Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Nick Kristof:

I walked out of that brothel knowing that I had a good front-page story and that these two girls were going to be dying of AIDS, and it just… I worried that I was exploiting them, getting what I needed, and moving on the same way that so many other people had been exploiting them.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Nick Kristof. He’s a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times. He has spent his career covering some of the most gruesome and cruel human rights abuses and has used his bi-weekly column to shine a light on global poverty, sex trafficking, and public health. Kristof has now published a memoir called Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. The book details his near-death experiences as a foreign correspondent, the many moral dilemmas journalists must navigate, and the lessons he has learned as a chronicler of humanity. Kristof joins me this week to discuss journalistic ethics, the state of his profession, and the responsibility journalists bear as the Fourth Estate. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions. So today, as I’ve done in the past, I want to answer some questions we’ve received from a number of listeners related to trial basics as Trump’s trial comes to a close. So I want to begin with some general thoughts on mostly the prosecution’s closing arguments. Joyce Vance and I discussed the defense’s closing arguments on yesterday’s Insider episode. By the way, a free sample of that conversation is available for Stay Tuned listeners. As Joyce and I discussed, the defense summation was sort of interesting. Todd Blanche made a lot of points, made a lot of hay of the fact as expected, and as would be understandable to anyone, that Michael Cohen is a big fat liar. He called him the MVP of liars. He called him the gloat, the greatest liar of all time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I continue to believe that if there’s a juror who finds not only that Michael Cohen embellished or lied in the past, but embellished and/or lied at this trial, as Todd Blanche claims, that juror can decide to throw out all of Michael Cohen’s testimony altogether, that might be a problem for the prosecution. So given that issue and other issues, the prosecutor in the case, Josh Steinglass, had his work cut out for him. Now, overall, I’ll say the prosecution summation was long but strong. People have been commenting on why it was necessary to have a five-hour summation that will wend into the evening. It’s easy to be an armchair quarterback and to criticize from the sidelines. My opinion is in agreement with the others who say that that summation was a bit too long.

I was texting with a former colleague who said it should have been half the length. But in the main, overall, even if there was some repetition and overly detailed analysis, I think the prosecution got across all the points they wanted to get across. In particular, and as anticipated, the prosecution had to deal with a Michael Cohen problem, right? Michael Cohen had lied before, had lied under oath, and arguably told some falsehoods that the jury could interpret his falsehoods at the trial itself, whether or not a particular phone call took place and what the subject matter was, whether or not he actually wanted to be the chief of staff to Donald Trump, whether or not he took actual responsibility for one of the tax counts he pled guilty to in the Southern District of New York and some other things as well.

And what Josh Steinglass did was to say, among other things, “Look, Michael Cohen is heavily corroborated by all sorts of things, all sorts of documents. In particular, he’s corroborated by what he called the smoking gun documents, Exhibits 35 and 36, that show, per the prosecution, that the payments made to Michael Cohen were not for legal services but rather were a grossed-up reimbursement of the money that Michael Cohen paid out of his own pocket, $130,000, to Stormy Daniels. In fact, this whole case, in large part, comes down to whether or not you believe that Michael Cohen acted alone, was freelancing, was rogue in making that payment, or whether Donald Trump was in on it. And as the prosecutor pointed out, “You know you might not like Michael Cohen. We’re not asking you to like him, we’re not asking you to feel sorry for him, but we didn’t pick him.”

And he said in an oft-quoted phrase, “We didn’t find him at the witness store. Donald Trump picked him to be his fixer, to be his cohort, to be his helper, to be his personal lawyer, right. So in a very real way, don’t blame us. Blame Trump.” That standard operating procedure for prosecutors and summations when they’re dealing with difficult and troublesome and unseemly cooperating witnesses. But he also said, I think in a way that was fairly persuasive, “There were other witnesses here too, a number of them, including people who used to work for Trump who still liked Trump, including David Pecker and Hope Hicks, who, if anything, had an incentive to steer their testimony in a way that would be favorable to Donald Trump. And their testimony was very damaging when put together.”

The prosecutor also pointed out that Michael Cohen was the last witness, and though an important witness, the way he characterized his testimony was for the purpose of context and color and basically urged the jury to focus on all the evidence that didn’t come out of Michael Cohen’s mouth. Those documents I mentioned, the testimony of other people about what is the central premise that Michael Cohen and Donald Trump were in on it together to mask this payment to Stormy Daniels in order to influence the election. That’s the whole case. And I think Josh Steinglass did a pretty great job in talking about all the reasons why that narrative that Donald Trump knew is better than Todd Blanche’s narrative that Donald Trump did not know that Michael Cohen was acting on his own. First of all, as he pointed out, it accords with common sense, right, and all the other facts you know about the case.

Michael Cohen, as Hope Hicks testified, knows… and as was emphasized in the summation, “Michael Cohen is not a charitable person. He doesn’t do something for nothing.” And as Todd Blanche himself pointed on his summation to make a different point, “Michael Cohen had been screwed before in terms of money in connection with his 2016 bonus they didn’t get from Donald Trump.” So the track record here was that Michael Cohen often wasn’t made whole. So the idea that he would’ve paid this money out of his own pocket after requiring a home equity mortgage loan, and he would do it on spec with the risk that Donald Trump famously cheap, famously stingy, famously micromanaging in his personal affairs, and his personal expenses, might one day give him some benefit in the future, defies logic, common sense and everything you know about the character of the players involved.

And the prosecutor also pointed out some of the most devastating evidence that these payments were not for legal services but were reimbursements. What was that evidence? Donald Trump, he didn’t testify at the trial, but his prior statements are admissible as admissions against interest in the trial. And Donald Trump in 2018, both in a tweet and in a media interview, said that these payments were reimbursements to Michael Cohen. So whatever you think about the length of the arguments, whatever you think about the flourishes on the part of the prosecutor on a part of Todd Blanche, the central evidence of the case about whether or not Donald Trump knew or had to have known what these payments were is there and was presented, I think, pretty forthrightly and in a compelling fashion by the prosecutor.

