What nobody told me about communication when I was starting out

Nobody told me that communication is political. I want to say this carefully, because the word carries more freight than I mean it to carry. I do not mean partisan. I mean political in the most practical, structural sense: every act of communication involves a set of decisions about whose perspective is centred, whose language is used, what gets said and what gets omitted, who is trusted to tell the story and who is not.

These are not technical decisions. They can be executed technically — through craft, through skill, through good writing — but they are political in their nature. They determine whose reality becomes the shared one. They determine who is legible and who is obscured.

Most communications training I encountered early in my career treated these decisions as though they did not exist. The curriculum focused on craft: how to structure a message, how to build a press list, how to understand a media cycle. These are genuinely useful skills. But they are downstream of a set of questions that were never asked in the rooms where I was trained.

The questions that were never asked

Who benefits from this story being told this way? What am I leaving out, and in whose interests is that omission? Whose perspective am I assuming is neutral when it actually carries a specific set of assumptions? Who is not in the room where these decisions are being made, and what is the effect of their absence?

These questions came to me later, through discomfort rather than curriculum. Through moments in fieldwork and in briefing rooms where something felt wrong in a way I could not name at the time. Through stories I produced that I later understood were more useful to donors than to the people they were about. I had the craft. I did not have the habit of asking what the craft was being used for. That habit is not part of most communications training. It was not part of mine.

What good education would have done

Good communication education does not only teach craft. It teaches critical thinking about what communication is for, and in whose interests it operates. It teaches the ability to examine a brief before executing it — to ask whether the framing of the task is one that can be accepted, or whether it needs to be interrogated first.

The craft is teachable in a day. The thinking is a practice that takes much longer — and matters more. It is the difference between a communicator who produces well-crafted messages and one who understands what messages do in the world — who they serve, who they risk, and what they cost the people whose experiences they represent.