Inventories
On How We ‘See’ the World
Last updated: May 25, 2026
Ever since I read these two Rebecca Solnit pieces on how journalists should be, I’ve held them close. They cemented something i felt when...
I found they resonated particularly for me sometime around 2022, when I reported a story on the history of the nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia during the pandemic, which necessarily entailed talking about the pig-farming industry that was decimated and which has never quite recovered. In the process of writing that story I discovered—not because of any editorial pressure from above but rather because of the constrictions of the form—how, because journalism necessarily targets a mainstream audience, it can be difficult to place your story within a framework that is still considered fringe, which isn’t already one of the range of generally accepted ones.
And I have more occasion to think about them these days, with everything going on in the world, and how and what we hear about them.
First, this piece from 2016, “To Break the Story, You Must Break the Status Quo”—by which she doesn’t mean ‘break’ in the manner of scoring a scoop, but in the manner of breaking tired, unexamined narratives:
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.
The second piece is from 2021, “Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo”:
The idea that all bias is some deviation from an unbiased center is itself a bias that prevents pundits, journalists, politicians and plenty of others from recognizing some of the most ugly and impactful prejudices and assumptions of our times. I think of this bias, which insists the center is not biased, not afflicted with agendas, prejudices and destructive misperceptions, as status-quo bias. Underlying it is the belief that things are pretty OK now, that the people in charge should be trusted because power confers legitimacy, that those who want sweeping change are too loud or demanding or unreasonable, and that we should just all get along without looking at the skeletons in the closet and the stuff swept under the rug. It’s mostly a prejudice of people for whom the system is working, against those for whom it’s not.
On Trying to Be Less Wrong, George Monbiot:
The evidence is not fixed. The facts change as new findings are made, and as societies, technologies and power relations change. Identities are not fixed either. People can be victims at one moment, oppressors at another. There is no virtue in sustaining a set of beliefs, regardless of the evidence. There is no virtue in either following other people unquestioningly or in cultivating a loyal and unquestioning band of followers.
While you can be definitively wrong, you cannot be definitely right. The best anyone can do is constantly to review the evidence and to keep improving and updating their knowledge. Journalism which attempts this is worth reading. Journalism which does not is a waste of time.
There are some people, some truth tellers, story tellers, one holds onto in times of crises. ed yong is one of them. he’s just a great storyteller and seems like a great human being. His newsletter is something I always look forward to reading. And I loved this talk he did last year:
—e.