Now, as I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, if there’s no verdict by the time you listen to this, I don’t know what the verdict will be. Juries see cases differently, and I’ve been surprised on a number of occasions in my own career as US attorney and as a line attorney trying cases myself about how juries react to cases. So any result or outcome is possible. We’ll just have to wait and see. The next question on a number of listeners’ minds is what is jury nullification, and why are people talking about it in relation to Trump’s Manhattan trial? So I’m recording this on Wednesday, May 29th, in the noon hour, and the judge has just finished instructing the jury, and the jury now has the case. By the time this podcast drops on Thursday morning, it’s possible that a verdict may already have been reached in the Trump case.

The jury will have all afternoon to deliberate. My guess is, though, that they’ll still be deliberating into Thursday, possibly into Friday, and there’s a chance they could be deliberating into next week. And one issue that I’ve raised with Joyce Vance and others have raised per the question is, what is this thing called jury nullification? Many of you may have heard Joyce Vance and me or other legal commentators discuss the possibility of jury nullification in Trump’s trial. So jury nullification occurs when a jury returns a verdict of not guilty despite believing beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard standard, that the defendant is in fact guilty of the charges he’s being tried for. Now, this sometimes happens when a jury feels that returning a guilty verdict would be sort of morally or ethically wrong or somehow unfair, notwithstanding the actual letter of the law.

They, for some reason, decide they don’t like the case. They don’t want there to be punishment for the accused, notwithstanding what the law requires. Now, in the State of New York, as in most places, jury nullification is technically illegal. What that means is a defendant can concede that he committed a crime but alternately make arguments about the law or prosecution being unfair or implore the jury to acquit him on that basis despite having committed the crime. Now, it may be that the jury votes to acquit on their own accord without input from the defense because of their own views about the case or the law or the particular defendant or the prosecution. There is in fact a history of jury nullification and politically and socially fraught cases. For example, in 1973, famously, a group of 28 activists who had been protesting the Vietnam War were tried for raiding a draft board office two years earlier.

Throughout the trial, the defendants openly admitted their guilt, and the evidence against them was overwhelming. But in spite all of that, the jury voted to acquit clearly sympathizing with the protester’s anti-war objectives. And even though, as I said, it’s technically illegal for parties to actively argue for jury nullification, if jurors nullify on their own initiative, there’s really not anything that the prosecution can do because of double jeopardy. Once a defendant is acquitted or found not guilty, they’re protected by the Constitution from being tried again for the same crimes. Now, how does all this connect to Trump? Well, it may not be relevant, and we’ll see, but there has been some discussion of whether or not there might be sympathy for Donald Trump or the nature of the crimes being charged.

Some or all jurors may find them not to be worthy of the state’s prosecution. Maybe they would buy the argument that Trump was being selectively or unfairly prosecuted, as Trump himself has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail and many social media posts. But to be clear, Trump’s attorneys did commit in writing at the start of the trial that they wouldn’t pursue those arguments or actively seek during nullification through some other means. And from what I’ve been able to glean, I think his lawyers have largely kept their word, although they have emphasized the weighty nature of convicting someone who used to be the President of the United States. As I said a few minutes ago, the prosecution has made a clear and convincing and strong case. And so one possibility, if there ends up being an acquittal, is that the jury nullified.

The other thing about this, by the way, is if there’s an acquittal, we may not know why. We may not know because jurors may choose not to speak and may choose not to seek the limelight and talk about the reasons for their decision. Another question that comes up, and may actually become relevant in the Trump case is what happens when the jury believes it’s deadlocked and comes back to the judge and says, as happens from time to time, it’s not uncommon at all, “Judge, we’re hopelessly deadlocked. We can’t reach a verdict, we can’t decide, we can’t be unanimous on any of the counts.” Does the case just end right there? Is a mistrial declared on the spot? Do the jurors go home? Is the case over? Well, sometimes it may be, but more often than not, the judge has the ability and the discretion to give a certain kind of charge back to the jury to get them to continue to deliberate.

That’s called an Allen charge. The Allen charge is just an instruction given by the judge to a jury when jurors say that they’re deadlocked and unable to reach consensus under a verdict. The name comes from an 1896 Supreme Court case, Allen versus the United States, which ruled that these instructions were permitted in federal court, but they’re not without controversy. The Allen charge is known as the dynamite charge because some people think the defense side, in particular, that it’s an explosive thing to tell the jury, and the defense side, for the most part, when they hear that the jury is deadlocked, want to end everything right then and there because they’ve lived to fight another day. Prosecutors, on the other hand, like the Allan charge because they want the jury to go back and deliberate some more in the hopes of getting the conviction that they sought.

Now, some jurisdictions don’t allow an Allan charge because of the concern they might unduly pressure members of the jury to abandon their minority positions and cave to the majority view. But in New York, as I said, Allan charges are allowed, and they’re sort of interesting. They’re kind of a mix of cajoling the jury, at the same time, praising the jury to try to get it to come to a consensus position. I don’t know if the occasion will arise in the Trump deliberations, but they may. And if they do, jurors will hear something like the following. Here are a couple of quotes from a standard New York State deadlock charge. The judge will say something like, “Members of the jury, I have your note indicating that you have been unable to agree in a verdict. As I told you in my initial instructions, any verdict you return on any count, whether guilty or not guilty, must be unanimous.

If you cannot reach a unanimous agreement on a particular count, you cannot return a verdict on that count, and a new trial will have to be scheduled before a different jury. It is not however uncommon for a jury to have difficulty initially in reaching a unanimous verdict.” And here’s the part where there’s a little bit of praise and cajoling of the jury, “Members of the jury. You make up a very good jury. There’s no reason to believe that the presentation of this case, again, would be to a jury that is any more intelligent, reasonable, hardworking, or fair than you are.” How do you like that? And the judge might say, “Start with a fresh slate. Do not feel bound by how you felt before, whether you favored conviction or acquittal.” And then, finally, the judge might say, again, “Please make every effort consistent with your conscience and the evidence in this case to harmonize your views and decisions in this case with those of the other jurors.

