On with Kara Swisher - On Journalism, Activism and Hope with Nicholas Kristof

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has been reporting on protests, wars and conflicts for more than 40 years, and he’s used his platform to highlight human rights issues at home and abroad. But despite being a proponent of "ethical journalism", he flinches at being called an “activist”. Kara talks to Nick about the swashbuckling adventures detailed in his new memoir, Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life, his take on the situation in Gaza and the student protests against the war, and why he’s more hopeful than cynical about the state of the world – even with Trump back on the ballot. This interview was taped on May 14, 2024. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find Kara on Threads/Instagram @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. It's on! Corporation. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. It's our rival columnist series. Not really, but today I'm talking to another columnist, this time from the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof. I also did a column of the New York Times, but I left and he came back after trying to run for

governor. Nick actually started with a paper record 40 years ago. In his late 20s, he became the youngest foreign correspondent the Times had ever had, and he's been running towards wars, riots, and conflicts ever since. He's also used his platform to highlight human rights issues that often go under the radar abroad and here at home. And I've interviewed him before about some of those issues, things like malnourishment, women's health, sex trafficking, and the gulf between rural and urban Americans. Nick writes about all of this, and growing up on a farm, he now manages in rural Oregon in his new memoir, Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life. I wanted to talk about that life

and why he, unlike Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who we spoke to last week, doesn't think America is on a downward slope. We have expert questions from not one, but two guests, Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, who we spoke to back in December. Nick, we've known each other a long time, and I've read your reporting even longer, and I'm thrilled your book, Chasing Hope, is out in the world. And Lorene Powell, who interviewed me during my book tour,

and I have interviewed her on many occasions. This is the big question I would like to ask Nicholas Kristof. But first, Nick Kristof. Hi, Nick. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. So I read the book On a Plane to London, and I'm not a hopeful person, I would say. I'm kind of, I wouldn't say cynical, but I found it very moving, and I was surprised that I did.

The first line of the book, obviously, is journalism is an act of hope, which I was like, mm-hmm, mm, sure, sure, Nick. Yeah, the cynic coming out. Well, but later you wrote, some reporters love roving the halls of Congress and asking pointed questions at press conferences. That's important, but it's not for me. I'm impatient with journalism as stenography, and I don't want to spend my life scribbling notes at news conferences. I'm pursuing change. I want to get in on the scene and figure out for myself what's happening. I want to invest journalism with purpose and harness it to a cause larger than ourselves. I envision journalism not just as a technical craft, but as one with an ethical mission, a better world. It's really interesting because I put something like that

at the end of my book, and I've gotten a lot of pushback for it. I want to make some change happen via the reporting I do. Talk a little bit about both those things, an act of hope and then an act of activism, really. Well, so I got into journalism in part after Watergate. And, you know, we saw how journalists held a president accountable. And that was important for the good of the country. And I look around the country right now and all the challenges we face and threats to democracy, and I think journalism has never been more important. And I say it's an act of hope because there is some presumption that when we go out and, you know, whether it's people risking their lives in Gaza or Ukraine or whether it's people spending a weekend poring over, you know, Trump's accounts, that facts matter and that truth has an impact. Trump's accounts that facts matter and that truth has an impact. And, you know, unfortunately, there are times when it doesn't, but that's what I think animates us.

You know, there is a legitimate debate about every bit of coverage in their own belief system. And I do not go that far, but I deeply believe that journalism serves an important purpose and that that is why we take risks. I mean, this book you do, you talk about that. But let's start with the optimistic part. You know, we have wars, political divisiveness, rising authoritarianism. Why do you think we should be optimistic? Give us your pitch. Well, I think we've always had immense challenges. After an excerpt from the book ran in the New York Times, somebody was emailing me and saying, oh, you know, actually the 1960s was a much better time. And I was thinking, really? I mean, you know, we had assassinations of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr. We had Jim Crow.

We had civil rights workers being murdered, not held accountable. We had the war in Vietnam, killing our own soldiers, massacring Vietnamese, secret attacks on Laos and Cambodia, etc., etc., etc. Good times for music, but okay. And, you know, I guess, look, in journalism, we cover planes that crash, you know, not planes that land. But what I've seen in my career, and I bet you've seen that too, is that there really has been this backdrop of, I think, material and moral progress. And I don't think that we provide that context sometimes. And I fear that I see so much, you know, disillusionment and distress and despair,

especially among young people. And I'm afraid that's paralyzing, not empowering. Sure, absolutely. Desmond Tutu left a deep impression on me. I just really, really admired him. Yeah, he did. You got his laugh just right. I met him only once and you got it right.

