Simon Willison’s Weblog

Providing validation, strength, and stability to people who feel gaslit and dismissed and forgotten can help them feel stronger and surer in their decisions. These pieces made me understand that journalism can be a caretaking profession, even if it is never really thought about in those terms. It is often framed in terms of antagonism. Speaking truth to power turns into being hard-nosed and removed from our subject matter, which so easily turns into be an asshole and do whatever you like.

This is a viewpoint that I reject. My pillars are empathy, curiosity, and kindness. And much else flows from that. For people who feel lost and alone, we get to say through our work, you are not. For people who feel like society has abandoned them and their lives do not matter, we get to say, actually, they fucking do. We are one of the only professions that can do that through our work and that can do that at scale.

— Ed Yong, at 19:47