When They Stopped Listening

Cedar Valley News – February 6, 2026
When They Stopped Listening
By: Dan Larson
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

The Washington Post laid off a third of its staff this week. It killed its sports section, its book section, its daily podcast. It gutted its local and international coverage. A newspaper that once helped bring down a president is now, by most accounts, just another website with a famous name.

I am not here to celebrate that. I have never taken pleasure in watching something fall apart—even something I disagreed with. There are people losing jobs. Families adjusting to sudden uncertainty. That is never a small thing, and I will not pretend it is.

But I do think there is a lesson in it. And I think it is the same lesson we talked about yesterday in Chloe’s column about Congress.

When you stop listening to the people you are supposed to serve, you become useless to them. And eventually, they stop showing up.

The Post did not collapse because of “market forces,” as some have claimed. News is a bigger business than ever. Plenty of outlets are thriving. The Post collapsed because it made a choice—over years, then over decades—to speak to one audience and about everyone else. It told half the country what they wanted to hear and told the other half they were dangerous, backward, and wrong. Then it wondered why only one half was reading.

That is not journalism. That is a mirror. And people do not pay for mirrors. They stop looking.

Proverbs 16:18 says, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” I do not quote that to gloat. I quote it because it is true, and because the truth applies to all of us—not just the people we disagree with. The Post was proud. It believed its voice was more important than the voices of the people it covered. It believed its judgment was superior to the judgment of ordinary readers. And when those readers tried to tell the Post it had lost their trust, the Post doubled down instead of listening.

The same thing happened in Congress. We talked about it yesterday. Sixty-one members are leaving. Kevin McCarthy called the institution “chaos.” Marjorie Taylor Greene said Washington is run by people who “can never, ever relate to real Americans.” Left and right, they are walking out the door—and not one of them said, “Here is what I am going to do about your grocery bill.”

The disease is the same. Whether it is a newspaper or a legislature, the pattern is identical: stop listening, start lecturing, lose the people, wonder what happened.

I have watched this pattern in churches, too. A congregation that stops listening to its members—that starts telling instead of asking, that becomes more interested in being right than being present—that congregation empties out. Slowly at first. Then all at once. And the leaders stand in the empty sanctuary and blame the culture, the times, the people who left. They blame everyone but the mirror.

The cure is not complicated. It is just hard. The cure is humility. The cure is sitting down and saying, “Help me understand what I have missed.” The cure is counting other people’s lives as worthy of your attention—not your correction, your attention.

James 1:19 tells us to be “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” That is not a slogan. That is a discipline. And it is a discipline the Post abandoned. It is a discipline much of Congress abandoned. It is a discipline we are all tempted to abandon when we are certain we are right.

I do not know who will buy the Post or whether it will survive in some smaller form. I do not know what Congress will look like after the midterms. But I know this: the institutions that last are the ones that listen. The leaders who endure are the ones who stay curious about the people they serve. The churches that remain full are the ones that remain humble.

If you want to be heard, start by hearing. If you want to be trusted, start by trusting that the other person’s life is as real as your own. If you want to lead, sit down at the table and ask what is on it.

That is not politics. That is not journalism. That is just how human beings stay connected to each other. And when we forget it—when pride tells us we already know enough, when certainty makes us stop asking questions—we end up alone. Holding a microphone nobody is listening to. Publishing a paper nobody is reading. Representing a district that no longer recognizes us.

The front porch is quiet tonight. I have been sitting here thinking about what we owe each other. Not agreement. Not applause. Just attention. Just the willingness to hear before we speak.

That is where trust begins. And that is where it ends when we forget.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Want to know the full story behind Cedar Valley? Teresa, Caleb, Dan, and the community you’ve come to know in these editorials first came together in Quiet Echo: When Loud Voices Divide, Quiet Ones Bring Together. Discover how a small town found its way from fear to fellowship—one quiet act of courage at a time. Available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3ME4nSs

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