Who Gets To Be Heard?

There’s something interesting about watching a place you’ve known your entire life suddenly appear under a different name.

In February 2025, Google Maps began displaying Gulf of America to users in the United States. In Mexico, it remained Gulf of Mexico. Elsewhere, both names appeared.

Google was following a change to the U.S. government’s geographic names system.¹

Same body of water. Different names, depending on where you happened to be looking from.

Gulf of Mexico had carried that name for more than 400 years². An executive decision didn’t erase that history. But it changed what someone would see when they opened a map.

I find that fascinating.

Imagine someone born twenty years from now looking at the same place. Without knowing what came before, would they ever think to question the name?

And what about the subjects where we don’t have an older map to compare against?

The people we learn about. The events we’re taught to remember. Decisions made long before we were around to ask about them.

We inherit an extraordinary amount of our understanding from people we’ve never met.

I wonder how often we remember that.

Who owns the account?

When we read the news, we tend to think about the journalist or the publication. We’re less likely to look into the company behind it.

But a newspaper can be a public service and somebody’s business at the same time.

It can employ good journalists while having an owner with commercial interests, political ambitions and the authority to influence its direction.

Sometimes that relationship becomes difficult to overlook.

When Michael Bloomberg entered the presidential race in November 2019, Bloomberg News said it would not investigate its owner or his Democratic primary rivals. It would continue investigating the Trump administration. Reuters documented the decision.³

An owner’s decision to run for office had changed what his newsroom could investigate.

I think that’s worth knowing if you depend on it to understand an election.

It doesn’t make every report false. It does mean there were questions the organization had decided its reporters wouldn’t pursue.

We’re accustomed to examining the interests of politicians and businesses. It seems reasonable to bring that same curiosity to the institutions telling us about them.

Including the ones we generally agree with.

Ownership is one part of this. There’s also the everyday decision about what becomes news at all.

Nobody can report everything.

But somebody decides what to report, who gets interviewed and which part makes the headline. A story can contain accurate information and still leave out something that would change how we understand it.

The difficult part, as a reader, is knowing what you haven’t been shown.

What are we leaving behind?

What we consider history today was once somebody’s present.

Somebody wrote about it, photographed it or thought to keep a record. Other things happened without anyone documenting them.

I wonder how much of what we’re living through will be understood differently by people who come after us. And how much they simply won’t know.

There are people who know a neighborhood, a profession or a particular subject closely, but have never been asked what they think. Their experience might complicate a story the rest of us have already accepted.

They won’t be right about everything.

Neither are the people we’re accustomed to hearing from.

That’s part of why I wanted to create CTRL.

I’d like there to be more room for people to examine something rather than feel they have to arrive with a position to defend. To publish an experience someone else might never encounter. To ask a good question without pretending to already know the answer.

Calling ourselves independent won’t make the work trustworthy. We still have to support what we publish and be willing to correct it.

But we can make room for more people to contribute.

You might have an essay, a photograph, a piece of research or something you’ve noticed that deserves a closer look.

You don’t need a following. You do need to give someone else a reason to consider what you’re saying.

We may not always agree.
I hope we don’t have to.

What would be the point of another publication if we only repeated the people already being heard?

What do you think we’re missing?⁴