That cackle of laughter. He did, he cackled. Self-deprecating, you know. Yeah. It was amazing. And he talked about the toolbox that they had had to overcome apartheid and brutal homophobia in South Africa and brutal xenophobia, that that was in part this sense of kind of guarded, scarred optimism, a sense of possibility, a sense of self-efficacy, and that that was what made their achievements possible. And, you know, you don't have that if you think we're just being overwhelmed by terrible things happening. But do you consider yourself an activist as a journalist or not? I know that's a loaded term.

I'm, you know, I periodically get introduced brightly by somebody saying, oh, Dick is this great activist. I always flinch a little bit at that because, you know, I periodically get introduced brightly by somebody saying, oh, Dick is this great activist. And I always flinch a little bit at that because, you know, I mean, there is an element of truth to that. But I worry that activist means you kind of sign on to a cause and you put on blinders and you're not quite ready to criticize it or notice its failings and you become invested in it. And I don't want to be that person. But, you know, do I want to push for change and use my toolbox to, you know, to create a better place? Absolutely. Yeah, there's got to be another word, a change agent. You're a change agent. I want to talk more about the book in a minute, but obviously one of the major humanitarian crises at this moment is Gaza.

Last month, you wrote a column titled, What Happened to the Joe Biden I Knew? Basically calling out the president for not pushing back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not doing more for the civilians in Gaza. You've known Biden a long time. Talk to me about writing this, the difficulties of writing this, because obviously it's such a fraught moment. And there is literally, no matter what you say, it's not the right thing. But that also is why I think it's really important to write about it. I think there are an awful lot of people who are struggling with what to think about it, and they were horrified by what happened on October 7th in Israel, and they're also horrified by the thought of people in Gaza being, you know, children being bombed or people starving. And that's a moment

when we can try to offer a little bit of illumination, you know, more light than heat, and offer some guidelines about what can be done. And I worry in writing, in criticizing Biden that, you know, that risks benefiting Donald Trump, who would be worst for people in Gaza and just about everywhere else. But at the same time, I think that Biden's present position is actually hurting him politically. And I think it's morally obtuse and practically obtuse. I don't think Israel starving Gazans or going into Rafah actually benefits Israel's own security interests. And I think it's certainly, you know, I think it's also just wrong. Yeah. You recently wrote about the Rafah invasion as the central question to code of whether Biden will use his leverage to prevent the starvation in which the United States is complicit. You say, you have said Gaza has been an albatross around Biden's necks, his war as much as Netanyahu's.

Is this about his legacy or more political? I wasn't clear what you were trying to get at there. So I think that there is a political cost. Or more political? I wasn't clear what you were trying to get at there. So, I think that there is a political cost. But I also think that there is a moral cost to the country as a whole. We have American 2,000-pound bombs being dropped and wiping out whole neighborhoods. I used to report in Gaza occasionally. dropped and wiping out whole neighborhoods. I used to report in Gaza occasionally. I remember these neighborhoods, and now they are just, you know, flattened with the stench of rotting flesh coming from in there. There are more than a thousand kids who've been amputated because of American

weaponry. And finally, I mean, I've covered starvation in plenty of countries, but usually this is in really remote areas where it's very, very difficult to access. And in Gaza now, we have people who are starving, including kids actually starving to death, as you have thousands of trucks full of food lined up at the border. And, you know, that this is something that I think the U.S. is complicit in, and it doesn't help that we are then dropping some food from planes to mitigate the starvation that we are also participating in causing. Has your feeling changed at all with the administration's recent decision to withhold bomb shipments until Israel has a plan to protect civilians? Yeah, I mean, I think that— They'll get plenty of weapons, by the way, they make that point. Yeah, and I, you know, I was really glad that Biden finally did begin to use his leverage.

And it was striking that the moment he did have a serious effort to apply that leverage, that immediately, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, okay, well, we'll, you know, we'll open up a crossing in the north and we'll do more. who said, okay, well, we'll open up a crossing in the north and we'll do more. And that signified to me that if Biden were more willing to use leverage, it actually can save lives. And I also must say that immediately when Biden did begin to use this leverage, then he began to get whacked by Republicans and conservatives. So I see his problem. He's getting criticized by me from the left for

not using his leverage. And the moment he uses it, he's getting attacked from the right for using it. You know, he can't win. But, you know, there are lives at stake. There is America's reputation at stake. And I think there's also Israeli security at stake. David Ignatius was just arguing that, that it's a security, it creates a security problem in was just arguing that, that it creates a security problem in Untold. Now, there's been a lot of debate about whether to use the term genocide in connection with Gaza. As someone who's covered other genocides, many of them like Darfur, what do you think? I would not use the term genocide. Why is that? Genocide requires, there's a high bar of proving intent. It's not just about a slaughter. It's about this Why is that? grade. And I think we should be careful about using the word genocide unless the lawyers see

a lot of evidence of that intent question. Where would you use? You know a lot of words. I mean, when Biden called it indiscriminate, I thought, yeah, that kind of captured a lot of what is happening. It's not entirely indiscriminate, but when you level neighborhoods, yeah, that feels pretty indiscriminate. And starvation, I don't know. I guess I'm a little wary of applying epithets to what people do. I think that sometimes doesn't necessarily clarify. But, you know, what we are seeing is an awful lot of kids being killed and kids actually dying of starvation. And whatever you call it, when that's done with our support and our tax dollars, that seems unconscionable.