To the best of your ability, I ask you to apply common sense and good judgment. Finally, ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate that the process of deliberations can be difficult. Frankly, it wasn’t intended to be easy. So in accord with your oath and your promise to me at the beginning of the trial, please continue to deliberate with a view towards reaching a verdict.” Generally speaking, after an Allen charge is given in the form that I described and if the jury in good faith goes back and deliberates for some period of time and comes back again and says they can’t reach a verdict, typically that will end the case. We’ll see if any of this becomes relevant in the Trump trial. I’ll be right back with my conversation with Nick Kristof.

THE INTERVIEW

What exactly are the moral bounds of journalism? Nick Kristof joins me to discuss a life spent covering global conflict and the ethics of reporting. Nick Kristof, welcome to the show.

Nick Kristof:

Great to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a treat to have you. I need to establish something on the record. You are in fact a listener to the Stay Tuned podcast, are you not?

Nick Kristof:

Yeah, but usually, I’m kind of grumpy when I’m hearing you because I listen to you on my runs, and so I associate you with pain, and it’s much more comfortable. I’m glad I’m not trying to speak to you.

Preet Bharara:

But muscle group but also… Hold on. Also, muscle growth and health and wellness. No.

Nick Kristof:

Well, yeah, if I stop to think about it, but frankly, it’s a little more the pain that I associate.

Preet Bharara:

No, it’s a little… I’m going to ask listeners to write in and let us know if they run to the podcast. I always found that odd, and it’s my podcast, but as between this podcast and Eminem, I would always choose Eminem for running.

Nick Kristof:

Oh, you-

Preet Bharara:

For energy.

Nick Kristof:

… belittle yourself, you know.

Preet Bharara:

I guess.

Nick Kristof:

No, it’s a good beat. And I learn something, and I get frustrated when I hear about legal issues that are being poorly addressed, and that makes me run faster.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Well, whatever works, sir. I’m going to take some credit for the hellness and heartiness of your physical well-being and the rest of the team too. So congratulations on your new book.

Nick Kristof:

Thank you. It’s exciting.

Preet Bharara:

It’s called Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. First question I have, and obviously, this is addressed throughout your book, which is terrific. And there are about 400 things I want to ask you about, but I’ll only have time to ask you about a few of them. You might think that a book whose subtitle is A Reporter’s Life would be called something like Chasing Truth or Chasing the Facts, not Chasing Hope. Can you explain?

Nick Kristof:

Yeah, I mean, part of it is that when people meet me, they always expect this really dour, sour, pessimistic person who’s going to corner them and start telling them how awful Gaza is and how awful female genital mutilation is and sex trafficking, whatever.

And that actually I’ve managed to cover… have a career covering war and genocide and poverty and emerge feeling pretty good about humanity. And I do think that we are… we’ve overdone the despair and that a little dollop of hope can help us actually address all these challenges which are very real and around us. So that’s why I picked Chasing Hope.

Preet Bharara:

You didn’t call it Chasing a Dollop of Hope. You called it…

Nick Kristof:

Well, I want to catch more than a dollop.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m wondering, are you exaggerating the hope level in the title there, Nick?

Nick Kristof:

Look, I’m not a kind of Panglossian optimist that everything is going to work out, but I do think that… I mean, I don’t think that people really appreciate just the stunning material and moral progress of our lifetimes, and especially covering global poverty and disease.

I’ve seen that up close. And when I was a kid, a majority of human beings had always been illiterate. Now, we’re pushing 90% adult literacy. That’s just an unbelievable change that lays the groundwork for all kinds of other larger improvements. So I’m chasing more than just a dollop of hope.

Preet Bharara:

Look, I’m going to jump ahead because you mentioned it. You tell a great story about sometimes you wonder what impact your writing has on the world because you’re observing and you’re writing about it, and you’re not participating necessarily directly in the solutions. But you wrote a column once about a malady that was causing the deaths of, I think, 3 million people a year. Tell us what that was and who ended up reading that column.

Nick Kristof:

So it was a long piece. This was before I became a columnist. I was a-

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Nick Kristof:

… reporter and I wrote about the plague of diarrhea worldwide at that point, killing 3 million kids a year. And it was a long piece and I’d traveled to India and Africa to report it, but I don’t think many people read it. I don’t think it had vast impact except for one young couple in Seattle that had made a lot of money and was thinking about how they should get involved in philanthropy. And they had tried providing computers to schools in poor countries, and that wasn’t going very well. And so this couple said, “Hey, maybe there’s something about this global health stuff that we can do.” And that was Bill and Melinda Gates.

Preet Bharara:

Bill and Melinda Gates.

Nick Kristof:

It was the most important column… or most important piece I’ve ever written because those two readers and the way it helped direct them toward global health.

Preet Bharara:

Did that change how you think about your writing? When you write, whether it’s long pieces, reporting pieces, or opinion columns, are you thinking about who the audience is? And since that time, have you thought, well, maybe somebody with means and resources or who has power of the person, government or power of policy in government, whether in America or abroad, do you write a little bit for them or not?

Nick Kristof:

So I certainly do not write for potential philanthropists who might try to figure out how they can spend their money. There are time-

Preet Bharara:

What about people in positions of power who have the ability to change things, you write for them?

Nick Kristof:

Sometimes, in the sense that I want… I care about the things that I’m writing about. I want them to have impact. I don’t want to off somebody in the White House gratuitously in ways that will lead them to do the opposite. And I’m always a little conflicted about this. I mean, I remember in Pakistan once there was a young woman who she’d been walking to school one day, was hit on the head, woke up in a brothel in the other side of Pakistan. Six years later, she was able to escape, and then the police essentially arrested her and were about to hand her over back over to the brothel keeper, who said he was going to kill her.

