If Journalism Didn’t Matter, They Wouldn’t Fear It

(This is adapted from a speech given to the Washington Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists on October 23, 2025)

Before anything else, congratulations are in order. Whether or not you leave with an award tonight, you’ve already accomplished something impressive—staying employed in this field. That’s no small feat. It probably means you’ve got either an unshakable sense of purpose or a partner in tech who’s keeping your “truth to power” dreams afloat. Maybe both—and if so, the next round’s on you.

Because let’s be real: being a journalist in 2025 is like being the last surviving Blockbuster. Everyone says they “miss you,” no one actually supports you, and somewhere, a TikToker with a ring light is confidently explaining your job, wrongly, and to millions. 

And yet, here you are. Still reporting. Still fact-checking. Still insisting that reality matters in a time when people treat facts like horoscopes: just pick the one that fits your vibe today. 

In just this past month, I’ve personally been told, over and over, that “the media” is the problem. With all my might, I really just want to shout back: there’s no single, shadowy “media.” There’s no great Wizard of Oz pressing the Bias Button behind some velvet curtain. There’s just… us. Sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated humans trying to make sense of a world that so often seems to be actively gaslighting itself. 

And look — we don’t need to be reminded how hard this work is. We live in an age of unprecedentedness. Every headline has that word stamped on it, and every time it does, our jobs get harder. 

We’ve all been tossed into this giant, shapeless blob called “the media” — as if a fifty-writer nonprofit newsroom, a freelance reporter covering housing and climate, and an influencer with abs of steel and a brain made of Red Bull are all the same thing. Spoiler: they’re not. 

Our rigorous fact-checks, our late-night interviews, our obsessive verification, our endless circles of openness and doubt — all of it gets flattened, treated as indistinguishable from the nonsense-spouting influencer who can clickbait his way into attention, authority, and audience, even when his “insight” could be out-reasoned by a Magic 8-Ball. 

Why? Because the information economy rewards volume, rage, and binary certainty. Nuance and complexity? They’ve got all the current market value of a typewriter. 

I know it’s fashionable to say journalism is dying. But honestly? Journalism isn’t dying. It feels like it’s being murdered. Murdered by corporate consolidation, by billionaire vanity projects, by “AI-driven content optimization” — which is really just plagiarism by another name. 

So when people say the industry is dying, I just want to clarify: it’s not dying of natural causes. It’s being smothered with a weighted blanket of neglect.

So when people ask, “Why do you still do this?” It’s not because it’s easy. It’s not because it’s glamorous. It’s because some of us still believe in the radical act of telling the truth. One of the few professions, right now, where we sign up for discomfort, for ambiguity, for risk, because we believe the stakes surpass comfort. 

And right now, empathy and humanization, the core of what we do, are under attack. Not just from obvious fronts, but from the subtle ones. The forces that would sanitize press voices, that would flatten complexity into “us vs them,” that would treat reporting as mere content rather than bearing witness, I see them ascending. 

Take, for example, the recent story of toddlers zip-tied like cattle in a Chicago raid; people with criminal records detained in inhumane conditions; fatal airstrikes on boats without due process. Each one triggers the question: does what we do still matter? Because so many on the outside say: I don’t want to engage because that’s happening over there, to someone else. And in that shift of focus, journalism loses not only meaning, but people. 

There are moments like this when I genuinely wonder if I suffered a mild head injury walking away from high finance — from the glass offices, the hotel suites, the catered lunches that came with their own microgreens. There have got to be easier ways to make a living than trying to keep faith in this cursed profession we call journalism. 

Not long ago, I hit a wall. The kind made of bills and self-doubt. Someone slid into my inbox with what they called a life raft: a steady paycheck, health insurance, and the promise that I’d never again have to Google “freelancer dental.” All I had to do was write the literary equivalent of a Xanax — comforting, inoffensive “thought leadership” about how corporations are really just people trying their best. 

It was tempting, the siren song of a paycheck disguised as purpose. But something in me, probably the same part that enjoys pain, said no. 

It just so happened to be the same day that I got a text from Mary Flowers, someone I hadn’t spoken to in years. 

