How can journalism make people care and bring about solutions? What role does storytelling play in shining a light on injustice and crises and creating a catalyst for change?
Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
You've been to 170 countries, and in your book Chasing Hope, you've written on the value of witnessing the world's atrocities, neglected conflicts, human rights abuses, and how you then turn these into stories that will call on people to act. How do you find your way into a story?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
So the backdrop of Chasing Hope came when I was trying to cover the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. I was making these trips and reporting on the horrific massacres, and it just felt as if these columns were just disappearing without a ripple. At the same time in New York City, all of Manhattan was up in arms about these two hawks that had been pushed out of an apartment building where they had a nest because the building didn't like their bird droppings. And I thought, “how is it that I can't generate the same outrage people feel for these two homeless hawks for hundreds of thousands of people? What's wrong with my writing? Why can't I connect with people on these issues?” So that led me to the work of what makes us care. And one of those lessons is that it's an emotional process—an emotional connection not a rational one—you have to tell stories about individuals. I'm always going out to find not just an individual story, but the most compelling story—somebody that people can relate to.
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And I wonder what role growing up in a small town (Yamhill, Oregon) played in the kind of journalist you’ve become? You get to know almost everyone in the town, I imagine, and you can see behind their stories in a way and all sectors of society that we might not get in big cities where we have this tunnel vision and stick with our groups?
KRISTOF
Growing up in a tiny town very much affected my journalism and how I see the world, in the sense that it always felt to me that national media establishments neglect small towns like mine, people like those around me, and the issues that concern us. An example is addiction—we've got more than 100,000 people a year dying from overdoses, including many of my old friends, and I don't think that America has come to terms with that adequately. When we try to cover what is happening in other countries, we go to the capital, talk to officials, and typically talk to university educated men who speak English, but that's a pretty tiny slice. That has encouraged me to talk to other people to understand what is happening more broadly.
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And you talk about the personal emotional stories, and I wonder how do you protect yourself emotionally—how do you keep your empathy in check, skepticism, critical thinking or neutrality, in these emotionally charged situations when you might be meeting warlords or covering human trafficking and witnessing these terrors? You begin Chasing Hope going down in a small plane in the heart of the Congo Civil War. With so much going on, how do you remain clear minded in those situations and also, journalistically, how do you develop that courage and strength?
KRISTOF
In writing Chasing Hope, I self diagnosed myself with a mild case of PTSD. It's probably parallel to an emergency room physician who is surrounded by trauma victims, but you have to create some distance from that pain just to get through the day. Where my armor breaks down is in particular where children are involved or where somebody that I am close to, such as my interpreter, has been in jeopardy and I fear that I’ll put somebody at risk. Every now and then unexpectedly, I’ll interview somebody and find myself completely tearing up.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
And I'm just wondering about all the places that you've been. What are some of those things that still haunt you?
KRISTOF
June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square in China is certainly high on that list. I was the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times and had covered the Tiananmen democracy movement. It had seemed so full of hope, but that terrible night, I heard that the troops were busting through student lines and headed toward Tiananmen. I rode my bike and got to Tiananmen Square a little bit before the troops did. And then they arrived and opened fire on the crowd that I was in. I was terrified. To watch a modern army turn weapons of war on unarmed protesters—that changes you. Frankly, at first, I was a little bit disdainful of some of the less educated protesters at Tiananmen, and I wrote periodically that although they say they're for democracy, they can't define the kind of democracy they're in favor of. That night, though, it was those uneducated workers and peasants who were driving their rickshaws out whenever there was a pause in the firing to pick up bodies of kids who'd been killed or injured, who blocked the troops. One bus driver saw troops coming in trucks, so he parked his bus across the road to keep the trucks away and turned off the engine. Then when the officer pointed his firearm at him and demanded he move the bus, he just hurled the keys into the high grass. People like that might not have been able to define democracy, but they were willing to risk their lives for it. And I think there's a lot we can learn from the courage and commitment of people like that whom I witnessed in June 1989.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes, that coverage was so moving, and so were those other books that you've co-authored with your wife, Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes, Thunder from the East, Half the Sky, among others. And you were the first married couple to jointly receive a Pulitzer for journalism. How do you work together to jointly tell a story?