And I interviewed her, and my immediate concern was not just telling this story about these terrible things happening, but it was to make sure that the police did not hand her back to that brothel owner for her to be killed. And so, I moved up the column, and I wrote it in a way that I wanted to be sure that those Pakistani officials would not hand her back. And so, I mean, I certainly do care about trying to solve specific problems and not screwing over the people that I write about, helping them, do no harm. But fundamentally, I’m really trying to write for a broad audience.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask a definitional question?

Nick Kristof:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

What is the difference between a reporter, a journalist, and a columnist or opinion writer? Are those different things? Are they overlapping things? Are they interconnected? And which are you at the moment, and which have you been in the past?

Nick Kristof:

So a journalist will certainly encompass not only reporters and columnists but also photographers and people who shoot video. I’m proud to be a journalist. Today, I think a lot of people would distinguish between a reporter who is writing about the news in a neutral way and a columnist who’s out there pontificating and telling the world what to do.

And I’m definitely a columnist, but I deeply believe that opinion writing should be grounded in reporting and that we shouldn’t just stir the pot but we should add to it. And so I’m also quite proud to call myself a reporter and to engage in reporting.

Preet Bharara:

But so reporting within your columns, or do you write pieces that people can read that are pure reporting and don’t have a particular and strong point of view?

Nick Kristof:

So I mean, my writing-

Preet Bharara:

That’s what I’m trying to get at. I guess-

Nick Kristof:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

… the reason I’m asking the question is one of the most engaging parts of your book for me is your recitation of moral and ethical dilemmas and questions that arise in doing what you do. And so I’m asking you sort of a foundational question so I can ask you later questions about how you think about the ethics of it. Because it seems to me the answers to some of those questions depends on whether or not you consider yourself to be a sort of neutral reporter or a person with opinions who’s trying to advocate for something. And maybe there’s an overlap, and maybe that’s why those questions are thorny for you.

Nick Kristof:

Yeah, I mean, the questions are thorny, but look, I certainly do think that I’m advocating, but I don’t want to get embedded in the advocacy community. I do want to have my independence from them. And while, as an opinion writer, my columns are grounded in opinion, some of the most important work I think I’ve done really hasn’t been about the opinions. It’s been about the reporting. What I wrote about Darfur, the opinion that genocide is bad was not a particularly interesting one.

I think that the reason those columns resonated was because of the reporting out there from Darfur about villages being massacred, people thrown into wells, people having their eyes gouged out, this kind of thing. And so likewise, I think a lot of the reporting of my work on sex trafficking, again, it’s not an interesting opinion that kidnapping 14-year-old girls and locking them up is a bad idea. It’s the actual reporting that I think moved people.

Preet Bharara:

So, Nick, I have a question about your columns. What are you up to now? 11 a week? How many do you do?

Nick Kristof:

It’s two a week.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So two a week, which, depending on if you’ve ever tried, it doesn’t seem like a lot for. I, a period of time, as some subset of my listeners may know, wrote a column for people who subscribed to the CAFE Insider podcast. And the hardest part of my week every week was writing that weekly 800-word column, A, to try to figure out what moved me enough to write about, and then B, how to write about it sort of differently from other people.

And once I got it in my head, and I stared at a blank screen for multiple hours, I might be able to write a reasonable piece in as short a time as 90 minutes. But there was a lot of pain in that for me. Do you experience any of that, or are you like one of my prior guests, George Will, the type who says he has 10 ideas for every column.

Nick Kristof:

I’m closer to George Will on that. My pain involves there are all these issues that I deeply care about, that I want to write about, and how can I pick only one for my next column?

Preet Bharara:

I see. Well, then, you’re in the right profession. And I was-

Nick Kristof:

Well, you know-

Preet Bharara:

… in the wrong one.

Nick Kristof:

I enjoy the writing. I find a sort of artistic pleasure in the writing, and I care a lot about issues, and I can give them a little bit of attention, I hope.

Preet Bharara:

I want to go back to what I said was very striking in the book, the way in which you lay bare or at least ask questions and honest questions about the ethics of what you do. And there’s many examples of this.

Here’s one where you say, “My passion for covering Darfur won praise and awards, but in my heart, I wondered,” and you wonder a lot in this book, “I wondered whether my drive to get to dangerous places in Darfur was entirely high-minded, or whether it was in part shaped by a reckless pursuit of glory. Prizes are the holy grail of journalism and also the curse of journalism.” So you wonder, but you don’t answer the question. What’s the answer to the question?

Nick Kristof:

I think, in all honesty, that I was motivated in part by that search for glory, the prizes. I was a finalist in 2004 and 2005 for Pulitzer for Darfur coverage before winning in ’06. And so I sort of knew that I was in the mix, and I cared deeply about Darfur and getting more attention and trying to do what I could to end the genocide there.

But was there also a selfish motivation? Yeah, I think there was. I mean, that worries me because I was not only putting myself at risk but also, on any given trip, my interpreter, my driver. If I was… had a photographer or video journalist with me, that person as well. So I was dragging others into risky situations in part for some kind of pursuit of glory.

Preet Bharara:

I just wonder… I’m wondering… See, I’m wondering too, you’re contagious, if you’re being too hard on yourself and it’s not clear to me, if you’re doing these things in good faith, what the misalignment may be between trying to do the thing you’re doing for the noble purpose, but also wanting to be excellent at it and get a wide readership unless you start to bastardize the pure part and embellish or mislead or distort for clicks. But that’s not what you’re saying.

Nick Kristof:

No.

Preet Bharara:

So where’s the misalignment, and what’s wrong with having both motivations simultaneously?

Nick Kristof:

What I worry about is the physical risk part that going into Darfur was dangerous. There were people who wanted to kill me. One person said I was the person that the Janjaweed most wanted to kill. And it was very difficult to know when you’re driving down some road whether there was going to be a sudden checkpoint and that was going to be it.