support and our tax dollars. That seems unconscionable. So, you said young people don't feel empowered, but you also wrote about the student protests on college campuses, which is highly complex. I had a 21-year-old, a 19-year-old, talked a lot about with them. You told the protesters to raise money for Gazans, or better yet, go to the West Bank and teach English if you want to help Palestinians. Talk about the reaction from parents, from students to that column. A lot of people weren't very happy with it. Because, I mean, they saw me as an ally who had been sympathetic to their criticisms of Israeli and U.S. conduct. And they expected me to support them. And they felt, I think, a little bit betrayed by that column when I was critical.

And, you know, all I can say is that I admire their intentions. I admire their concern for the world. I wish that there were more Americans who felt that empathy for people who were suffering along the way away. But the metric of progressivism should be progress. And what matters is not just good intentions, but is outcomes. And I don't see those protests as actually advancing the interests of Gazans. And I fear the opposite. I'm shaped a little bit by the anti-Vietnam War protests, which, in my view, probably helped lead to the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and thus lengthened the Vietnam War and perhaps resulted in more Vietnamese dying rather than fewer. That's your worry. How do you think about it in terms of, say, the Tiananmen Square protests where you were present?

You had a very incredible scene of a rickshaw carrying a dead body away and saying, tell the world. In 1989, or the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, where they were streaming over the border, say, in East Germany to West Germany, or Arab Spring, are they different from your, what protests work? Well, the East German protests did help bring down communism in Eastern Europe. And protests in Mongolia brought down the communism there in South Korea and Indonesia. I mean, I've covered a lot of democracy movements that have actually worked.

And on the other hand, as you note, in Arab Spring, they resulted in a crackdown that made things worse. And the same was true in Tiananmen. I do think that if it's clear that protests are going to make things worse, then it's a mistake to plow on ahead and lead to a crackdown and just blame the oppressor. On the other hand, I don't think that was clear in the case of either Tiananmen or Arab Spring. And I guess fundamentally there, I would blame the people with the machine guns rather than the students. I think the distinction is that here, it seems to me that my best judgment is that the protests on American campuses, it was hard for me to see how they were going to help Gazans. And easy for me to see how they were inflaming the situation, how I thought there was a tolerance in some quarters of anti-Semitism.

And it also just distracted us all from the suffering in Gaza. Instead of talking about hunger in Gaza, we were talking about students at Columbia University. What would you tell them to do? I know you said, go do other things, but if they want to express themselves in protest, is that a useless tool now? Given social media, there's always a bad player, people show up. It's used on social media by the right to make it look insane, chaos or whatever. I mean, I don't have any very good things that I can suggest. And, you know, I think that was one of, you know, I was suggesting, you know, look, write letters to the editor. People kind of roll their eyes or, you know, go off and, you know, volunteer and.

Yeah, Gramps. Sure. Go and, you know, go to the West Bank and bear witness. And, you know, that feels pretty hard and potentially risky. So, I don't have any good answers. And I think one of the complicating factors is that there is this real social and cultural divide in the U.S. and quite a deep suspicion in the part of most Americans who are not college graduates toward college students who their regard is kind of entitled and privileged and, you know, are not particularly

likely to try to get moral guidance from them. And that makes it hard. That makes it hard. I'll talk about the role of media later, but I wonder if you've been following the reporting by student journalists, which is quite impressive. I'm just curious, what do you think about it and any advice you have for them? I don't have any. I think they're doing a great job. Oh, fantastic. I was so impressed by what student journalists were doing on so many campuses.

And I've got to say, I mean, we don't really have a business model in journalism. And I've got to say, I mean, we don't really have a business model in journalism. I don't know how these people are going to be paid, but I am just awed by the talent of these incredibly smart kids going to journalism school, committed to practicing journalism, sometimes going off and risking their lives in distant conflicts. Yeah, they aren't being paid. That's their economic. That's the economic plan there. Free. I mean, it is, I mean, I really am so impressed by journalism. I thought the coverage of the protest was just magnificent in so many places.

