Sometimes we just need to listen

Journalists - and Greek ones in particular - love to talk. A lot. But it is important that we learn to listen as well, as has been discovered - often in a brutal manner - by media all around the world.

In a recent discussion here in Athens, Mark Thompson, president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company, explained how the American elite was blindsided by the election of Donald Trump because it hadn't been listening closely enough. Trapped in a bubble with people who share the same same tastes and beliefs, the country's elite failed to sense the tectonic shifts in American public opinion. This also happened in Greece in the first few years of the crisis and led to a severing of the bond of trust between the public and the media.

Listening, of course, is different to pretending to care, to pretending to understand the other's pain for purely...