And my interpreter and my driver would typically be at much greater risk than I was. And frankly, I think journalists often take too many risks in covering conflicts. And I worried that I was part of that problem and that I was not only risking my own safety in a way that was unfair to my wife and kids, but that I was also putting other people at risk.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned a couple of points, a kind of journalism that you don’t like, and you critically refer to it as journalism, as stenography, and how you wouldn’t want to be a stenographer. I’m going to ask you a question that you want to answer, but can you name some stenographers at The New York Times?

Nick Kristof:

No, I’m not going to go there.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you this question? Are there people who practice the journalism of stenography at your storied paper?

Nick Kristof:

Yeah, and look there… I mean, there’s a certain amount of stenography that is perhaps necessary. I mean, there’s sort of a fine line, but when a president or some important person gives a speech, then you want to report what that person said, and that, depending on how it’s written or what the topic is, that first draft may be a little bit stenographic. But I think it’s also important, and Donald Trump illuminates a problem in particular, that we don’t just do stenography and that we also do truth-squatting and fact-checking and providing context.

Preet Bharara:

You said another thing that was very striking to me. You write when you joined The Times in 1984, it wasn’t all that different from The Times of the 1940s, “But on my way, journalism changed more than in any period since, or perhaps since Gutenberg.” The most since Gutenberg. Explain what you mean by that.

Nick Kristof:

Well, so now, for example, we do podcasts at The New York Times. We do videos. We are worrying about search engine optimization in writing headlines. We do newsletters. We have so many more platforms.

Preet Bharara:

Right. But does that… But those are changes of content platform and form. How does that change, if at all, and if so, how does it change radically the content?

Nick Kristof:

Well, storytelling in some ways has been largely the same since Homer and through Gutenberg, but I do think that the platforms matter, and that matters when it certainly changes the reporting. And also, I think I was going to say the reader experience, but it’s not readers, but the consumer experience when it’s different media, different platforms. I think that… I mean, another change that I think we’re grappling with is the way opinion creeps into what we traditionally regarded as news reporting.

And we do have this traditionally, this Chinese wall between the news side and the opinion side. But I think that throughout the journalism world, and you see this in cable television a lot, there… often it’s more entertaining to have opinions thrown in. And so there isn’t as clear a divide as there traditionally was in journalism between news and opinion. I think that can be problematic.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, look, it seems to me that one radical change is that it is literally true that the barrier to entry to journalism is as low as it’s ever been in human society. And in the old days, if there was… there were two papers in your community and three television stations, you either got a job at one of those and could be a journalist, or you put up signs in your yard.

Nick Kristof:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

The lack of any barrier to entry and the fact that anybody, whether they’re operating in good faith or bad faith, whether they’re spreading good information or misinformation or disinformation can gather and collect a large audience. Good thing or a bad thing?

Nick Kristof:

A bit of both. I think of it in terms of a gatekeeper role that, traditionally, we in journalism we’re the gatekeepers for what kind of information reach people. And for example, in the year 2000, I covered the George W. Bush presidential campaign, and it was sort of well-known that there were reports that he had fathered a child, an illegitimate child, and nobody knew if it was true, and nobody covered it. It was something voters never knew about because it didn’t really seem relevant, and we couldn’t prove it. By 2004, there were these likewise unproven and, I think, fundamentally, false reports that John Kerry had behaved badly with his swift boat during the Vietnam War.

And all of a sudden, this became public in the subject of much debate because we were no longer the gatekeepers. Somewhere in that period, people figured out how to get damaging and fundamentally false information before the public. And I think that’s unfortunate. I think that one consequence of people are less informed, and there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of… I mean, Black Twitter, I think, has been very effective in elevating issues before the public that with the traditional news media, we did not adequately cover. Globally, the fact that you have people in Iran or Syria or elsewhere who were able to get information out is really important. So I’m a little ambivalent about that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, I guess the answer is, that you’re reciting is, which I think makes perfect sense, any mass enlargement of access to the public square is going to have some good consequences and some bad consequences.

Nick Kristof:

A little like Gutenberg.

Preet Bharara:

A little. Yeah. I mean, some people might have… people might have argued and, I’m sure, did argue. I haven’t gone back and researched it. Maybe we should have a historian on, but I’m sure there were people who bemoaned the advent of the printing press in radio, and certainly, people criticize television. That’s a new form of journalism. So I guess that’s just how it’s going to be, right?

Nick Kristof:

Yeah. I mean, look, radio had Father Coughlin, and it also in the updated version has you, and the same with TV, same with print. So, on the whole, I think there is something to be said for the increasing access to the media, and I think a lot of things get attention that should and the traditionally didn’t.

And I think that’s particularly true in the developing world where ruthless dictators have to understand that if they massacre people, there are likely to be videos that get out and end up on Facebook and raise the costs of genocide.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned massacres of innocent people. I was just about to ask you about your time in China, and your time in particular in and around the time of the protests at Tiananmen Square. My first question is, and you talk about this in the book, how did your several years in China change you and your outlook?

Nick Kristof:

So I think that that was really where it, in some ways, change the kind of journalism I do. It made me walk a little more closer to the edge, closer to the wild side. And that was fundamentally because, on the night of June 3rd, fourth, 1989, I watched a modern army use weapons of war against student pro-democracy protestors. And then I saw the government round up pro-democracy protesters, including many of our friends. And it was very hard to stay neutral as you saw government butchering people. And in particular, I did something that was professionally somewhat dubious, but it felt like the right thing then, and I think it still does. There was a young man who had helped us cover that Tiananmen Student Democracy Movement.

He was sent to prison, he escaped from prison, and then he came to Beijing and asked for our help, my wife’s help and mine, in escaping from China. And the one thing that is pretty clear is if you’re a journalist, you don’t help escape felons flee the country. On the other hand, he was 19 years old. If we didn’t help him, he was going to get caught. That was going to be… I would’ve hated to think of what would’ve happened to him. And he had gotten in trouble because he had helped Times readers. So we did help him, and he was able to escape, and I’m proud of that. But I think that it did mark a period where I became more willing to push the edges of what journalists are supposed to do.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Nick Kristof after this. Describe a little bit as you do here, and you’ve already done this a little bit, but the amount of actual human fear you felt being in that environment and during Tiananmen Square.