It was, absolutely. They used a lot of social media in really smart ways, video, things like that. And actually, it was much more even-handed, which was interesting, much more so than regular media, I have to say. But this ties in nicely with your memoir, your life as a reporter. I, as I said, I really enjoyed it. I was surprised how much I liked it. It really hit home with me as my own career.

I think we're around the same age. Anyway, for those who don't know, you grew up in Oregon, went to Harvard, then studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Not very impressive. One of your first exclusives when you got stuck in Poland after the government imposed martial law. Talk a little bit about that trajectory and how it prepared you for your life as a foreign correspondent. I almost was one and then met foreign correspondents when I was at Columbia. And I said, no, I'm not. These are very unhappy people. I remember thinking that. So, my dad was a refugee. And I think that gave me an interest in international affairs,

gave me a sense of what was potentially at stake in covering international affairs. And it gave me this, you know, yearning. I was restless also, you know, maybe growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere gave me a little bit of that restlessness. I enjoyed traveling. I found, when I was at Oxford, I traveled a lot and reported and, you know, reported basically to cover my expenses, traveled in Africa and Asia, elsewhere. And I just found it, it's, I couldn't believe people were paying me to go and travel and talk to interesting people and write about it. Yeah, you went to Pakistan, India. You were held – robbed and held at gunpoint in Ghana. You spent a year learning Arabic in Egypt.

It's pretty swashbuckling, actually. I mean, it was just – it really was so much fun. I mean, I had to choose between being, I was studying law at Oxford, so being a lawyer and being a foreign correspondent. And, you young person. Would you – I don't think you can do that today. It doesn't feel like that. Would you recommend a young person who's maybe a freelancer, especially when they're writing on spec, to take those kind of risks? It feels like that's not available anymore. Oh, I think it is. can go off to Bangkok and get a job writing for, you know, an English language publication, their website, or there are a lot of young people who study Chinese who go off to Taipei or Hong

Kong and do something like that, a little less Hong Kong now than maybe five years ago. But there is some of that. It's, I think now that there are fewer jobs as foreign correspondents, but I think still the opportunities for a young person to go off and report abroad and gain some of those journalistic skills and see the world and learn a language, I think those opportunities still do exist. Do you think they're still doing it for reasons that you did it for. You continued to write, scratch a cynical journalist and the idealist bleeds, withdraws as the business certainly isn't money or family-friendly hours, but in part a notion that journalism upholds the public interest. And, you know, it's a big theme throughout this book. And it's also a big theme to say, I cringe when I turn on the television and see commentators pontificate or manipulate the public. Talk about the idea of reporting, because it drives me nuts. You know, I was talking to David Ignatius about this, too.

There's so many people who aren't journalists or reporters, I would say. Talk a little bit about that, going places and doing this, because you have sort of a classic tale of how you got to where you were. of how you got to where you were. So I think there, you know, this is, it feels strange for an opinion journalist to say, but I think that our value is not the opinions we bring to the table, but the reporting that is mixed in with the opinions. So you don't just stir the pot, but you add something to it. And that comes from reporting.

just stir the pot but you add something to it and that comes from reporting and i think so much of opinion journalism today you know it's on cable television it's shouting it's confirming people's prejudices rather than pushing back at them and it's not involving you know getting new information that you add to the uh to the supply and that's where you And that's where, you know, that's where people learn. And so, I deeply believe in traveling and getting out of the capital, just trying to figure out new information. And that's expensive. And there's not always a business model for it. For a while, the times, every time you traveled from the Baghdad airport to Baghdad, it cost $10,000 in security escorts. And, you know, for a while, there wasn't a lot of readership of our Baghdad coverage. And we were losing money every time anybody went, you know, from the airport to the town. But that is what journalism actually does. That's what's

important. And, you know, I want to push back at your suggestion that maybe young people today don't have that sense of idealism. You know, I saw so many young reporters risking their lives by going into Syria. And frankly, I cringed because they often were unsafe. You know, news organizations weren't willing to risk their own staff's lives by sending them into Syria. And so, freelance, they were sometimes willing to risk their own staff's lives by sending them to Syria. And so freelance, they were sometimes willing to use freelance photographs. And so freelance photographers were going in, taking enormous risks. And I don't think it was just career advancement, although that was an element of it. But I think people genuinely wanted to bring a little more attention to a brutal civil war. genuinely wanted to bring a little more attention to a brutal civil war.

