention of the child’s attendance at a Houston-area private school are enough to identify the student relatively easily.”

The Express article also superfluously states, in two separate instances, that both Wu and his wife—a Houston TV reporter—were born in China. Wu, a combative online personality himself, has long been the subject of racist and xenophobic attacks from the political right.

The second half of the article, under the subheading “Other Controversies Surrounding Wu,” features an X post from French, the RRC candidate, accusing the Houstonian lawmaker of being a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mudslinging is common in politics, of course, but “There’s been an unwritten rule forever that if you’re in the middle of a political fight, leave the kids out,” Schwartz said. 

In breaking that rule last month, the Express also seems to have broken with its own purported policies and that of the journalism profession—an industry fighting for its credibility against a rising tide of misinformation—broadly speaking.

“No ethical journalist would mistake the Dallas Express reporting on Rep. Wu’s son as anything even remotely resembling fair, newsworthy journalism,” Axelrod said. “[It] appears to be a hit piece masquerading as journalism … [an] example of a news outlet with a history of distorted and vindictive reportage training its sights on the child of a state representative it opposes.”

The post ‘Gossip and Sleaze’: Dallas Express Smears State Rep’s Son Under Fake Byline appeared first on The Texas Observer.

For years, climate scientists have projected that South Texas would grow hotter and drier—that drought cycles would lengthen, that rainfall would become less reliable, and that the water systems built for a wetter century would eventually face conditions they were never designed to absorb. In Corpus Christi, that projection has become a daily operational reality.

As of early 2026, according to recent monitoring data, Lake Corpus Christi stands at just over 9 percent of capacity, and Choke Canyon Reservoir, the city’s other primary source, is below 8 percent full. City planning scenarios suggest a formal Level 1 water emergency, requiring mandatory cuts across all users, could be declared as early as May. Some city planning models now account for no meaningful rainfall for the remainder of the year—not as a worst case, but as a planning baseline.

What is unfolding here is, at its core, a timing failure. This is not a failure of prediction; the science has been consistent for decades. It is a failure of alignment. The climate is changing faster than the infrastructure built to manage it. South Texas is drying. The reservoirs that supply the city were structured around conditions that are no longer stable. The industrial demand layered on top of that system—formed under hydrological conditions that have since shifted and reflect the water availability of a wetter decade— has no mechanism to recalibrate when the rainfall those commitments assumed stops arriving. This is a synchronization failure between climate systems and human systems. The reservoirs are where that gap becomes measurable.

Choke Canyon fell from 47 percent to 11 percent capacity between October 2021 and October 2025 alone. That four-year decline is the physical signature of a five-year drought that has kept the Corpus Christi area in persistent moderate to severe drought conditions, with year-to-date rainfall running at less than 60 percent of normal, according to regional climate data. This is what climate-driven aridification looks like at the reservoir level—slow, cumulative, and indifferent to development patterns established in wetter years.

The drought did not create the industrial water demand, it exposed its limits. Since 2015, petrochemical plants, steel mills, and liquefied natural gas export facilities came to the region with assurances that enough water would be available. Those assurances were made against a rainfall baseline that the drought has since revised, and under hydrological conditions that climate projections had already suggested would not hold. What was promised as an abundant water supply was, in effect, water that depended on hydrological conditions that did not persist, and now, under drought conditions that climate science had long flagged as likely, the gap between promise and supply has become a crisis.

Industrial facilities now account for 50 to 60 percent of the city’s total water consumption. Individual facilities can consume several billion gallons annually—reflecting the scale at which industrial demand now operates within a system that was never sized for prolonged drought at this level of consumption.

The deferred solution has a name and a cost. The proposed Inner Harbor desalination plant has been discussed for more than a decade. As cost estimates ballooned from around $750 million to $1.3 billion, the city voted to cancel it in September 2025. The worsening water emergency has since put it back on the table, with a vote on a revived proposal from a new contractor expected this month. But current timelines suggest the plant is unlikely to come online before 2028, a solution measurable in years for a crisis measurable in months.

Emergency measures are now underway. The city is drilling a wellfield and pursuing groundwater purchases. The largest remaining reservoir, Lake Texana, located about 100 miles away, is currently 55 percent full but could fall to around 30 percent by summer. Each of these measures buys time. None of them resolves the underlying mismatch between what the climate is delivering and what the infrastructure assumes.

What makes Corpus Christi significant as a case is not that the drought was unpredictable. It is that the drought was predicted, and that the planning systems in place were calibrated to conditions that are no longer stable. Research led by Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon projects that Texas could face conditions drier than those any megadrought of the last thousand years by the latter half of this century. The state water plan, researchers noted, does not explicitly account for climate change in its supply or demand projections—and the probability of exceeding the 1950s “drought of record,” still the benchmark for state planning, is increasing year by year.

State projections suggest an 18 percent decline in water supply combined with a 9 percent increase in demand by 2070. Those numbers describe a structural imbalance that has no analog in the planning frameworks under which the current industrial commitments were made.

According to regional climate records, the volatility itself is a signal: Last year ranked among the driest on record for the region, while 2021 was the wettest in 30 years. Planning systems built around averages fail when the distribution of wet and dry years shifts this dramatically. The 2021 wet year likely generated the false comfort that allowed another round of industrial commitments to proceed on optimistic water assumptions.

The lesson Corpus Christi offers is not primarily about desalination financing, or any particular vote, or which companies consume how many gallons. It is about synchronization. As Shannon Marquez, a professor at the Columbia Water Center, has noted: This is not an isolated crisis. It is consistent with how things will unfold in water-stressed regions that have not yet begun to plan.