Nick Kristof:

When the shooting began, I rode my bicycle full tilt toward the shooting, toward the gunfire ahead of me as these huge crowds, huge throngs, were running the other way. And I remember just thinking, “This is completely crazy that I am… everybody sane is running away from gunfire, and I’m bicycling as fast as I can toward it.” And then I got to this large crowd, and it felt a little comforting because there were a lot of people around me, and the troops would periodically open fire, and I always tried to keep a layer of people between me and the guns.

But then I realized after a few minutes that I was a little bit taller than the average person in front of me, and there were a few really important inches of me that were exposed. And so, then I crouched down, and it was hard to take notes because my notebook became damp with the sweat of my fear. And I both that night at Tiananmen and then later in Darfur and Myanmar and other places, I spent a lot of time being pretty scared.

Preet Bharara:

You write also that when people talk to supporters, and you were one of the people who talked mostly to supporters of the Democracy Movement, it’s easy to think that that movement would triumph and succeed. But when you also recite, I think very honestly, the idea that the side that has principles generally loses to the side that has the machine guns. Is that always true?

Nick Kristof:

So I think there are a few ways in which we, as reporters, manage to mislead ourselves. And one is that we, and diplomats too, we tend to talk to like-minded people who are more educated, who favor a little more democracy. And so there’s a selection bias in our information, and we don’t appreciate the way dictators are ready to open fire on students. We tend to listen to victims, and victims exaggerate, victims lie.

And after Tiananmen, there were real exaggerations of the number of people who’d been killed about Tiananmen Square being knee-deep in blood, this kind of thing. And I knew that was not true because I had been there, but I think that some of the journalism from that period suffered from that problem of not being as skeptical of victims as we are of dictators.

Preet Bharara:

You got ahead of me because literally the next thing I was going to ask, I was going to quote from the book on this point because for someone like me in a totally different context, having been a prosecutor and having been as required by law, someone who has to notify and take into account the perspectives of victims of crimes, what you wrote is incredibly important and incredibly difficult it seems to me.

I teach a class at NYU Law School, and we spend an entire class talking about the weight that should be accorded to a victim’s wishes and how much you trust a victim’s testimony. You’re talking about it in a completely different context, but I just saw a lot of parallels, and you write a version of what you just said. “One of the most important lessons I learned from my Tiananmen reporting is that victims lie too.” And as you said, “To be a skeptical of victims as a…” Was that hard to write, and did you get a bad reaction from people when you say that? Because do some people think that you were blaming the victim?

Nick Kristof:

I think that people sometimes resent both that conclusion and they resent the kind of reporting that it represents. And I found it hard that when I was reporting on sexual violence or rape, then… to try to do my due diligence and verify this. And that means sometimes asking questions in different ways to see if the answers come back the same. It means trying to make sure that the person was actually there that day.

It might involve asking neighbors again without disclosing any confidential information. But it feels really yucky to doubt somebody who is telling this heart-rending story, especially something as intimate as having been raped. And yet, if my job is fundamentally to report the truth and be sure of that truth, and I need to verify. And as I said, that often just felt really yucky to me, and I’m sure it felt yucky to readers. I know it felt yucky to some of my… the interpreters and people I worked with.

Preet Bharara:

So how do you go about expressing skepticism and doing your job as an appropriate truth-teller? Are there, I don’t want to call them tricks. Are there methods that you use so you get the information you need, you verify it without alienating the person you’re interviewing?

Nick Kristof:

So I mean, I wonder if it’s a little the same as prosecutors, but I often ask the questions different ways-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Nick Kristof:

… and see if they all end up the same. I look for things that just seem a little over the top that might be an indication somebody is exaggerating. Depending on whether what the person has told me is confidential, but I may ask other family members or neighbors for their views to verify it. And then I sometimes will ask somebody why they’re telling me this.

And that’s especially important if I’m… Look, I guess one of the problems is that I want to be able to use somebody’s name and age and description because it gives a verisimilitude to be able to have a victim there and if they’re willing to be photographed, for example. But in the case of rape, for example, in Darfur, that person would be admitting to a crime because she would be, in effect, acknowledging that she had had sex outside of marriage, and she would not be able to provide for adult male witnesses to prove that it was rape. And so she was at risk of being prosecuted for adultery or fornication and as well as just having her character devastated.

And so when people were willing to be named, I just wanted to be very sure that they understood what The New York Times was that a lot of people were going to see this. And I remember there was one woman in particular, Suad, and she had been gang raped by the people committing the genocide. She said she wanted to be photographed, she wanted to have her name used, and I kept… I was really worried about this, and I finally asked her why, and she said, “Look, this is the only way I have to fight back at the people who did this. This is what I want.” And I sort of understood that, and she was okay. I went back and saw her a year later, and she was okay.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, you talk about this dilemma too in a related fashion in the book, and you talk about the sex trafficking and the lack of consent to this conduct on the part of victims. And then you say, “Well, I interviewed some of these people,” and you write, “What is meaningful consent for a child in a brothel, not to sex, but to an interview?” What’s the answer to that question?

Nick Kristof:

It’s hard. I mean, I remember one of the first times I reported on this in Cambodia, and there were these two girls, 14 and 15, and I spent hours with them getting their story. And they told me that if they had tried to run away, the police would’ve arrested them and handed them right back to the brothel owner, and who would’ve beaten them and starved them. And I was appalled by what had happened to them.

But I walked out of that brothel knowing that I had a good front-page story and that these two girls were going to be dying of AIDS, and it just… I worried that I was exploiting them, getting what I needed and moving on in the same way that so many other people had been exploiting them. And I don’t have a good answer. I mean, you try to gauge whether consent is real, whether people are actually comfortable. I think, in general, a lot of people are willing to have their stories told if they think it will help other people, but it’s very hard to work this out and especially when children are involved.