And I have a lot of admiration for some of those young folks who were traveling around and trying to work their way up with their articles or their photographs. Well, you had a traditional past. You were a business reporter and within two years became a foreign correspondent in Asia. Before that, you had met your wife, Cheryl, who was also a journalist at the time. The two of you became the first husband-wife team to win a Pulitzer together for your reporting on the Chinese democracy movement in Beijing. Talk about working together and how you decided who was going to do what, stay home, how you navigated that. You know, the Times had started out as a really deeply misogynistic place, not only toward female staff, but also toward spouses, which at that time meant wives of correspondents,

and made it very difficult for those wives. And when I was becoming a foreign correspondent, I worried about that, that, you know, I didn't want to marry somebody who would just kind of hang around the house and— Wait for you. And so the times then, you know, it changed. And their openness toward Cheryl was kind of a breakthrough. And it was so important to our coverage that Cheryl was a partner in this. And, you know, she is ethnically Chinese, so she could slip into places and she was harder for state security to follow while I was a little more easy to follow. And those five years in China were really difficult.

Those five years in China were really difficult, and we were always so worried about getting our sources in trouble and made some really difficult ethical decisions, including once helping a dissident who had escaped from prison help him flee the country. And I just could never have made that decision on my own. And it was so important to have a partner whose moral values I trusted and believed in and to bat around back and forth our options and what we should do. How did you manage the writing and editing with each other? And is there anything you do differently today, the day-to-day? So Cheryl was more interested in business journalism, which had very little appeal to me. I was more interested in some of the political, social, cultural stuff. And so we didn't, I mean, look, I mean, people ask, you know, how did you manage to

cover a country together or write a book together? But we also raised three kids together. And if you can raise three kids together, articles for a book or a piece of cake. We'll be back in a minute. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.

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and it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover I want to shift gears and talk a bit about day. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. I want to shift gears and talk a bit about how you think about the changing role of journalism

and the media and these kinds of conflicts and in general. In the book, you write about those protests in China, how you ran toward the gunfire to do reporting. You write, documenting the toll wasn't work, but a mission. And Cheryl and I toiled almost around the clock to gather evidence and push back on the lies of the Chinese state television. We were exhausted, but this was journalism with meaning. This was what I yearned to do in the midst of a massacre. I found my place. What does journalism with meaning mean to you? Well, I guess it's the opposite of that stenography. In other words, I've done

a lot of reporting about exchange rates, for example, and I understand that's important, and it captures some of the world. But I was powerfully seared by standing on Tiananmen Square and having army troops open fire on the crowd I was in and seeing kids die and seeing the courage of people who were standing up to the army. And so, how could I fight back at that? I wasn't going to throw Molotov cocktails at the tanks in Tiananmen Square, but I could document the number of kids they killed. I could try to get stories of the repression, of torture. And that was my toolbox to fight back at the repression and at the dictatorship. repression and at the dictatorship. And that really did feel like a mission and something powerful, especially when we had friends who were arrested, who were missing. We didn't know if they were killed. It was just really a horrible time. Yeah. But you think about it. You talk about mission a lot. A lot of journalists won't talk about the idea of mission. They won't. They'll

say, I'm just here to document it. I'm a proponent of CNN Christiane Amanpour's mantra, be truthful, not neutral. Another colleague of ours, Judy Woodruff, didn't exactly disagree with that idea, but she kind of did. Let me play a clip from what she said. I don't know what neutral is. My view is that, okay, I'm not taking sides. I'm not sending money to the Republicans or the Democrats. I'm hearing all sides, not just both sides, but all sides. And as for truthful, I mean, who has ground truth? I mean, I'm a big believer as, again, as a reporter, a humbled reporter over all these years. There are a whole lot of things that I thought were accurate in the moment that I learned a few weeks or a few months or a few years later were wrong, were absolutely wrong. And so I'm careful about what I believe, you know, what I

call truth. So Judy, as a point, we report, we learn more truth shifts. You write about that a lot in your book as well, in the lead up to the Iraq war, in your column about the weapons of mass destruction. Talk about that and what lesson you took away from it, and some thoughts on both Christiane and Judy. I really like what Judy said about humility, and I think we need a lot more of that in opinion journalism in particular. I think we need a lot more of that in opinion journalism in particular. But I think fundamentally, I would side with Christiane. I think that we have an obligation to share the truth as we see it. And in journalism, we believe in providing fairness and also truth. And often they go together.

