The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - A Reporter's Love Letter to Journalism

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times. His gripping new memoir, "Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life," takes us behind the headlines of some of the most defining events of our lives, including the Tiananmen Square protests, genocide in Darfur, a civil war in Yemen, and closer to home, the addiction and despair faced by working-class America.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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His gripping new memoir, Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, takes us behind the headlines of some of the most defining events of our lives, including the Tiananmen Square protests, genocide in Darfur, a civil war in Yemen, and closer to home, the addiction and despair faced by working class America. And all that brings Nicholas Kristof back to our airwaves tonight from his farm in Yamhill, Oregon. And Nick, it's great to see you again. How are you doing? Great to be with you again. Thanks for having me. A pleasure. I want to start at the very beginning here and take you back to eighth grade at Yamhill Grade School. And the notion then that you might someday become a writer slash journalist because you were

interested at that time in overthrowing the patriarchy. Tell us that story, if you would. So the little country school that I went to, Yamhill Grade School, had a rule that boys could wear blue jeans, but girls could not. And so as a editor of our little grade school newspaper, I championed their cause. And I and sure enough, the the school changed the rules to allow girls to wear blue jeans. I was pretty, pretty caustic in my editorial. And I this was my entry into journalism. I was so impressed. This was a way to meet girls, to impress eighth grade girls, and as you say, to overthrow the patriarchy. And change the world in the process, eh? That's where it all started? It really is. And, you know, it was a window, you know, more seriously into the

ability of journalism to project issues onto the agenda and get people to think about injustices, whether it's genocide in Darfur or eighth grade girls not being able to wear blue jeans. You know, I read the account in your book very carefully, and I'm still astonished that a guy from rural Oregon ends up at Harvard and Oxford. How does that happen? Well, I mean, to be truthful, it probably involved a certain amount of affirmative action. I mean, I suspect that Harvard was probably okay with getting a farm kid from the middle of nowhere to diversify its class. And, you know, they had no idea whether my school was any good. And I, you know, I was happy to

benefit from that. And then once I was at Harvard, then it was easier to get a Rhodes scholarship. that. And then once I was at Harvard, then it was easier to get a Rhodes Scholarship. And, you know, luck kept compounding for me one after the other, even as bad luck kept compounding for some of my neighbors here as good jobs went away, meth arrived, and so on. You did move up the ladder at The New York Times and have covered some of the most incredible events that we have seen. And let's start with the Tiananmen Square protests and massacres in June of 1989. How close do you think you came to being killed yourself during that time? Too close. I was in that crowd that the troops opened fire on. And, you know, most people in the crowd weren't killed, but plenty were. And you just never forget seeing a modern army turn its weapons of war onto unarmed protesters.

And I've got to say that it, you know, that left a deep impression on me, but something else left a deep impression on me that night. disdainful, a little condescending to some of the peasants from the countryside who had joined the democracy protests on the basis that, well, they say they're for democracy, but they can't really define democracy. They don't know what institutions they want and so on. You know, there was an element of truth to that. But that terrible night when the troops opened fire, it was those uneducated peasants, less educated workers who took their rickshaws and every lull in the firing, they drove out toward the troops and picked up the kids, the bodies of the kids who'd been killed or injured, and then frantically peddled them to the hospitals. And they may not have been able to define democracy, but they were willing to risk their

lives for it. And, you know, these days risk their lives for it. And, you know, these days, as American democracy is under pressure, I think that there's a lot that we can learn from their courage and persistence to try to get that democracy. Harvard's Michael Sandel is a friend of yours, and we've had him on this program many times. And we've talked about the fact that one of the great divides in your country, to a lesser extent in ours, but to a great extent in your country today, is this educational divide. There is a snootiness among educated people to look down on the people who very much make our societies run and work. Why does that persist?