Preet Bharara:

So this comes up in my law school class as well. And when we come up against a very difficult moral dilemma for which there’s no real answer, and some people will disagree, and sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong, and you can’t get anonymity. To me, the important thing is that thoughtful people in good faith are giving consideration to the factors on both sides, and that’s what most likely causes the least unethical decision to be made. What do you think about that?

Nick Kristof:

Yeah, I think about this a lot, and I think transparency is what is crucial, and that when I make these really tough kind of borderline decisions, then I think if I come clean with a reader, then that’s kind of… that’s certainly my obligation, but that helps address the moral complexities. There was a time in Sierra Leone when I came across a… there was a 14-year-old girl who had reported her pastor for having raped her. And then it turned out that the same pastor had raped basically all the girls in the neighborhood, and the police did not have a car, so they couldn’t arrest him.

And so I offered my car for the police to go, and then it turned out that he was away, but I was afraid that once he heard that police were looking for him, he would run off. And so I did something that I wonder about, and I think others wondered about, including my bosses, which was the girl suggested that, “Look, if you as a foreigner call him and say you want to meet him, then he’ll be proud. He’ll be pleased, and he’ll [inaudible 00:47:48] you, and then the police can arrest him.” And so that’s what we did. And I called him up on his cell phone.

I said I was a reporter for The New York Times and wanted to meet him, and he agreed, and we met, and then the police arrested him. And should a reporter be involved in criminal justice issue like that? I don’t know. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to let a rapist of children escape if I could prevent that. And it looked like that was going to happen. And so I just came clean with the readers and explained what I had done. And in general, I think readers were okay with that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It brings to mind as you were speaking this dilemma of a reporter being a bystander and an observer as opposed to someone who’s a helper. How do you think about that?

Nick Kristof:

I think that what my own role is that after I’ve done an interview, if there is a child who needs to get to the hospital, I will drive that kid to the hospital. If a kid is going to die because of lack of 20 bucks worth of medicine, I will take the mom and buy that medicine. And then again, I will try to disclose that. But fundamentally, we are human beings first and reporters and bystanders second. So we don’t just sit down and watch a trial die and chronicle it. We have obligations to other people.

Preet Bharara:

We should call this episode Dilemmas with Kristof because this one really struck me because I’ve been thinking about it in a context different from the one you mentioned. You write in the book when you talk about the coverage you did of Darfur and the genocide there. “One conundrum we all face in Darfur and elsewhere was whether to use graphic photos.” End quote. And boy, that, to me, is one of the most difficult questions. And the way it’s come up in the United States in recent years is in the context of mass school shootings.

Nick Kristof:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

And there are people of good faith who I saw get on television after Uvalde and after other shootings and say, “Maybe we’re coddling the American public. And people will understand the horror of this if we show graphic images.” On the other hand, people of good faith don’t want to exploit those things and want to preserve the dignity of the deceased. So this is another example of a question I do not have the answer to. I’m very torn about it. How do you think about it?

Nick Kristof:

My thinking has evolved as I’ve grown more frustrated by the public’s willingness to put up with genocide or mass shootings. And so I think there are real problems with suddenly inflicting a photo, a graphic photo, on somebody who might not be ready for it. But in Darfur, it just felt like this was dragging on and on, and that if people understood what genocide looks like, they might be more willing to actually end it.

And so I had arguments with my bosses, and we ended up running some tough photos of children who had been killed and including one girl whose hands were handcuffed behind her back. And I think kind of the same as school shooting. I do think there is a consent issue and that we should be careful about running photos that can be degrading or humiliating the people without the family’s consent, but especially where there is family consent, then I think that the obscenity is not in the photo, the obscenity is in underlying condition.

Preet Bharara:

Just speaking of these issues, you include in your book a story about the war photographer, Photojournalist Kevin Carter, who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a starving Sudanese child. Anything you want to add or tell the audience about that incident?

Nick Kristof:

So Kevin Carter was a terrific photographer. He’d done tremendous work in South Africa. And then, in covering that Ethiopian famine, he won the Pulitzer for this extraordinary photo of this vulture hovering behind a starving child. And he was criticized to some degree, both by the public and within media ranks, for… It was unclear to what extent the child had needed help and to what extent Kevin had helped the child.

But he then killed himself some months later after winning the prize. And I don’t understand the circumstances well enough, I don’t think any of us do, to know whether he did something wrong in that. But I do think that people like Kevin Carter, I mean photojournalists in particular, put up with an awful lot in their work and suffer a certain amount of PTSD and face really difficult dilemmas about helping people that they’re photographing. And sometimes, they get it right and do tremendous things, and sometimes they don’t.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It just leads into other criticisms that I know you’ve had to face and deal with, and I wonder how you think about them. And again, you’re very honest, and you mention them in your book, right. The idea that for some people, American news coverage of humanitarian crises is exploitative. And the other about you in particular, you write that, “Woke critics sometimes scoffed at my reporting was that of a white savior.” Now, do you dismiss those? Do you think about them? Do they bother you? Do you respond to them?

Nick Kristof:

So I think about them, and I think there is a certain amount of legitimacy to these. I think there is a problem with Westerners sort of parachuting into a place. And I also think maybe more fundamentally that there’s a problem in us just highlighting all the things that are terribly wrong in Africa, for example. And if you look at the places that I’ve disproportionately covered in Africa, it’s been the War in Congo. It’s been the Darfur genocide. It’s been the crisis in South Sudan. It’s been upheavals in West Africa. It’s been disease.

And, yeah, there’s also an awful lot going right in Africa that I’ve covered, but not to the same degree. And I worry that the upshot is a focus on problems that makes it harder to attract tourism, to attract investment. So I think that’s all legitimate. I’m a little more skeptical of the notion that we’re trying to exploit suffering because, I mean, the truth is that readers or viewers are not much interested in these topics. And any news organization that covers these kinds of global poverty or global health issues is losing money as it does so, not making money, and it’s also kind of hard.