fairness, and also truth. And often they go together. If you are fair and quote people from all sides and you are dispassionate and neutral to some degree, then that serves the interests of truth. But that is not always true. And it struck me in 2016 that the public believed that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were roughly equal in terms of their dissembling. And in fact, every journalist covering that campaign knew that Hillary Clinton was, you know, fairly typical in the way she spun and dissembled. And Donald Trump was off the charts. And I don't think we conveyed that truth to the public. we conveyed that truth to the public. In the Joe McCarthy period, I don't think it worked to just quote Joe McCarthy and the people he was accusing of being a communist. In the Civil Rights Movement, I don't think it worked to quote George Wallace and Martin Luther King because the public then

thought that Martin Luther King was this guy stirring up trouble. And so, there are times when there is a tension between those. And I think truth, and I think this is the point that Christiane was saying, that our best understanding of the truth is what we need to convey, acknowledging that we may be wrong. And the greatest challenge we face in journalism, but in life itself, is our willingness to unflinchingly take a moral stance based on what we believe in while acknowledging that we may be wrong. Well, you know, I was going to talk about Trump in a minute, but let's cover that right now. You called him racist in 2016, but in your book, you call the media response to his campaign pathetic and essentially call our mainstream media for being complicit in his being elected. and essentially call our mainstream media for being complicit in his being elected.

At the same time, in your book, you were critical of the newsroom reaction to the 2020 op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, titled Send in the Troops, which called for military intervention against protesters. Responding to the death of George Floyd, more than 800 New York Times staff members signed a letter protesting that op-ed. It's a lot of people. In the book, you kind of dissed those staffers as digital audio people who are, quote, less steeped in journalistic traditions. So talk about this a little bit because there really is a huge push-pull in newsrooms. Because I don't think people quite understand how newsrooms work sometimes when I read some of the coverage. So I think that people who grew up in the news business, And this is certainly how I feel.

I suspect it's how you feel, that we do have this sort of fundamental notion that all sides get covered and that there are these difficult balances to make and sometimes difficult choices, but that, of course, an opinion page will have op-eds by people one disagrees with and views one may sometimes find offensive. And that, you know, where you draw the lines are going to be difficult and can disagree about that. But I think that there are a lot of younger journalists, and I think the George Floyd moment particularly captured that, who just think this is an immoral

opinion and one should not give legitimacy to somebody like Cotton or others. And they would draw the lines very, very differently. And on the one hand, I think that journalism should have moral purpose, but I think that we should have a broad range of opinions. And I think that it works best when my liberal opinions are escorted by conservative commentary alongside it. Sure. But you did say the media response to his campaign was pathetic and being complicit. You've argued internally that the Times should be, quote, more willing to exercise moral authority, but that the new wave of moralism is Washington Times' lean to results I thought were neither fair nor good journalism. It's a real push-pull because it feels a little

bit like you want to have moral authority and say what you think and have a responsibility for not considering Trump and Hillary the same, for example. Now, one of the things that you have the luck to have done this book right when Joe Kahn gave that interview with Semaphores Ben Smith, and I'm sure you're hearing about it a lot. Let me read what he said so people who haven't heard about it. There are people out there in the world who may decide based on their democratic rights to elect Donald Trump as president. It's pretty clear, but it's not a job the news media to prevent that from happening. It's a job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening. At the end of your book, you wrote, we journalists shouldn't dispassionately observe our way

to authoritarianism. We shouldn't be neutral about upholding democracy. I couldn't tell whether you agreed with Joe Kahn or not. I felt his interview was a little bit boneheaded myself and the way he expressed himself, because it did sound like everybody's equal kind of thing, which they often aren't factually. So explain those two sentences, because you wrote something slightly different in your book. So, I mean, look, I've known Joe Kahn for forever, and I don't... You don't have to insult your boss. It's fine. Oh, he's not your boss. No, no, he's not. But I do think that the

critique of him has been somewhat unfair, and it's been taking, you know, a couple of sentences that he said and suggesting that he, you know, doesn't care about democracy. And so, I think the Times does, you know, does deeply care. And I think he's trying to make this push-pull, you know, provide this context that it's really difficult to figure out where you draw the line and that we don't want to be in the tank for Biden. Now, whether that was said with perfect felicity, you know, look, I don't know, but I do have complete confidence in his ability to provide accountability in the U.S. and abroad. But I do, you know, I do stand by this point that when democracy is at stake, you know, we are not neutral about that. And we have to do a much better job than we did in 2016.

I think we failed the public then. And questions about like, to what extent do you use the word lie? I think that's difficult. I've debated so many New York Times people. I'm like, he's lying. I don't just say lie. You can't say lie.

And I don't know why it was so loaded for some reason. Yeah. I mean, I think I would probably use the word lie less than you, but maybe more than the Times uses it. I mean, I think we should be careful about using terms like that. But I think we should make very clear to the public when people are lying. We'll be back in a minute. built HubSpot. It's an AI powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now it's easier than ever to be a marketer.

