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Kristof’s Moralistic Journalism Was Often Full of Holes Ari Paul ([link removed])


NYT: Nicholas Kristof Leaves New York Times as He Considers a Political Run

Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 10/14/21 ([link removed]) ): "I’ve reluctantly concluded that I should try not only to expose problems but also see if I can fix them directly.”

New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Nicholas Kristof has ended a four-decade career of globe-trotting and covering poverty, war and strife. He is choosing to return to his native Oregon, where he grew up on a farm, with an eye toward running for governor as a Democrat (New York Times, 10/14/21 ([link removed]) ).

In his formal announcement, he vowed to tackle “unaffordable housing, weak mental health support and inadequate education” (Oregonian, 10/27/21 ([link removed]) ). In his last column (New York Times, 10/28/21), ([link removed]) Kristof cited the bravery of pro-democracy activists he has covered the world over as inspiration to address the social problems he sees festering in his home state: “I’m bucking the journalistic impulse to stay on the sidelines because my heart aches at what classmates have endured,” he said. He has decided to rise above the supposed disinterest of journalism, he wrote: “It feels like the right moment to move from covering problems to trying to fix them.”

It's indisputable that Kristof stands out in the world of opinion journalism; few with his position have fused commentary with on-the-ground reporting and outright activism. Columnists aren’t expected to do reporting, and the title can be seen as a late-career relief from having to go places and interview regular people. Some at the Times are expected to be more like public intellectuals, like Paul Krugman, commenting on the news rather than uncovering news in the field. Or it’s a chance to advocate for a pet political cause without having to put real energy into doing anything about it. But there is no doubt Kristof feels strongly about injustice, as demonstrated by the 2006 Pulitzer ([link removed]) he won writing about the conflict in Darfur.

And yet his moral compass has sometimes led him astray. Maybe he thinks he can rise above the fray and balance budgets, battle the corporate interests, and grapple with the state’s out-of-control police and fascist street mobilizing. But his journalistic record leaves something to ponder.


** 'A full-on re-evaluation'
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Newsweek: Somaly Mam: The Holy Saint (and Sinner) of Sex Trafficking

Newsweek (5/21/14 ([link removed]) ) cited a column by Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 1/3/09 ([link removed]) ) that presented a false sex-trafficking narrative.

The most glaring and memorable example of this comes from one of Kristof’s pet issues: battling sex trafficking in Southeast Asia. When it was exposed that Cambodian activist Somaly Mam, whom Kristof not only lauded but used as a source, had fabricated much of her life story (Newsweek, 5/21/14 ([link removed]) ), it threw his reporting, advocacy and commentary on the subject into question.

Back when the Times had the ethical clarity to employ a public editor, Margaret Sullivan (6/2/14 ([link removed]) ) noted that because Kristof had portrayed Mam “in an extraordinarily positive light,” and that “a great deal of money has been raised to combat sex trafficking, in part as a result of Mr. Kristof’s writing about Ms. Mam,” Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.”

Eric Wemple of the Washington Post (6/2/14 ([link removed]) ) went further, saying that Kristof’s reporting of Cambodian sex-trafficking deviated so much from what was later uncovered that it “should prompt a full-on New York Times re-evaluation.”

Kristof (Politico, 6/20/14 ([link removed]) ) later admitted that he, like any journalist, could have been misled by sources, but focused on the big picture:

On some of the big issues--the foolishness of the Iraq War, lack of WMD in Iraq, failures in Afghanistan, Darfur, importance of women's rights--I think I've been ahead of the curve.


** 'They don't exploit enough'
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New York Times: Where Sweatshops Are a Dream

Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 1/14/09 ([link removed]) ): "A job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children."

What’s interesting about Kristof’s concern about sex trafficking in the Global South is that he is an avowed fan of Western corporations running brutal working conditions in the Global South, shrugging off efforts by human rights and labor organizations to improve labor conditions. In one dispatch (1/14/09 ([link removed]) ) from Cambodia, he wrote, “The central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough." The alternative is economic backwardness, he asserted.

But the International Labor Rights Forum (4/3/09 ([link removed]) ) responded:

The main problem with Kristof’s argument is that he seems to assume that the goal of the anti-sweatshop movement is to shut down factories where sweatshop abuses take place. In fact, it is understood within the movement that shutting down a factory in the face of a campaign by workers to better their condition is in and of itself a sweatshop condition. Sweatshop activists don’t want workers to lose their jobs. We’re saying that those jobs should be dignified ones, in which workers earn something approaching their fair share of the profits of their labor.

In an article (9/24/00 ([link removed]) ) co-written with his wife, Sheryl Wudunn, Kristof employed a number of rhetorical tricks to excuse his defense of exploitation, the first situating himself as a more worldly elder educating idealistic youngsters: He and Wudunn were outraged at first by sweatshop conditions, but learned to accept them as a pragmatic economic reform in the underdeveloped world.

