To Break the Story You Must Break the Status Quo
“No journalist is the first person to know anything, if they’re reporting on what happened to another person, though you might be the first person to listen. It’s always someone else’s story first, and it never stops being their story too, no matter how well you tell it, how widely you spread it.
Even what you deem worthy to report, who you quote is a political decision.
The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. It is a tendency of journalism to focus on what changed yesterday rather than ask what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo.
Some of the stories we need to break are not exceptional events, they’re the ugly wallpaper to our everyday lives.
Every bad story is a prison; breaking the story breaks someone out of prison. It’s liberation work. It matters. It changes the world. Percy Bysse Shelley famously noted that poets are the true legislators of the world; journalists are the storybreakers whose work often changes the belief systems that then drive legislative and institutional change.
I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status-quo bias, a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit, to let people who have been proven to tell lies tell more lies that get reported without questioning, to move forward on cultural assumptions that are readily disproven, and to devalue nearly all outsiders, whether they’re discredited or mocked or just ignored.”
Rebecca Solnit, “To Break the Story You Must Break the Status Quo”
Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.