KRISTOF
It's funny because people always ask that question, and there's a little bit of a hint of how do you guys write books together and stay married? We also have three kids, and the truth is that if you can raise kids together and stay married, a book is a piece of cake. It really is. And you know, you put a manuscript down at night. It stays down. A manuscript can't play you off each other. At the end of the day, if you screw up on a manuscript, it's only a manuscript. It's not like screwing up on a kid. More seriously, it helped to have Sheryl and me working on these things together.
China, after Tiananmen, was a somewhat dispiriting time. We were tailed a lot. We dealt with really tough ethical decisions, and it really helped to have somebody who was engaged in this business who understood the risks. We could talk through some of these questions about what our moral responsibilities were to our sources and to our readers.
When we wrote Half the Sky about empowering women around the world, if it had been just a woman writing that book, it would have been marginalized as just a woman's issue. And it would have been weird if it had been just a man writing it, but I think a man and a woman addressing gender inequity together underscores that this is an issue that affects all of us, whatever our sex. And that we all have to get to work to try to address it. So, it's been a wonderful partnership.
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You also describe your early posting as New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong during a kind of golden age of print journalism where you had more time to explore, whereas now, with the attention economy and clickbait, so much has changed. What are your reflections on the future of journalism?
KRISTOF
Traditionally, newspapers were often monopolies or oligopolies, and so they were making money and perfectly fine being committed to covering important things that readers weren't terribly interested in. That business model has collapsed for local journalism around the country. We're losing an average of two and a half newspapers each week around the country, and we've lost more newspaper journalists than we have coal miners over the last decade. In terms of national, international coverage, The New York Times still has a good business model. The Washington Post has a business model in the sense that Jeff Bezos has a large checkbook. The Wall Street Journal is doing okay, but the newsweeklies are collapsing, and television is struggling. There are still reporters covering the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, but you don't have many reporters covering what's probably the world's biggest humanitarian crisis right now—the famine in Sudan. It's just like how Yemen wasn't getting much coverage when it was the biggest crisis. I think that's fundamentally because it's expensive and dangerous to cover those kinds of international stories, and there's not much of an audience for it. Once, I did back-to-back columns about the Yemen humanitarian crisis and Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court. The Kavanaugh piece—I could whip off in a few hours, while the Yemen piece resulted from an expensive, dangerous trip to Yemen. But the Kavanaugh piece got seven times as many page views, so you can understand why an executive producer wouldn't want to send a camera crew to Yemen when they can just put a Democrat and a Republican in a studio together and have them yell at each other.
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Your writing has inspired Bill and Melinda Gates to focus their philanthropy on global health. Robert DeVecchi, the former president of the International Rescue Committee, said your coverage of the genocide in Darfur saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Considering the changing face of journalism, how can we continue to be a catalyst for positive change?
KRISTOF
I hope that we come up with a solid business model for journalism. I'm actually planning a trip to Sudan right now and it will probably lose money for The Times, but they're willing to send me to cover pieces that maybe only my mother and wife will read. We need a better business model for journalism as a whole. I think that there may be ways for journalists to partner with aid groups and think tanks around the world to cover crises.
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Your parents were educators, and you've also created mentorship programs where you've taken young journalists on the road with you to help bring them along that pathway toward journalism. You've been an outspoken advocate for education reform. What are your reflections on education, and how can we improve our education models to prepare people not just for the jobs of the 21st century but to be more engaged global citizens?
KRISTOF
If you look over the last 500 years or so, the best metric to predict where society will be in 30 or 50 years, the best metric is simply education today. One reason I think the U.S. is the world's largest and most successful economy today is that, beginning in the 19th century and through about 1970, the U.S. led the world in mass education. And what matters is not so much elite education. Britain had Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, and it had better elite education, but it wasn't great at mass education. And the U.S. really was. We were the first country to have almost universal literacy, male and female. We were the first country to have widespread high school attendance and the first country to have significant college attendance. And then, beginning in about the 1970s, we lost that lead. And now, there are many countries that are way ahead of us. I think back to my old classmates who are now dead, and I think: What were adults thinking in the 1970s that they let them drop out? And yet, I think today: What are adults thinking in 2024 when they let one in seven American kids today drop out of high school and let so many emerge from the school system not literate, not numerate, completely unprepared for the 21st century?
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Yes. And for somebody who's always gone out into the world, who's derived their knowledge from one-on-one to understanding what it is in the world, what are your reflections on how AI is changing the way we communicate with ourselves, our imagination, and journalism itself? How can we prepare everyone, especially young people, for these uncertain futures?