I think it's because those who frame the agenda and act on it, including journalism, you know, we tend to be from that educated elite. And so, look, I mean, I spent I spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan covering those wars and they were really important issues. I'm glad I did. But every two and a half weeks, we lose more Americans to drugs, alcohol, and suicide than we lost in 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I don't think that we in journalism, I don't think elected officials, I don't think the public has come to grips with a heartache in so many homes and towns across the country, nor have we provided the resources to deal with the tragedy at this level. And, you know, I think it's very easy for intellectuals to complain that working class folks are turning to conspiracy theories, are turning to demagogues. And that's true. But that is in part because we fail them. And I think we have to look in the mirror as well as look at their own look at their failings.

have to look in the mirror as well as look at their own look at their failings. I should circle back to China for just a second, because I know that you talked to people at the time who thought democracy coming to China was an historical inevitability. And here we are 35 years later. And I don't know anybody who thinks democracy coming to China is an inevitability. Does anybody there still believe democracy is going to happen someday? Oh, yeah, I think I think they think it will happen someday. But no, nobody's going to put a timetable on that. And, you know, that's kind of how I feel. I mean, I, you know, I've seen I've covered democracy movements all over the world from, you know, Poland and early 1980s, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia. And what I've learned is in the short run, when you have people of principle going against people with machine guns, you know, the machine guns are likely to prevail. class. They aspire to, just as they choose among five different kinds of coffee at a coffee shop, also to help choose the kind of governance that affects their lives. And I think that will come

to China. I think it will come to Russia. But when, I have no idea. One of the things that we've learned doing this program over the years is that we can spend a lot of time doing subjects that are important and not that many people will watch them. And Afghanistan is a great example. We had Canadian troops there for 20 years. And every time we did a program on Afghanistan, our ratings went down. We still did them because we thought it was important. But OK, you know what I'm getting at here. You have the same problem in private media at The New York Times. You want to write about a column about some very worthy things and places that you've covered. And the bean counters at The New York

Times are not thrilled with your notion of duty in those cases. What do we do about that? I mean, I should, first of all, defend the bean counters. They've been very willing to let me go cover stories like the Yemen humanitarian crisis, like Darfur, and write columns that pretty much only my mother reads. But we do have a broader problem that the business model for an awful lot of that media is collapsing, and everybody has better metrics to gauge the audience, and it's becoming more clear that you know audiences aren't so don't care so much about these stories that are expensive to cover it's not as dangerous

to cover and so i think that part of the answer is going to be philanthropic funding in some cases i think that in i mean this isn't so much international funding, but in terms of local journalism, I think that there may be some government support that will come through to help local newspapers just stay alive. Right now in the U.S., two newspapers are going bankrupt every week. public will also hold our feet to the fire, our feet as news organizations, and make sure that we cover really important stories, even if they don't have a built-in audience, and push us to try to tell these stories in engaging ways that will help get a few more readers. They are important. If we don't cover them, they just won't get addressed. I do want to take you back to April of 1997 and the moment in a plane that is about to crash that you are in. And you decide at that moment you need to write a farewell note to your wife because you think you are about to die. What was in that note?

I, you know, in the end, I tried to I took out my notebook and tried to write something, tried to write that farewell. But I couldn't think of something kind of loving and inspiring that kind of fit the moment. I was really too terrified. But I think, you know, but what I should say is just that correspondents and photographers, you know, we take risks. But adrenaline keeps us going. And it's our spouses, it's our children who really pay a price for that. And, you know, Cheryl, my wife, she put up with me disappearing into war zones. I have a little bit of spousal advice for your audience, too. You know, right after the plane crash in Congo, I pulled out my satellite phone.

I called up Cheryl, who was then in the Tokyo Bureau of the New York Times. We were based in Tokyo. And I just reassured myself that, you know, she's there. But I didn't want to tell her that I'd just been in a plane crash. I thought, that's what you wait until you're safe and sound sitting opposite your spouse and tell her then. That's what you wait until you're safe and sound sitting opposite your spouse and tell her then. And then we hung up and then I had to tell the New York Times foreign desk in New York about the crash. And then an hour later, somebody from the New York Times in New York was speaking to Cheryl and said, that's terrible about Nick's plane crash.

I was so busted. The lesson I offer is that it's important to be completely transparent to your spouse, even about plane crashes in Congo. You got scooped by your own newspaper. I did. You did. Well, do you want to tell us? I mean, this is the craziest story I read in your whole book. The notion why you were in that plane to begin with, why you were crashing and why there was half a body hanging off the plane.

You want to tell that story? Yeah, so there was a, this is an aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. There was an enormous humanitarian crisis building in the Democratic Republic of Congo, well, actually it was then Zaire. And ultimately, you know, five million people would die in that civil war in Zaire slash Congo.