A decade ago, Mary’s son, Michael, was murdered when a man burst into an apartment and shot him in cold blood. His death broke the heart of a community already stretched thin by grief. At his funeral, a thousand people filled a West Seattle church to testify to who he had been — the man who would give his own coat to a shivering child, the youth coach who stayed after practice to talk a kid out of despair, the father whose love for his daughter radiated through every story told. 

After the service, Mary approached my mother, Cynthia, and me. Her face was streaked with tears, her voice steady only because it had no other choice. She said the media coverage of her son’s death had deepened the wound — that the city’s largest outlets had rendered him not as a human being, but as a headline. They ended the article with his criminal record, a charge more than a decade old, leaving readers to conclude that somehow he had earned his fate. He’d been treated as a statistic, a stereotype: a Black victim with a past gun charge, as though that negated his life rather than contextualized it. 

Mary said, “Please, tell my son’s story. Not as an angel. As a man, complex, flawed, and fully human.” 

So we did. We wrote The Life and Legacy of Michael Flowers. And after it ran, something rare happened. The paper that had reduced him called the Flowers family into their offices and apologized — face to face. I can still see Michael’s ten-year-old daughter, Myanna, tears falling as she said to the editor, “Thank you for finally telling the whole story about my daddy.” 

That moment stayed with me. Because journalism isn’t just about speaking truth to power — it’s about speaking truth to the powerless, reminding them that their lives matter beyond their tragedy, that their stories are not disposable. 

Years later, Mary texted me again. She wrote: “You and your mother gave me the gift of a lifetime when you honored my son. Every time I read that story, it fills me back up, when grief depletes me.” 

I don’t share that for applause. I share it because it reminds me what this work is for. Not to fill a column inch or meet a word count, but to bear witness. To reassemble what the world has broken. To restore the humanity that headlines bury. 

Every generation of journalists has its trial. Ours is surviving the flood — not of truth, but of noise. We live in an empire that manufactures distraction the way Detroit once made cars. And yet, the people still look to us, searching for signs of life, for signs of their own lives. 

They rely on us, not for perfection, but for presence. For proof that someone still cares enough to see them. 

And what do we do? We show up. We show up when the lights go off and the cameras leave. We show up after the press conferences, when the grieving mother still hasn’t eaten and the child still can’t sleep. We show up to say: your story will not end in erasure. 

That’s our job. To humanize, to contextualize, to tell the truth when telling it costs us something. 

Because right now, it’s more lucrative to lie. It’s more fashionable to serve power. It’s easier to flatter the rich than to stand with the poor. And yet — we must. 

We must, because if journalism didn’t matter, they wouldn’t work so hard to destroy it. Think about that.

If words had no power, no one would spend billions to own them. No one would consolidate the outlets, cut the funding, rebrand propaganda as patriotism. 

They wouldn’t fear us, if we weren’t dangerous. 

Independent media, local media, community media — that’s the last line of defense. Because democracy doesn’t die in darkness; it dies in apathy. It dies when people believe that nothing true can survive. 

But truth does survive. It hides sometimes. It waits, patient and bruised, for someone willing to dig it up and speak it aloud. That someone is us. 

There’s a line from Audre Lorde that I keep close to my ribs: 

“When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” 

Tonight I say, it is better to write. It is better to film. It is better to publish, and risk rejection, than to let truth rot unspoken. 

And when the work wears you down (and it will) remember this: even if your story doesn’t win an award, it might win a heart. It might win a moment of understanding between strangers. It might save someone from being invisible. 

That’s worth every sleepless night, every low paycheck, every bit of rage and heartbreak and doubt. 

There’s another line I hold close when the world seems overcome with bleakness. It’s from Derek Walcott, who once wrote of love and broken vases. 

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” 

But I’ve come to think of it this way for our purposes: 

Break a world, yes, shatter it with truth, with grief, with the long ache of history, and the hands that gather its fragments, the mouths that speak its stories, the hearts that refuse to stop loving it, those are stronger than the comfort that once called itself peace. 

Because peace was never the stillness of silence. It was always the trembling work of becoming whole again. 

That’s what journalism is. That’s what you are.

You are the hands gathering the shards. You are the ones reassembling the world with the passion fierce enough to be called truth. 

So keep going. Keep telling it. Keep witnessing. 

Because the story isn’t over —it’s just waiting for someone brave enough to tell it fully. Thank you.