Then he and Wudunn turn to a “having said that” throat clearing, admitting that sweatshops “house workers in firetraps, expose children to dangerous chemicals, deny bathroom breaks, demand sexual favors, force people to work double shifts” and bust unions, but that these factors are a “clear sign of the industrial revolution that is beginning to reshape Asia.”

You’d be laughed off the stage if you suggested that while slavery in the antebellum South was brutal, it was a clear sign of the growth of large-scale farming necessary to develop the Southern economy. Also, a Western correspondent allows for only two options for the developing world: stay stuck in early post-colonial squalor, or grind through industrial savagery in order to attain modernity.

The idea of Asians having their own agency to find other options is beyond his comprehension, displaying both an imperial mindset where the people of the South can only compete between modes of serving Western capital, but also a kind of naivety that is unbecoming a global journalist.


** 'Bombs can save lives'
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Though he claimed to be "ahead of the curve" on "failures in Afghanistan," Kristof was an early liberal promoter of the US war and occupation there. Twenty years later, the country is worse off than the US military found it. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but back then, Kristof (2/1/02 ([link removed]) ) asserted that “our experience there demonstrates that troops can advance humanitarian goals just as much as doctors or aid workers can,” and “that guns and bombs can save lives as much as scalpels and IV tubes do.”

Part of this perspective is just pollyannaism about the history of US militarism after World War II, but such moralizing about the need for interventionism ([link removed]) gave liberals the impression that if they did not support the War on Terror, then they’d be turning their backs against women’s rights, education and secularism. It’s not a stretch to assume that such rhetoric ungirded the success of the push for the Iraq War as much as jingoistic neoconservatism.


** 'I support education reform'
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NYTL Students Over Unions

Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 9/12/12 ([link removed]) ): "The Chicago union seems to be using its political capital primarily to protect weak performers."

On the home front, Kristof (9/12/12 ([link removed]) ) joined the right in bashing teachers unions in the Chicago teachers' union strike. He asserted even-handedness by saying, “It’s true that the main reason inner-city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty,” but went on to repeat the anti-union line that teachers unions, because they stand up for due-process rights in disciplinary procedures, are out to protect bad teachers at the expense of students. “While the Chicago teachers’ union claims to be striking on behalf of students,” he said, “I don’t see it,” despite the fact that, as The Nation (2/15/21 ([link removed]) ) later reported, “When CTU members struck in 2012, surveys found broad support among parents for the teachers and their union” because the union was mobilizing for investment into education generally, not just teacher salaries.

Kristof (7/15/17 ([link removed]) ) even propped up the privatization of education in Liberia (led in part by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates) to counter the “hostility of American teachers unions and some of their progressive supporters to trials of private management of public schools abroad.” While lauding the expansion of privately run charter schools in New York City, he stated unequivocally (4/23/15 ([link removed]) ), “I support education reform,” which in this context meant opening up public school systems to private-sector management.


** A rough start
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Portland Tribune: New Republic publisher admits conflict endorsing Kristof for Oregon governor

The Portland Tribune (9/27/21 ([link removed]) ) cited a Politico piece (9/3/21 ([link removed]) ) that reported, "Kristof is coordinating closely with political consultant Carol Butler, whose longtime partner, the New Republic publisher Win McCormack, is one of Oregon's biggest Democratic donors."

Sure, every journalist has their shortcomings. But in an age when conservatives paint establishment journalists as out-of-touch globalists who can’t relate to the common citizen, is the image of Kristof swooping in from four decades abroad to save his home state, without any prior electoral experience, the message Democrats want to send to the world?

Kristof is already off to a rough start. Oregon-based editor and publisher Win McCormack (New Republic, 9/16/21 ([link removed]) ) wrote an ode to Kristof’s campaign, touting the journalist’s academic prowess and journalistic travels, but also trumpeting his love of his hometown and devotion to the Oregon underclass. McCormack acknowledged that his “domestic partner, Carol Butler, a longtime political consultant, is assisting Kristof's campaign” only after the article was published (Portland Tribune, 9/27/21 ([link removed]) ).

In the grand scheme of electoral machinations, this is a minor embarrassment, but still feeds into the fear that elite media are intrinsically tied to a class of political operatives cocooned from people outside New York City and Washington, DC. So the Kristofs of the world are helping to create the right-wing populism they say they want to fight against.

Kristof’s brand of soft liberal journalism often rightfully pined for an end to injustice, authoritarianism and poverty, but typically saw privatization and the market as the solutions to those problems. He brushed aside the brutal conditions in manufacturing labor, passing off worker suffering in the Global South as the price of modernization. This was basically a part of the failed Clinton era pivot away from the Democratic base of organized labor toward business interests.

Kristof, like any citizen, should feel free to step out of the media and directly into the political sphere. But his career on the Times opinion page, despite being thought of as the voice for moral crusading, has left quite a bit to be desired from people who care about labor rights and US militarism.
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