It's the most lethal conflict since World War II. And so the UN chartered a plane to carry, I think it was 18 journalists, into the heart of Congo to cover that. We had a crazy American pilot who was taking this small plane and he landed in Goma in eastern Congo. And there was this, you know,

there's not a lot of entertainment in Congo. So there was this enormous crowd of people playing chicken with a plane on the runway. We just landed and they parted. Then we did some business in Goma. An hour or two later, we got to the end of the runway. The pilot took off and again, the crowd reassembled. And then he thought they were all going to part. One this had collapsed the right landing gear. It had broken the cables that carry hydraulic fluid, the pipes that carry hydraulic fluid.

So we lost control of the plane. He didn't want to try to land where he had just killed somebody. And that's how we ended up, you know, crashing in a field. And it, you know, it does underscore just how so much of journalism is actually getting to the story, trying to figure out how you get there. And then, of course, equally important, get back. But I presume that was one of many, many, many moments in your career where you asked yourself, what the hell am I doing here and what is going on? Fair to say? Yeah, that's fair to say. I mean, I remember when the Tiananmen massacre was happening and I was pedaling frantically on my bicycle through these tank

traps to get to the massacre ahead of me and crowds were streaming in the other direction. I was thinking, what kind of a crazy job is it that has me peddling frantically toward gunfire when everybody in his right mind is peddling away? That's journalism. Well, let me follow up on that, because you point out in the book you've taken a lot of risks, maybe come, you know, you haven't crossed the line, but you've sure snuggled up close to it in taking personal risks to get the story out. Is there ever a story that you've covered that you felt was worth dying for? Not worth dying for, but taking risks that might end up with death.

Yeah, I mean, the Darfur genocide was something that hundreds of thousands of people were being killed. Women were being raped en masse and then mutilated so that they would be forever scarred and stigmatized as rape victims. And this was a government that was, you know, organizing a militia to target three specific ethnic groups. I visited villages that had been burned, bodies thrown in wells to poison those wells. And I certainly tried to keep myself alive. And of course, when I'm reporting, I'm risking not only my own life, I'm risking my interpreter's life, my photographer's life, my driver's life. And so we have a responsibility to look after them as well. But when you see those massacres and that kind of genocide,

then you want to fight back with everything you have and my tools to fight back are my laptop and my camera. And so I fight. Understood. Nick, get comfortable for a second because I want to read a couple of excerpts from your book and then we'll come back with a question. 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. That's risky, I know. It can backfire and undermine journalistic credibility, for one journalist's moral purpose is another's megalomaniacal crusade. I want to dig a little deeper on this issue of journalistic credibility because you, of course,

go on to describe an incident with Donald Trump, who was visiting the New York Times office at the time. And he said on the record that he was going to impose a 45 percent tariff on all Chinese goods. And you reported it. And then Mr. Trump does what Mr. Trump does. He denied ever having said it. And here's the next excerpt. That's wrong, Trump said. They were wrong. It's the New York Times. They are always wrong. So, you write, we released the audio of Trump calling for the 45% tariff on Chinese goods. While there had been many venal politicians around the world whom I deplored, Trump was unique. He was a con artist. I had never known an American politician so uneducated about policy, so self-absorbed, and so deceitful. so self-absorbed and so deceitful. Okay, how do you fairly cover someone who, in your own words, is so awful and deceitful? So, traditionally in journalism, and as you know, we honor two principles. We try to be fair and we try to convey the truth. And fairness, we attempt to master

by quoting people on each side. And normally that works to project truth, that people can figure out what is going on. But it doesn't always work. And it didn't work in the civil rights era, for example, to quote Martin Luther King Jr. on the one hand and a civil rights leader and a governor like George Wallace on the other.

The public didn't understand where the truth lay. And likewise, I think we in the media in 2016, when Trump was running, I think we let them down. We quoted people on each side. Trump was good for cable television in particular. He brought in eyeballs. And we didn't convey the truth, which was what we knew, which was that he was lying out the kazoo. So how do we do that? You know, I think it's what we do as foreign correspondents when we cover Vladimir Putin,

when we cover Xi Jinping. Now, we quote them. We say that Putin says he isn't invading Ukraine, but that he's engaging in a special military operation, etc. But we also make sure that our audiences understand what Putin is actually doing in Ukraine or what Xi Jinping is doing in terms of domestic repression. And, you know, there's no algorithm that can precisely explain how to do that, But we have our paramount responsibility is to convey the truth to our audiences as we best understand it with a lot of humility about our ability to master that truth. And I think that is going to be a real challenge for the American media this year. Well, okay, let's follow up on that because I take your point of what you're trying to convey there. Let's follow up on that, because I take your point of what you're trying to convey there.

