Every columnist eventually confronts a question more unsettling than the blank page: Who, exactly, are we writing for?
We write about corruption, inequality, and political hypocrisy. We defend the vulnerable, question the powerful, and imagine better possibilities.
Then we publish, share the link, receive a handful of reactions, and return to our lives.
The next morning, the powerful remain powerful, and yesterday's injustices compete with newer ones for attention.
Has the column made a difference or merely supplied content to an insatiable machine?
This is not simply a crisis of readership. It is a crisis of purpose.
The question is not only whether people read our words, but whether words can interrupt the habits of a society that has learned to live comfortably with its contradictions.
Attention has become a commodity. A political scandal is consumed alongside celebrity gossip, a humanitarian catastrophe beside a dance video, and an argument between advertisements.
The thumb moves before the mind finishes thinking. A tragedy appears, provokes outrage, and disappears beneath a joke. Even suffering has become content, with a short life expectancy.
The newspaper column faces an existential disadvantage. It asks for patience: Staying with an uncomfortable argument, entertaining competing explanations and resisting immediate verdicts.
Yet the dominant culture rewards speed, certainty, and spectacle. Nuance is difficult to package. Doubt is equally difficult to monetize. A qualified argument rarely travels as far as a sharpened accusation.
Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death that public discourse could become entertainment, sacrificing substance to spectacle.
The danger is not that people have stopped receiving information, but that it arrives in forms discouraging reflection. We know more, with less time to understand.
Does this mean the columnist is fighting a losing battle? Perhaps, but that conclusion is premature.
We err when we measure writing only through readership figures, shares, comments, and institutional responses. These reveal circulation, not consequence.
A column may reach thousands and change nobody's mind. Another may stay with one reader long enough to alter a decision, challenge prejudice, or encourage resistance to injustice.
We rarely know which sentence will live again in a classroom, newsroom, or family dispute. An argument's public life may be invisible to its author.
John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, defended contesting opinions because even an unpopular or mistaken view can force prevailing beliefs to justify themselves rather than survive through habit.
Our responsibility is not necessarily immediate consensus or reform. It is to resist stagnation when questions become too inconvenient to ask.
A society becomes unjust when people lose the language to recognize injustice. Wrongdoing disguises itself: Exploitation becomes efficiency, exclusion necessity, censorship responsibility, and opportunism pragmatism.
The columnist exposes these transformations and restores the names power tries to change.
George Orwell understood the political significance of language. In Politics and the English Language, he argued that corrupted language can facilitate political manipulation and intellectual dishonesty.
Writing, therefore, is not merely expressing an opinion. At its best, it makes reality harder to disguise. A good column does not simply tell readers what to think; it helps them recognize what they have been encouraged not to see.
Writers must confront an uncomfortable possibility: Sometimes we write less to change the world than to reassure ourselves that we have taken a position.
Outrage becomes a professional identity, renewed weekly without demanding much of its owner. We condemn public hypocrisy while cultivating vanity, criticizing political performance while performing righteousness for an audience.
Writing about injustice does not make a writer virtuous. A column may defend the poor for vanity, turn people into symbols or reduce reality to a politically useful narrative. Moral authority rests not on declared intentions but on honesty, discipline, and willingness to confront inconvenient evidence.
Albert Camus, in The Rebel, explored the moral tension between resistance and its limits. Rebellion becomes dangerous when defending human dignity turns into justification for new domination.
Opposition alone does not guarantee moral clarity. We must question not only the injustices committed by those we oppose but also those we excuse when they serve our preferred cause.
This matters in societies where political loyalties determine the boundaries of outrage. A columnist who condemns an offense when committed by one political camp but rationalizes the same offense when committed by another is not defending a principle. The columnist is defending a tribe.
Consistency is less glamorous than indignation, but it is the foundation of credibility.
So, whom are we writing for? Not necessarily for millions who may never encounter our work, nor exclusively for officials who might respond to criticism.
We write for readers willing to think beyond inherited assumptions, for those whose doubts have not found language, and for those who need to know that discomfort with public injustice is neither irrational nor solitary.
We also write for a future reader who may return to the record and ask who noticed, who objected, who remained silent, and what arguments were available when society made its choices.
Hannah Arendt's reflections on responsibility and judgment matter here. In Eichmann in Jerusalem and her broader political writings, she examined the dangers of thoughtlessness and the failure to exercise independent moral judgment.
Public writing can resist that failure. A columnist cannot think on behalf of readers, but can create conditions in which thought becomes harder to evade.
Nor should we romanticize the profession. A column is not organizing a community, building an institution, or changing a law. An elegant article cannot substitute for justice, and a thousand condemnations cannot replace accountability. Writers must not confuse describing a problem with solving it.
Writing is one part of civic life. A column can preserve evidence, challenge official narratives, clarify neglected questions, and keep an issue alive after its commercial appeal fades.
In Four Quartets, TS Eliot writes: "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." This is no excuse for carelessness. Writers must test their accuracy, reach beyond the already convinced and reflect the realities they describe.
Yet honest speech's consequences cannot always be controlled by its speaker.
Perhaps the question is whether we would continue writing if applause disappeared, readership declined, and critics never acknowledged us. The point is not to ignore readers, but to distinguish communication from the desire to be admired.
The danger of doomscrolling is not simply that readers forget yesterday's arguments. Writers may adapt to the same forgetfulness, producing louder opinions for shorter attention spans.
When every column must become spectacle to survive, the writer risks becoming another entertainer in the marketplace of outrage.
We cannot compel society to listen, but we can refuse to measure our work by distraction.
We can write precisely instead of exaggerating, remain fair instead of partisan, and return to neglected questions after novelty moves on.
Perhaps, sometimes, we are creating empty noise. No profession is immune to vanity, repetition, or futility. But silence is not automatically wisdom, and the absence of immediate change does not prove an argument has failed.
Between the illusion that writing can save the world and the cynicism that writing can do nothing lies a harder responsibility: Speak truthfully, question relentlessly, and remain answerable to the people whose lives our words describe.
The columnist may never know who was listening. The more important question is whether, amid the noise, the columnist was still saying something worth hearing.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.
