The Cost of Keeping Quiet

It’s hard enough to find a job these days. Even harder to keep one.

Downsizing due to economic pressures. High prices with no relief in sight. The weight of the world, if not on our shoulders, is definitely weighing on our hearts and giving all of us an intense case of anxiety. This is the world we’re expected to move through, operate in, and succeed despite. And somehow, on top of all of that, we’re also supposed to keep our mouths shut.

Don’t offend the wrong person. Don’t let anyone know where you stand.

Anybody who has worked a job that deals in public opinion (which, let’s face it, who doesn’t these days) has heard it before. Opinions are dangerous. Opinions are how you lose trust. Lose clients. Lose the job you worked so hard to get and are now terrified of losing.

The thing you don’t hear as often: silence has a cost, too.

Let Me Be Honest About My Position

I want to be clear about something before I go any further. I’m lucky. I’m in a role and at a place where I can write something like this. Where I can call out our administration. Not everyone can say that, and I don’t take it lightly.

There are people right now who are stuck in jobs and working for employers who are actively advocating against their best interests. Against their healthcare and their right to organize. And those people can’t say a word about it because they need the paycheck. They have families. They have rent. They are, in the most literal sense, just trying to survive.

I don’t blame them.

But the people at the top, the ones setting the policies and automating the jobs while pocketing the savings? What’s your excuse? You have every platform, every resource, every protection money can buy. And yet you hide behind corporate statements and carefully worded non-answers, because the only opinion you’re willing to defend is the one that protects your bottom line.

That’s not neutrality. They’re cowards.

The Myth of the Opinion-Free Professional

In journalism, where I started, and in public relations, where I spend my days now, there’s a deeply held belief that opinions will ruin you. That having a perspective makes you untrustworthy. That the moment you reveal what you actually think, you lose credibility.

I spent years internalizing that. Voting in off-year elections felt like a secret I had to keep. Having feelings about the stories I covered felt like a liability. Somewhere along the way, professional neutrality stopped being a practice and started being an identity. 

But it’s all a con. And it’s a con that benefits the people in power far more than it benefits the rest of us.

When I was making the case for journalists being allowed to vote in primaries (in many states, voter registration is public, which means your party affiliation is too) the argument against it was always the same. It creates the appearance of bias. But what that argument conveniently ignores is this: just because you have a job doesn’t mean you don’t have an opinion. And just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean you can’t report the truth.

Every journalist, every PR professional, every human being walking into a room brings their life with them.

Bias Isn’t Always the Enemy

Bias gets treated like a dirty word. Like it’s always the thing corrupting your judgment or skewing your coverage. But that’s too simplistic.

Bias often comes from life experience. And life experience – real, sometimes painful life experience – can make you better at the work, not worse.

On my first day covering the Missouri State Capitol, as I walked into the creepy basement elevator with two lawmakers and my giant box of gear, they joked behind my back about what a waste of time the sexual harassment training they’d just walked out of was. Only to add with a laugh seconds later, ‘gosh, we probably shouldn’t say that in front of someone with a camera.’ Ha. Ha.

At that same internship, I was told by my mentor that my profile picture, where I was wearing a wide-strap tank top dress (which was honestly pretty modest for what I used to wear back in the day) was inappropriate and trashy, and nobody would ever take me seriously as a reporter after seeing that. Cool.

Those experiences didn’t make me biased. They gave me context. They told me something true and important about the environment I was operating in, something that no journalism school class could have given me. My perspective.

That’s not something to apologize for.

So What Do We Do With This?

I don’t have a clean answer. I don’t think there is one.

What I do know is that we’re living through a moment that demands more honesty, not less. The economy is squeezing people, and trust in institutions is eroding. And the carefully managed, opinion-free professional voice that so many of us were trained to perform feels increasingly hollow and useless.

People don’t want a press release. They don’t want corporate-speak. They want to know what you actually think, and whether you’re willing to stand behind it.

I’m not saying burn your career down for a hot take. I’m saying that the reflex to flatten yourself, to sand off every edge, to never let on that you’re a person with real experiences and real stakes in what’s happening, isn’t protecting you as much as you think it is.

It’s definitely not protecting the people who need someone to speak up.