But we don't live in a world where the truth often matters. We live in a world where everybody's got their own version of the truth. And, you know, we only need look at the Trump trial just ended where he's found guilty on 34 counts and his base is even more firmly in his corner. They're more convinced of your culpability in somehow lying about his circumstances. And he may actually have gone up in popularity despite having been found guilty of all those counts. How do we, I mean, this seems like a nonsensical world in which we're living in right now. How do we even navigate these waters? So I think it's hard. And in the short term, you know, we will not be persuasive much of the time. But I have seen that, you know, over time, truth does have a way of rising to the top. I think it

helps when journalists don't come across as disdainful to working class Americans or disrespectful toward people of faith. I think we sometimes lose people for those reasons. I think that, again, kind of goes back a little bit to this gulf between the educated and those who are less educated. So I think, you know, we can try harder. I would like to see, I mean, I think that when there are conservative opinion pieces in the New York Times escorting my own liberal views, I think that when there are conservative opinion pieces in The New York Times escorting my own liberal views, I think they give my liberal views more credibility. I think they actually help me get that message across.

But it's hard. And this year is going to be a particular test of that. I think the best of journalism this year is some of the best that I've ever seen in my life. But the bad journalism out there is as bad as I've ever seen it. Well, you've done some of the best journalism, I'm happy to say. And I want to refer to your latest column for The New York Times, where you offer up this insight about what's going on in the Middle East right now. You write, we think of moral issues as involving conflicts between right and wrong.

But this is a collision of right versus right. Tell us more about what you meant by that. So I look at what Israel has achieved economically and in terms of governance at home, not in occupied territories, but within Israel, at home, not in occupied territories, but within Israel. And it's impressive. And Israeli parents have the right to raise their children without being shelled from Gaza or from Lebanon, without being afraid of car bombs. But Palestinians as well have a right to raise their children without fear of bombs, American-made bombs in many cases, being dropped on them by Israel, having their homes destroyed, their schools attacked. They have the right to their

state as well. And so that's what I mean that, you know, there is this tendency, I think, too often to have people value human rights on the Israeli side of the border or to value human rights on the Gaza side of the border. But unless you care deeply about human rights in both Gaza and in Israel, then you don't actually care about human rights. That is a nuanced view in a world that wants you to take sides. I'll ask the same question. How do we navigate those choppy waters in this kind of world? Well, so it's okay to take sides, but above all, you know, what we need to be is not pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel, but anti-massacre. That's the side that we need to be on. Anti-massacre,

anti-starvation, anti-terrorism, wherever that terrorism comes from, and just have to think above all about the common bonds of humanity that link us all together, whatever our nationality. You offered up a roadmap of 20 different ways to think about the war. I don't know that we've got time for all 20 here, but you want to lay a few on us? I don't know that we've got time for all 20 here, but you want to lay a few on us? Yeah, I mean, I think they all kind of flow from this notion that too often we are devaluing one side or the other. And what we're not focusing on adequately is the humanity of both. And, you know, I've reported a lot in Israel over the years. both. And, you know, I've reported a lot in Israel over the years, Israelis had the right not to be invaded on October 7th and killed and raped by Hamas fighters. And Palestinians, you know,

half of the people in Gaza are under 18. There has to be some presumption that children on both sides of the border are innocent. And while I think Israel had every right to respond militarily in some form after October 7th, I don't think they had the right to starve people in particular. And, you know, in my column, I've run a photo of a child who died from starvation. I think we have to focus above all on practicalities, what is actually going to be more likely to lead to peace down the road in ways that will protect the well-being of people on both sides. And I don't think that is happening right now in Gaza. And also focus on that common humanity and never lose sight that there are, you know, moms and dads and children