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And you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing and makes writing blogs, creating videos and posting on social a breeze. So now it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Every week we get a question from an outside expert. This week we have two. Lucky you. Hi, I'm Lorene Powell and this is the big question I would like to ask

Nicholas Kristof. We spend a lot of time at Emerson Collective tackling the complex challenges of public education. And Nicholas, you often write about how America too often falls short in educating its students. But last year, you chased hope in the Deep South, and you wrote some amazing pieces during your travels to Mississippi, and you reported on the state's extraordinary progress in raising standards and lifting educational outcomes. Can you talk about the success story of Mississippi education? Yeah. You know, Mississippi is the last place you'd expect to be encouraged about anything, last place you'd expect to be encouraged about anything, including education. And yet, it has made remarkable progress, especially in third grade reading. And actually, in third grade math,

it turns out they really focused on third grade reading. But it turns out once you get kids able to read, then they also do much better in math. They just apparently become more excited about school generally. And what is striking about Mississippi's success in those third grade scores is that Mississippi didn't solve child poverty, which is some of the worst in the country. It didn't solve racism, which is also just awful. It didn't provide vastly greater funding. It did improve funding, but not vastly greater. And yet, even with that child poverty, even with racism, it still managed to get kids to read by the end of third grade. And to me, that was just a lesson for the rest of the country that we have no excuse.

When one in seven American kids drops out of school, those kids are cooked. Their kids are cooked. We fail them. They are. They are. You talk about that a lot when you're running for governor. I'll get to that in a second. But like I said, we have two questions here this week. This one is from Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, who I spoke to last fall during the climate change conference. It's great to be with you, Cara and Nick. You're both amazing leaders.

amazing leaders. I guess my question is, what's the best way for those reading your book to move from awareness to action, to actually get involved and make a meaningful difference, whether it's on the immediate foreign policy and security crises we see, or some of the long-term global issues like disease prevalence or global poverty or the treatment of women that you've written about and reported on so faithfully over time? So I would suggest that people not try to solve all problems or even solve one problem, but to find one issue that they deeply care about, maybe because of something in their own background. And in general, I think it's best not to try to, you know, solve, change global policy, but to do something for particular individuals. So, instead of trying to get all girls educated, provide an education for, you know, third

graders in one particular school. There's a group called CAMFED, for example, that gets girls into school. And anybody can support a girl to attend school for a year. And then at least for that kid, it's going to make a real difference. And so whether it's writing a check or whether it's volunteering, I would suggest things that are really targeted

and help individuals. You write in the book how you helped a Chinese dissident, as you know, to get out of China safely. You also bought two women from their brothels in Cambodia to free them. So, you've done that yourself in a lot of ways as a journalist, which is interesting. And raised a lot of eyebrows along the way. Yeah, yeah. Do you care?

Yeah. I mean, some of the things that I did, you know, like buying the two girls from the brothel in Cambodia and taking them back to their families, you know, that is not something that should be generally done because if you buy girls, you're essentially creating a, you know, you're supporting the market for kidnapped girls. So, you know, it worked once to highlight the issue and the fact that I got written receipts for buying human beings was, I mean, that just kind of staggered me. a problem. And, you know, trying to put human faces on these issues so that people don't just think of sex trafficking, but think of, you know, Srinath and Srimam and these two girls times one million. Sure. You're kind of doing the everything's content argument here, but actually, you are an action person. I'm going to push back on you because you... Okay. argument here, but actually, you are an action person. I'm going to push back on you because before we go, I do want to talk about your brief and stunning political career. In 2022,

you ran for governor of Oregon as a response to Trump and the divisiveness in American society. Talk a little about this because, again, you keep doing things, even though you say, I probably shouldn't do those things. And then there you are running for governor. I think I was even like, he's running for what? Like, although I had thought about running for mayor of San Francisco. So, I feel your pain. Yeah. Of not doing enough, right? after I'd written a book about the kids on my old school bus in rural Oregon. And at that point, a quarter of those kids had died of drugs, alcohol, and suicide. Wow. At this point, it's more than a third.

And I was just angry at the way we had failed people in those kind of communities. And angry at the governance in Oregon, at the fact that we had such weak education outcomes, so much homelessness, and so on. And I thought there was a weak field. I was sort of encouraged by some folks to make the plunge. And so, I did. And well, and then it all landed in a belly flop. And I must say, you know, I'd been politics adjacent for so many years, and I kind of thought I knew something about politics. And it was so different from what I'd expected. And my team and I thought, well, okay, Kristof may not know campaign finance.

