Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times' often heroic international journalist, has stuck his inquisitive snout into dangerous situations throughout his career.
But admitting that there's a white reporter's burden in writing about Africa is among the braver things he's done. It's the bold revelation of a messy little secret not so mysterious to those of us in the profession.
In a YouTube post answering reader's questions -- good, interactive idea -- Kristof picked this one: "Your columns about Africa almost always feature black Africans as victims, and white foreigners as their saviors."
After naming some Africans he's mentioned in his columns who are making a difference, he says, "But I do take your point. That very often I do go to developing countries where local people are doing extraordinary work, and instead I tend to focus on some foreigner, often some American, who's doing something there."
Why, if that's not the real narrative arc of the story? Isn't this just reinforcing the Ugly American view of the world, where we're always at the center?
"The problem that I face -- my challenge as a writer -- in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo, is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I'm writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that's the moment to turn the page. It's very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that."
Sometimes I turn the page on those stories myself in a rush to get to Maureen Dowd. But I remember a similar problem covering Central America, where readers often didn't know or didn't care which country was which.
"One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character," Kristof said.
Bridge character? Along with the overuse of "narrative" (see above) in talking about journalism, this is sounding uncomfortably like fiction writing. It's not about made-up prose, though. It's just a reality of our profession that's gotten more acute as digital progress gives the public we serve an increasing role in making up its own mind about what's interesting and happily digestible.
Even those of us who've reported from countries in conflict, but without Kristof's great pedigree for highlighting injustices worldwide, know that there's an imperative that stories need to be readable in addition to being substantial.
In an era of Demand Media, where trending topics and search rankings drive assignments -- often "evergreen" stories about how to bake a cake or buy a house -- this is a more difficult subject than it was when I moved from the Philippines to El Salvador and editor/reader interest plummeted.
The 1980's Philippines during the end of the Marcos era was made for oversimplification and parachute journalism: Most people spoke English, much of the dramatic action unfolded on TV, there was a stereotypical bad guy (Marcos) and equally stereotypical angel (Cory Aquino). The reality was more complicated, of course. But the easy-to-understand overlay drew interested eyeballs really well.
Salvador, which was undergoing its own violent upheaval and was even more of a chess piece in the Cold War era, was just one of those confusing Central American countries. Whose side were we on there? Is that where the Sandinistas are? Are we for them or against them?
Story lengths were halved and it was a rare, bloody day in San Salvador when a piece from there made the front page. But everyone paid attention when a bunch of U.S. Special Forces soldiers got hemmed in at the capitol's Sheraton, surrounded by leftist guerrillas during a military offensive. I'm sure I squeezed the hell out of that harder than I did another failed-land-reform expose.
It does make you think about context and framing and who you choose to write your story around. This is one of many on-the-ground realities for war correspondents. Things like information trade-offs in tropical jungles or the cool courtyard of embassies, decisions made under threat of bodily harm -- all sorts of situational circumstances where you might bend a rule or two in the pursuit of telling the tale -- do happen. Angling a story to make it more readable isn't a sin.
(Reporters covering obscure budget issues or dense business theory may face the same problem, though the stakes are usually lower.)
In the past, giving people what they want wasn't on the table. Our Higher Calling disease compelled us to tell our audiences what was important whether they were interested or not. Those days are over. Yahoo just announced a new news blog, The Upshot, which involves quality reporters but still relies on computerized topic assessments to provide the leads.
And simpler is better in an adrenalized, multi-tasking world, especially in a culture conditioned by Walt Disney.
Now, even for pros like Kristof, it can be a very black-or-white thing. Who doesn't grasp an evil, non-white foreign government oppressing its people vs. a white knight from a hometown near you?
So what's the solution? Do we have to dress the Yanks in lifts and halos to make our stories readable?
NYTPicker, the spicy blog often critical of the Times, isn't sure itself. While reverential about Kristof ("praised by presidents and world leaders for his compassionate and determined effort to help the destitute"), a post on him does note a view that he displays, at times, a "condescending superiority" over the suffering characters in his column.
But by freely admitting his slant, Kristof has provided something else the crowd says it wants these days: transparency.
Kristof should "push himself to question his ongoing narrative," Timespicker says, and "put aside his homegrown American heroes in favor of richer yarns" about locals.
Ah, but the richer yarn part is the problem. Richer for whom? Can Kristof get Lindsay Lohan in that Eastern Congo story somewhere?
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Can't read the language of Egyptian mummies
An' a fly go a moon
And can't find food for the starving tummies
Pay no mind to the youths
Cause it's not like the future depends on it
But save the animals in the zoo
Cause the chimpanzee dem a make big money
This is how the media pillages
On the TV the picture is
Savages in villages
And the scientist still can't explain the pyramids, huh
Evangelists making a living on the videos of ribs of the little kids
Stereotyping the image of the images
And this is what the image is
You buy a khaki pants
And all of a sudden you say a Indiana Jones
An' a thief out gold and thief out the scrolls and even the buried bones
Some of the worst paparazzis I've ever seen and I ever known
Put the worst on display so the world can see
And that's all they will ever show
So the ones in the west
Will never move east
And feel like they could be at home
Dem get tricked by the beast
But a where dem ago flee when the monster is fully grown?
Solomonic linage whe dem still can't defeat and them coulda never clone
My spiritual DNA that print in my soul and I will forever Own Lord
In the age of a Black president, many have questioned, would Blacks cover pres Obama without bias. I have never in my life hear whether Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush were ever going to be covered by the White media without bias. Double, trouble standard? You bet.
Same is true for the poor.
The media used to be closer in wage to middle class and working class people. Today, Katie Couric, pulls in 15M. Williams, 10M, Matthews 5M. Smith 8M, etc. Has any one in your profession asked them how that big of a salary color their bias? No.