on each side who deserve that protection and deserve that respect. In our remaining moments here, Nick, I do want to, I want to follow up on the title of the book, because in spite of the fact that you have seen some of the most miserable, awful things anyone could, you're still chasing hope. You are still optimistic. And I guess I have to find out why that is. I'm glad you asked that because, you know, I am this person who's covered war and genocide and poverty and addiction, but emerges with hope. And partly that is because the backdrop I've seen is material and moral progress that we don't always talk about in journalism, but that is real. There's been an explosion in well-being, a huge reduction in child mortality, in illiteracy. And I think what I've also seen

is that side by side with the worst of humanity, you invariably find the very best. And if I can just give one example, you know, in rural Pakistan, I met this incredible woman, Mukhtar Mai, who had been sentenced by a village council to be gang raped for an offense that her brother supposedly had committed. This village council carried out that sentence. They gang raped her, expecting that Mukhtar would then kill herself out of shame. And instead, Mukhtar prosecuted her attackers. She sent them to prison and she used compensation money to start the first school in her village because she believed that education was the best way to chip away at the misogyny and violence that led to her rape. And you just can't leave this little village of Mirwala in Pakistan and talk to Mukhtar and see the children of her attackers enrolled in that school

and just not feel fortified by the way we humans, when we are tested, we sometimes are capable of extraordinary resilience and strength and courage and magnanimity. And so the challenges around us are very real. But that is what I hope we can summon to try to address all these challenges around us. That's why I wrote Chasing Hope. You do confess, though, in the book that you have probably suffered some kind of PTSD over the years, having seen what you have seen. And I wonder whether you ever had a moment where you thought the emotional toll of bearing witness to all of this is too much. I can't do this work anymore. So I thought a lot about the toll on my family, on my wife, on my kids. You know, and I worry about that and you have to find a balance.

I mean, you know, I don't want to get killed. I want to get there, but I also want to get back. But when you see the Chinese army mow down protesters, when you see villagers massacred in Sudan, bodies thrown into wells, when you in Myanmar, when you see the Rohingya, you talk to a mom who had her her baby plucked from her arms and thrown into wells. In Myanmar, when you see the Rohingya talk to a mom who had her baby plucked from her arms and thrown into a bonfire, you just feel you've got to fight back in every way you can. And so you keep on going down these roads and trying to find witnesses and trying to take pictures and trying to stay alive while doing it, talk your way through checkpoints. And, you know, imperfectly,

I think it does make a difference. I think journalism matters. Journalism is an act of hope because we think that if we can get that story and project it onto the agenda, it will matter. And not always, but sometimes it does and we end up better for it. Well, then this has got to be my last question.

And I'm going to take you back to Janet Malcolm, the journalist who uttered those very famous words that we're all a bunch. At the end of the day, we're all a bunch of con men preying on people's vanity. There is so much discussion nowadays about the declining trust that much of the public holds journalists in. much of the public holds journalists in. What do you think we have to do to get conservatives to see that there's more than just Fox News, liberals to see that there's more than just MSNBC, and that there can be a credible journalistic ethic that everybody follows? So I do think that politics goes through cycles, and I've seen that in my life after Watergate, for example. I hope that we are now in a fever and that that fever will break, perhaps after Donald Trump loses this fall, if that's what happens. If he's elected, then the fever may continue. that fever may continue. I think, though, that it's not going to be just about journalism. And we have to do a better job, I think, of trying to reduce that disdain we have for working class folks or often for people of religion. But fundamentally, my take is that,

you know, this is an international phenomenon. You're seeing elements of that in Canada. You see elements of that in Europe, in Australia. And I think it's because there are a lot of people who feel disenfranchised, who feel marginalized, who feel that they've lost hope. And that is why addiction is such a huge problem around the Western world. And so I think that the first step has to be to try to provide a business model for a lot of communities around the world that have lost theirs and don't feel that they have a path forward. I think that's partly about figuring out how to create better jobs and partly about giving

people education so that they can compete more effectively in the 21st century. There are just too many young people who emerge without the literacy and the numeracy and the skill set that will enable them to compete. And then they are fodder for conspiracy theories and demagogues and misinformation and disinformation. So that's where I look for the future. Well, Keep Chasing Hope, Nick. It was a great book. Absolutely loved it. Can't recommend it strongly enough. And we're so glad you spent some time with us on TVO tonight. Many thanks. Good to be with you.