KRISTOF
There have been some alarming experiments that show AI arguments are better at persuading people than humans are at persuading people. I think that's partly because humans tend to make the arguments that we ourselves find most persuasive. For example, a liberal will make the arguments that will appeal to liberals, but the person you're probably trying to persuade is somebody in the center. We're just not good at putting ourselves in other people's shoes. That's something I try very hard to do in the column, but I often fall short. And with AI, I think people are going to become more vulnerable to being manipulated. I think we're at risk of being manipulated by our own cognitive biases and the tendency to reach out for information sources that will confirm our prejudices. Years ago, the theorist Nicholas Negroponte wrote that the internet was going to bring a product he called the Daily Me—basically information perfectly targeted to our own brains—and that's kind of what we've gotten now. A conservative will get conservative sources that show how awful Democrats are and will have information that buttresses that point of view, while liberals will get the liberal version of that. So, I think we have to try to understand those cognitive biases and understand the degree to which we are all vulnerable to being fooled by selection bias. I'd like to see high schools, in particular, have more information training and media literacy programs so that younger people can learn that there are some news sources that are a little better than others and that just because you see something on Facebook doesn't make it true.
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Exactly. There's checks and balances, so it is important to understand fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. You said your experience in China helped you have a certain respect for the mechanisms of capitalism, even though it doesn't work perfectly, and it hasn't worked perfectly in terms of how we are stewards of the planet. This you've seen from your travels around the world, these decisions that cause ecological degradation because we're not seeing further down the line to the future. I know that maintaining ecological balance is important for you. You have practical working knowledge since you were raised on a farm and to this day you and your family run a 25-acre farm in Yamhill, Oregon. What, in your view, is holding us back from moving forward on environmental issues?
KRISTOF
I think that the problem is a classic economic problem of tragedy of the commons—the fact that any one country is going to benefit if other countries reduce carbon emissions but is going to suffer when it itself does means there's always a tendency to want other countries to lead the way. Since the industrial revolution began, the US point of view is that we can't get anywhere unless India and China reduce carbon emissions, while India and China say if you look over the last one hundred years, the US is the one who put out all the carbon, and we're just finally getting a little bit richer and you want to cut us off at the knees.
There are arguments to be made on both sides, but the fundamental impediment is that 10 years ago, it just seemed really hard to see how we were going to get out of climate change and disastrous consequences, but right now, if you squint a little bit, you can maybe see a path through this period where we reduce carbon emissions enough to figure out how to navigate our way to a future in which things work and we pay a price, but one that is manageable. Green energy is becoming much cheaper because of a revolution in battery technology, and now there are possibilities for a field-like energy generated by waves or fusion nuclear power to remove carbon from the air with direct air capture. We're not sure that these will work, but they may, and they would really be revolutionary. China is an interesting example of a country that has made remarkable progress on electrification and battery technology. It is still pushing out a ton of carbon, but it has done this for practical reasons—it understands that those are key technologies for the future and whoever figures out how to get electric vehicles done right, whoever figures out how to get battery technology right, the world is going to benefit from their progress in battery technology, just as the world has benefited by having solar panels made in China go up all over the world.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
You know, we're so glad that Chasing Hope allows us to understand some of these backstories that make or don't make the cut when you're writing an article, but how do you narrow that down when there's so many fascinating details to what would be the most poignant to bring across the essence of the story?
KRISTOF
That's the perpetual challenge of storytelling. It's what Homer was wrestling with 800 years ago and what we wrestle with today. But I think one of the lessons of storytelling is that you pick the elements that will move a reader. In my case, I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
And as you think about the future, those teachers who have been important to you, and the importance of storytelling, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
KRISTOF
I think a lot of young people today are focused on what might be called résumé qualities. I was proud to be the youngest foreign correspondent at the Times and then youngest national correspondent, winning a Pulitzer, these kinds of things, but overtime, I came to see more importance and reward in finding a purpose, finding meaning, paying it forward, and giving back—the eulogy qualities, the kind of things people say when they remember you, not the résumé qualities. It's the importance of finding friends, emphasizing family, and doing things that give you that sense of fulfillment and meaning, keep you going, and give you a cause larger than yourself to hold on to. I, too, am not sure I got it at the beginning of my career, so I think it's maybe hard for young people to grasp, but that is the advice I would offer.
