The further you are from power, the more you see: Gary Younge about:reader?url=https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/intervie...

and their local manifestations, while zooming into

oppression and exploitation in those societies. The
award-winning British journalist and author has
now taken up a teaching assignment at
Manchester University as Professor of Sociology.
In an interview over Skype, Mr. Younge spoke on
politics, journalism and the politics of journalism.

When you look back at your reporting

trail what would you say were the most
valuable lessons professionally and
personally?

Personally, one was to always try and add value

somehow. On election night in 2008 with [Barack]
Obama, [I thought] why go to Grant Park [Chicago,
U.S.]. Everybody else is there. What am I going to
add at Grant Park? Whereas if I go to a bar in the
South Side, a black area, where there are no
cameras, then maybe I can add something. So, I
went to a bar the night before. I found a guy, and I
went and voted with him the next day.
I watched the results come out and I saw how

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The further you are from power, the more you see: Gary Younge about:reader?url=https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/intervie...

This particular story is really not so interesting, it’s

not what I came to journalism to do. There was a
lesson about how people experience these things
as opposed to the meta story of the politician, the
election and so on.
Sometimes the things that aren’t stories should be
stories, and the news agenda is skewed towards
power and the powerful. Also, the people in the
newsroom think if it’s not happening to them, it is
not news in the same way.
There is this phrase in journalism, ‘When a dog
bites a man, that is not a story; when a man bites a
dog, that’s a story’. And I understand that. But
sometimes you have to ask yourself: who owns
these dogs, and why do they keep biting people,
why do the same people keep getting bitten?
One of the other things was learning that there is
news in what appears to be banal. And that often
what is banal for the people who create news is
deeply traumatic for large numbers of people. And
so, I try to find ways to make what people think
they know new and different.

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The further you are from power, the more you see: Gary Younge about:reader?url=https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/intervie...

And I would say, although I am less fluent in the

language of this, there was also gender there. I
remember as a young man, meaning 16-17,
thinking of feminism as something that posh white
ladies did. And I found them annoying, when they
were saying, ‘you are part of the problem’. I was
like, ‘no you are a massive problem, and I see no
kinship with you’.
And then when I taught in Sudan for a year when I
was 17, I did my reading. I read Women,
Resistance and Revolution by Sheila Rowbotham.
It was all about gender, class and how they interact
and intersect. Almost straight after, I read The
Color Purple, which is not a massively polemical
book but still, the penny dropped.
Well, yes, of course, either everybody is free, or
nobody is free. You can’t have socialism without
feminism, you can’t have socialism without ending
racism, none of this stuff makes sense unless you
include identity in it. The people who try to pit one
against the other are not going to understand.
And on ways in which my understanding of class

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