The Texas Water Development Board’s own analysis estimates a severe drought could cause $153 billion in annual economic damages by 2070 if new water sources are not developed. Yet the state water plan was built against a hydrological baseline that climate science says is already receding. Industrial water contracts were negotiated against rainfall averages that the drought cycle is now revising in real time.

Corpus Christi is not exceptional; it is early. The same existing development patterns, the same infrastructure deferral, the same gap between industrial water commitments and actual climate-adjusted supply—these conditions are present across South and West Texas, wherever reservoirs are falling and drought projections are sharpening. What the city’s crisis demands is not a post-mortem. It demands a planning architecture built around the climate variables that were once projections and are now operational realities.

The climate does not negotiate with infrastructure timelines. In Corpus Christi, the forecast arrived before the infrastructure did. Other Texas cities are likely to encounter the same alignment problem as their reservoirs decline.

The post The Corpus Christi Water Crisis Isn’t Exceptional. It’s Early. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

When a teenager in Texas is pushed out of their home because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, foster care is supposed to help. It is meant to offer safety, stability, healing, and the chance to begin again. But for many LGBTQ+ youth, rejection does not end when the state steps in. It simply assumes new forms.

I have spent much of my life working and researching within Texas’s foster care system. Over the years, I have interviewed LGBTQ+ young people who entered care after being exposed, outed, or treated as something to be fixed. Some were forced out of their homes. Others endured other forms of rejection: parents who stopped speaking to them, churches that condemned them, relatives who framed their identity as shameful. By the time they entered foster care, many had absorbed a traumatic message: Something is wrong with me. I do not belong.

Rejection is not just an event. It is a trauma. It reshapes how young people understand safety, attachment, and worth.

What troubled me most in those conversations was how rarely that trauma was addressed by the child welfare system charged with protecting them.

Instead, they were rejected again and again. Many youth moved through multiple placements in quick succession. They were labeled difficult. They were misgendered. They were disciplined for behavior related to grief, fear, or stress. When foster homes fell through, they were routed into group homes and congregate care facilities, usually hours from their schools, siblings, and friends.

Group homes tend to be framed as temporary solutions—a last resort used only when family placements are unavailable. But for LGBTQ+ youth, who entered care because they were punished for their identity, such settings can reinforce negative feedback they received at home: You do not belong in a family. You are better managed than loved.

The young people I spoke with described strict schedules, constant surveillance, and staff turnover that made attachment nearly impossible. Care felt transactional. One young adult told me, “People were paid to take care of me my whole life, so it just started to feel normal that everything had a price.” When all caregiving seems temporary and professionalized, belonging can feel conditional.

Such instability compounds trauma. And for some LGBTQ+ youth in Texas foster care, it sets the stage for other consequences. For many youth, the search for connection does not end in a foster home. It ends with someone else who seems to offer what the system never did.

Many youth I interviewed became victims of trafficking and exploitation. Yet they did not describe these experiences as a sudden fall into danger, but rather a gradual slide toward someone who promised stability, protection, or affection. After multiple placements, after being told they were difficult, after living under constant supervision, even small gestures became attractive. A ride. A place to stay. Someone who used the right name and pronouns. Someone who said, I’ve got you.

Instability makes young people mobile. Trauma makes them hungry for belonging. When placements collapse and group homes feel more institutional than familial, some youth run. They leave not because they are delinquent, but because they are searching for connection on their own terms.

Traffickers understand this. They do not begin with force. They begin with belonging.

Again and again, the same patterns surfaced. Many former foster youth who later experienced exploitation had histories of placement disruption and time in congregate care. When someone offered a couch, a meal, or the promise of partnership, it did not feel like danger. It felt like relief.

Group homes do not cause trafficking. But instability, isolation, and repeated rejection create predictable vulnerabilities. National research has found that LGBTQ+ youth are overrepresented in foster care and significantly more likely to be placed in congregate care settings. Youth with histories of foster care involvement are overrepresented among trafficking survivors. In Texas, where placement shortages and years of system strain have led to heavy reliance on congregate care, this sequence repeats itself. 

Rejection at home. Instability in care. Group placements that normalize conditional belonging. Running. Grooming. Exploitation. These are not isolated failures. They are all linked.

Texas has the power to interrupt that sequence. For years, the state’s foster care system has struggled with placement shortages, workforce instability, and an overreliance on congregate care. But safety of vulnerable kids should take priority over institutional convenience.

When youth enter care after identity-based rejection, the central focus should be healing. The system should offer something radically different from what they experienced at home. Instead , the state often confirms the very story it should be helping young people to rewrite.

For LGBTQ+ youth, community  typically includes more than the traditional nuclear family. Many create their own support networks. They form chosen families. They rely on mentors, neighbors, teachers, coaches, and friends’ parents who affirm them when others will not. Yet child welfare systems often overlook these relationships because they do not fit neatly into legal categories. Recognizing and supporting those connections, rather than defaulting to group placements, could improve stability and shift the trajectory of care.

The child welfare system cannot undo the trauma of family rejection overnight. But at a minimum, it should refuse to repeat it. It can choose stability over convenience. It can invest in the relationships youth are already building. It can recognize that for LGBTQ+ young people, safety may come less from institutional placement and more from people who affirm and choose them.

If we continue to route LGBTQ+ youth into settings that confirm they do not belong in families, we should expect them to seek alternative connections—sometimes with those who wish to exploit them. If we instead support the families they create and the caregivers who already affirm them, we might finally offer what foster care should provide: not just safety, but home.

The post Foster Care Repeats Rejection for LGBTQ+ Texans appeared first on The Texas Observer.