I mean, there is a legitimate argument that what is an American doing parachuting into South Sudan to cover the crisis there when he doesn’t speak global languages, doesn’t know the history deeply, et cetera. On the other hand, it’s hard to know when you have a civil war, who else would provide the journalism because you can’t… it’s hard to see which faction you turn to. And in covering the Civil Rights Movement in the US, who you couldn’t have had white Southerners cover that because they would’ve said, “The problem is all these outsiders coming to stir up trouble.” It’s hard.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that de Tocqueville ever was criticized for parachuting into the United States of America?

Nick Kristof:

Oh, that’s a great argument, Preet. I got it.

Preet Bharara:

And opining and opining from the remove of being a Frenchman on our democracy. We studied him with great reverence in college.

Nick Kristof:

Yeah, I’m going to… that’s a good argument I’m going to have to add to my quiver.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I think the title of the episode now has to be Kristof Compares Himself to de Tocqueville. How do you interest the minds of Americans who, I think it’s fair to say with certain exceptions, a couple of which we’re seeing right now, don’t, by and large, involve themselves in crises that happen in other parts of the world, unless they directly implicate American interests.

Nick Kristof:

I mean, that’s a perennial problem. And it’s not just other parts of the world. I mean, it’s you know-

Preet Bharara:

In our own country.

Nick Kristof:

Our own country. Addiction. We lose more than 100,000 people a year to addiction. I don’t think we cover that nearly as aggressively as we should. So I try all kinds of things to get more interest in these kind of neglected topics. I have my annual win-a-trip contest, where I take a student with me as a way of trying to get campus interest in these topics. I’ve used photo, video, social media. When I’m out there reporting, I try to find the most compelling possible story to animate the topic, and I feel strange about that.

I go into a village somewhere, and I’ll ask if anybody’s been injured, and they’ll take me to some elder, a 60-year-old man who’s been shot in the leg or something. And I’ll immediately know that I can find something more compelling than this. And I’ll sort of say, “Well, is there any kid who’s been shot? Maybe a girl?” Because I’m trying to find the most compelling anecdote, and I feel terrible sort of dismissing this elder, but I… it’s hard enough to get readers to care about these places, and I want to give it my best shot.

Preet Bharara:

Nick, when you’re speaking a moment ago about how it’s not just the case that Americans don’t necessarily have interest in things going on in other parts of the world, but also in our own country.

You have a passage in your book where you say the following quote. “I have words to describe the chaos and upheaval that I encounter in poor countries, but we lack the vocabulary to describe the distress in working-class America. It’s a broad interlinked pathology that includes mental health problems, homelessness, addiction, loneliness, chronic,” and you list a number of things. Why do we lack that vocabulary?

Nick Kristof:

I think because we think of poverty in a traditional sense as being about lack of money, lack of resources, but a lot of what I see isn’t exactly about that, and this is very personal to me because, at this point, more than a third of the kids on my old school bus to Yamhill Grade School and Yamhill Carlton High School each day have died from drugs, alcohol, and suicide and reckless accidents, these deaths of despair, and they certainly… they weren’t wealthy, but many of them had air conditioning.

They had vehicles. The problem wasn’t exactly resources, but it was this despair, this sense of no future, tendency to self-medicate, and I don’t think we’ve got a handle on that in this country, and I think that our policies have largely failed to that community. I think, too often, educated, well-off Americans feel kind of a scorn for those who are less educated, and I just think we failed a lot of working-class Americans.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I wish you the best of luck on your reporting, on your column writing, Nick Kristof. Congratulations again on the book Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. A very good read that everyone should do.

Nick Kristof:

Thank you. My pleasure.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Nick Kristof continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discuss his 2021 run for governor of Oregon and what he learned about politics from the campaign trail.

Nick Kristof:

I would never have imagined that I’d have run for a governor for a political office, but I was just particularly frustrated at the State of Oregon.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

To end the show this week, I want to tell you a story of sorts. So I’m just back from Iceland, where I was on vacation with my family. Yes, I should probably get my head examined. It was finally 80 degrees and perfectly sunny weather in New York, and the Bharara family hopped on a plane to of all places, Iceland. I can report that it is truly a beautiful country. It’s the land of volcanoes and waterfalls. It has a natural environment unlike any other. It’s the land of fire and ice, as they say. But something else was notable to me too, given my old line of work as a federal prosecutor, the crime rate in Iceland is astonishingly low. Considered one of the safest countries in the world, Iceland sees an average of 1.5 homicides per year in the whole country.

That number spiked in 2020 when there were a total of five homicides in Iceland, which was, as one study called it, unusually high for the country, and it’s a low rate even accounting for the small population. In 2021, the homicide rate was just 0.54 per 100,000 people. To put that into perspective, the rate in the US is around 6.3 per 100,000. Other types of crime in Iceland are also low, and traffic offenses are the greatest contributor to Iceland’s number. Yeah, traffic offenses. Though guns are popular in Iceland, the country has extremely strict gun regulation and training, and most police officers do not carry firearms. The country also has robust social welfare programs, low-income inequality, and inexpensive and accessible education, which must be contributing factors also. But here’s the thing. Given that there is virtually no crime there, I was struck by another fact.

One of the most popular modes of fiction in Iceland is what, crime novels. The tradition and popularity of the genre extends throughout Iceland and around the world. Probably the most well-known Icelandic crime novelist is Ragnar Jónásson or the king of Icelandic crime fiction, whose novels have sold more than 3 million copies. There’s also Yrsa Sigurðardóttir or the queen of Icelandic crime fiction, whose popularity also reaches throughout Europe and the US. Here in America, we are surrounded by crime, and though crime rates overall have been decreasing violence persists. For the people of Iceland, violence like that is mere fiction, the way we might read a sci-fi mystery novel or a story about planetary warfare purely imaginative, and it occurs to me what a thing for gun violence and murder and violent crime to be relegated largely to fiction where it should be.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Nick Kristof. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper, the technical director is David Tatasciore, the deputy editor is Celine Rohr, the editorial producer is Noa Azulai, the associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Jake Kaplan. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.