He may not know the county commissioners around the state, but at least he'll be able to be good at doing interviews. And the one thing I totally screwed up at was interviews. But you almost, you were doing pretty well until the machine kind of shut you down, correct? Yeah, we were, well, we were leading in the polls, I think, because there was just such frustration among the public in the state of the state. And Oregon has a quite dysfunctional campaign finance system in which there are no campaign donation limits. And that very much helped me as somebody who had a national audience and a lot of national supporters. But then the Secretary of State at the time said I did not

qualify on the basis of residency. And so, I was pushed off the ballot. She was then forced to resign in a corruption scandal. That's your favorite part. I love how you make it a note at the bottom. Yeah, a little footnote. FYI. I'm trying not to sound triumphant. It was fine. You should have put it in the body. I'm trying not to sound triumphant. I was, you know, in the— It was fine. You should have put it in the body. I kept thinking that's very funny that you put it there. I mean, I thought about in the acknowledgment saying, you know, this book is only possible because Shamia Fagan kicked me out of the race, so I had time to do this book.

But I thought that would be a little much. Why not? See, now I know you can't. See, I would have done it in a second. I would have put the shiv in her easily. I have just a couple more questions. Do you want to run again? Are you thinking about running again?

Because you ran right back to the time. Yeah. No, it was an amazing experience. I learned a lot. I'm glad I did it. I think it made me a better journalist. It probably made me a little more sympathetic to politicians, perhaps, at least some of them. But I, no, I think I had my fill. I think my wife might kill me if I tried again. And it also, you know, while it was frustrating as a journalist not to be able to actually

do things and solve problems, it also reminded me of my freedom as a journalist to say what I think and piss people off. When I was running for governor, I'd meet groups of donors, Democratic donors in Portland. And of course, we'd be talking about all the problems in Portland. And there'd often be kind of an undercurrent of them wanting me to denounce Republicans for being awful. Yeah. And I kept thinking, you know, you can't blame Portland's problems on Republicans because

there aren't any around here. This is our mess. Yeah, that's correct. We created it. Yeah, yeah. You can't be complex as a politician is what you're saying. You can't be complex. All right, speaking of complex, we have two more questions very quickly.

You touch on AI and journalism and your worries about where it's going. That's sort of my area, obviously, my wheelhouse. But are you confident about journalism going forward? The Times is the lone ship floating around. How do you look at, and they're about to attack with AI, and I can tell you it's going to be a real difficult thing for many, many media companies. I worry about that a lot. And you know infinitely more about this than I do. But we can only function if we have a business model.

The business model has already collapsed for local newspapers around the country. I think it probably will be collapsing for cable TV, et cetera. And AI, I think, is going to be a huge challenge for us all. We let Facebook and Google, et cetera, pillage our content. And I'm afraid that if AI does that too, then the loss will not just be the New York Times shareholders, it'll be the public. And it won't just be the Times. So, I worry about that a lot. Any solutions? So, I think AI is such an enormous threat that I think it comes down to the questions of intellectual property and payment for it. For local journalism around the country,

I would now be in favor of something I never would have supported a decade or two ago, and that is government support. And, you know, we have National Endowment for Arts grants for a local theater troupe. And I think it's far more important that a town have a newspaper than that it have a theater troupe, although it'd be great if it had both. Yeah. Yeah, that's going to go well politically. You have to rely on the kindness of billionaires who got the money from killing off media. You see the irony there, Nicholas? That's where it's going.

It's better to have a billionaire rescue a paper than not to have it rescued at all. Fair. But it's not a great solution at all. No. Anyway, last question. You like to reference eulogies, both the criticisms and the virtues you think will be part of someone's legacy. You're still young, obviously. But if you were writing your own eulogy today, what would you put at the top of those columns, the top criticism, the top virtue, the guy who freed girls from the brothels, shortest gubernatorial campaign of all time, ran a farm and made cider in Oregon. What would be the top criticism, the top virtue?

I think the top professional virtue would be that I really worked very hard to try to use my tools to help address needs. You know, I say professional because, I mean, I think that my – I care, you know, about family and I think we raised three amazing kids, et cetera. But so, somewhere in there, that would be the virtue side. I think criticism that I had a platform of immense power and repeatedly wasn't careful enough, screwed up, was periodically unfair to people, missed stories of enormous consequence, and just bungled an incredibly powerful spotlight. Which you still have, so get to it. Yeah, indeed. Keep chasing that hope.

It's hard to say you bungled. I'm going to give you a big break. Compared to a lot of people, no way. But it's a low bar in some cases. In any case, I really appreciate it. It's a really wonderful book. It really actually gave Karis Fisher hope, which is unusual. It's called Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life.

And by the way, it's beautifully written. Thank you. It's such an easy read in that regard because you're such a terrific writer. And you deserve all the kudos you're getting for it. Thank you so much. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rossell, Kateri Yochum, Jolie Myers, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher, Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, and Kate Furby. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you aren't just stirring the pot, you are adding something

to it. If not, put down that spoon and go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On With Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things. And it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new Reimagine Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, We'll see you next time. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo.

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