A few days ago I watched a video about Calla Walsh, a twenty-two-year-old American woman who in six years went from Democratic Party election campaigns to the stages of Iranian state television. The video came from an Italian channel about communication, and at one point its author stops to state his method: this isn’t a geopolitics video, he says, he deals with communication, and his aim is to give us the tools to form our own opinion. It’s a purpose I respect, and that is exactly why it annoyed me to watch it betrayed minute after minute. It starts with the title, keywords in capitals, about the child prodigy who now celebrates dead Americans. It carries on through the almost sole source of the story, a profile published by The Free Press that he himself calls “beautiful”. And it ends with an inaccuracy that whoever made the video could have checked in five minutes, even written in an on-screen caption (Walsh was born in 2004, not 2005).

Having an opinion is normal, and I have one too. But if you present yourself as the one who analyses communication without taking sides, word choice is exactly where impartiality stands or falls, and there it fell. I told him so in a comment, and while writing it I realised the interesting part of this story was a question the video barely touched at the end, when it talked about institutions that can no longer pick up the anxiety of an entire generation. What happens to a person when they talk, and talk, and talk, and nobody listens?