Ryan Mitchell

Kara Mitchell is the Staff Writer: Fact Integrity & Logic Review at Just Right News, where she leads investigations into how claims are built, tested, and either confirmed or collapsed under scrutiny. Born on October 11, 1985, in Columbus, Ohio, and now based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Kara brings a Midwestern steadiness to her work: practical, thorough, and unapologetically committed to clear thinking. At Just Right News, she anchors Fact Integrity & Logic Review and authors The Truth Process, a reader-facing series that opens the hood on how facts are sourced, how arguments are constructed, and how narratives can quietly slip past reason if we’re not careful. Kara’s approach is simple to describe and demanding to execute. She starts every story with source mapping—tracing each claim back to its first appearance, identifying who benefits, and flagging any breaks in the chain of evidence. She distinguishes what is known from what is asserted, and what is asserted from what is merely assumed. She keeps a working ledger of uncertainties and reverses course publicly when new information requires it. That discipline stems from early work parsing public documents, sifting through budget line items, and catching small errors in places where small errors mattered. Over time, she developed a knack for detecting logical shortcuts—equivocations, moving goalposts, and data “rebaselining” masquerading as trend. Raised in a family that valued entrepreneurship and personal responsibility, Kara learned to respect the difference between expertise and authority. Expertise earns trust; authority expects it. That distinction shapes her conservative outlook: a belief that sound policy follows sound facts, that institutions should be accountable to the people they serve, and that transparency is not a courtesy but a duty. Her columns rarely tell readers what to think; they show readers how to see the structure of an argument so they can decide for themselves. The Truth Process grew out of Kara’s conviction that journalism should be legible. In that series, she walks readers through the “chain of custody” of a claim, highlights what was left on the cutting-room floor, and explains why certain datapoints didn’t make the cut. She treats corrections not as defeats but as the natural outcome of an honest process. Whether the topic is public health, election procedure, or energy policy, her touchstones are the same: original documents, replicable methods, and the humility to separate signal from noise. Now in Ann Arbor, Kara keeps a quiet routine: early mornings, long walks by the river, and evenings with case law, datasets, and a stack of highlighters. She believes that clarity is a public service and that readers deserve the full blueprint of how conclusions are reached. At Just Right News, she brings that ethic to every piece—building arguments brick by brick, testing each one, and leaving a clean trail so others can check the work. In an age crowded with confident claims, Kara Mitchell’s craft is making sure the confidence is earned.