Then to your main point about Africa.
Same thing there. Most of the people in journalism have zero roots to Africa. They have very little association to Black folks in general. Why would their interest be in Africa? Indeed, why?
Look at coverage of issues on TV/Cable and print.
Poverty, not covered. Housing problems, homelessness, inequalities, unemployment, health care, etc.
None of these and many issues get covered.
Why, just like the saying, you are what you eat, goes. So too is applicable here.
If it is about us, regardless of affiliation, then it becomes a concern.
The media cares about the climate. It affects them. They travel. They see how it might impact them.
Africa, Poverty, Political civility(only how to gin up enmity and ratings)==important coverage.
The vast majority of Kristof’s pieces do not feature white savors. More often, his heroes and heroines are from the countries he’s reporting in. He has a series of op-eds about sex slaves working in brothels in Cambodia. He features the brave women who escape from these horrors only to fight to free more women. Nick has a knack for showing horrible situations in a positive light by featuring local people who are working to better the situation. (Again, this could be an attempt to increase readability of his important subjects. It’s hard for Americans to read such sad and depressing stories all the time, but by interjecting some positive stories, he leaves the reader with hope).
I don’t believe negative press stifles investment. Investors do not (or should not if they know anything about business) make important business decisions based on some reporter’s op-eds. They do their own research, hopefully visit the country they’re interested in, and take away their own truths about the region. Besides, to say that Kristof “never reports” on positive or realistic story isn’t true. But I agree he should do more.
Take care and keep caring about Africa. When's your next visit?
Sounds like good advice, from a well-known author to the lesser-known.
The problem is not Kristof, but the American public in general. The reality is that journalists cover what the American people wish to read, and American people in general do not care about Africa, Eastern Europe, or SouthEast Asia. They only care about regions which affect them, like China, Mexico, or "old" Europe. So what you get are people like Kristof, whose job is to convince people his own point of view, being the default news source because Kristof's pieces are the only source of opinion around certain issues.
IMO the bigger problem with journalism lies in areas where news reporters write articles like Op-Eds. This is more rare on domestic reporting in the US because there are people from both sides who will scream whenever they do detect bias. However when you read stories about say, Tibet, almost all Western reporters will focus on the plight of the Tibetans rather than the Han Chinese and blame the later for all of the problems in the region.
What Africa needs most is fair trade and investment. For that to happen, it needs potential investors to have an accurate view of the investment risks, which means an accurate journalistic picture. Kristoff does not supply that. Kristoff writes "narratives" with "interesting characters" designed to keep readers from turning the page. Africa is big and diverse, and Kristoff perpetuates a stereotype of Africa as a homogenous zone of war, rape, want and suffering.
On a statistical level, if he wanted to produce journalism about "typical" Africa, he would be writing about Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya -- not because they're happier than Congo, but because that's where the Africans are. It is sometimes estimated that one in four sub-Saharan Africans is a Nigerian -- obviously not as big geographically as Sudan and Congo, which are sparsely populated by comparison, but Nigeria is the giant in the room in terms of population. In terms of economic activity, he should be focusing on South Africa. I can now see the strategy of the South Africans in hosting the World Cup for weeks they caused images of sports crazy, urban working and middle class (and poor) Africans in a middle income developing country to be beamed around the world.
I don't think we honestly get very good reporting about goings-on on the African continent, one reason being that people are generally preoccupied with goings-on at home. When something is going on, half a world away, you don't really have as much concern for it as if it was going on next door or in your front yard. And, maybe, we should be more concerned with next door, and the front yard, because one tendency of the news world is to go and try and mind everyone else's business overseas, while we neglect our own. And that is a mistake. There's lots of poverty and hardship stories right here in the US. Will they have saviors, or whatever?
The resources of Africa that you are about to lose access to are far greater than all of the oil in the Middle East. Wake up those in power in the West before the whole of the continent of Africa will be in the sphere of influence of China. Africa is the new frontier.
But, just occasionally, I find him to be a little out-of-touch. One example: I follow him on Facebook, and a few weeks ago, he posted a question for all his followers about a video that he had shot in Africa. Basically, he was worried that some Americans might be offended by seeing images of naked African women and children in the video, and he wanted to know if he should include these images or not, and if so, if he should include a warning to go with the video.
To me, that was just such a ridiculous thing to ask. If I were shooting such a movie, my first concern would be: what are the ethics of filming these images? Were the subjects of the movie okay with being filmed in this way? Did they know and fully understand how these images could be appropriated?
Images of frail-looking, naked African children are such loaded images and are appropriated for all kinds of things in the West. For Kristof to not question this, and only be concerned with whether Western audiences might be offended seemed to me a really careless attitude. Sort of like ugly American tourists who go to third-world countries and snap images of starving children, as if they were souvenirs.
Good comments. Thanks for posting about his Facebook video re Africa. Did'nt know.
It is "such a ridiculous thing to ask" ...... But we dont think Kristof gets that.
Nor your last question: "Did they know and fully understand how these images could be appropriated?"
It is not just Americans, but Other White Folk as well who "go to third-world countries and snap images of starving children, as if they were souvenirs."
Exactly that - "as if they were souvenirs." Perfectly put.
Like most of his peers @ the NYT & even in the MSM, Kristof is an Egg, full of him self and seeks to extend his sell by date.On centre stage. But there are others now, over there, on centre stage too, others from whom the World is clamouring to hear.
Few of us have a stomach for the same old media messages from the same ol journalists, their papers, publishers and owners. As for the "transparency" Bronstein thinks we want - Their heads are transparent now and we're looking right through them: There's nothing inside. Empty.
Cheers~