Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life
Nicholas D. Kristof
460 pages; Penguin Random House
$26.69-$32.00
$14.99 Kindle
Unlike most candidates for public office, Nicholas Kristof did not time his memoir to coincide with the launch of his campaign for governor of Oregon. He waited until it tanked.
The timing worked out well for Kristof to report and write, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.”Between the time he was kicked off the ballot for insufficient residency and his return to The New York Times, he got the opportunity to reflect on his life, assess his career and sketch his vision for the ways journalism should be done.
He sums up the latter in the first six words of his 460-page opus: “Journalism is an act of hope.”
“Chasing Hope” is spiced with the back stories of Kristof’s global reporting as well as his Times maneuvering (more on both, as well as his fling with politics, in a bit). The book’s most consequential contribution to the craft is Kristof’s focus on hope as his journalistic purpose.
Think of “Chasing Hope” as an answer to the question posed by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen in a book published in 2001.
“The title of this book,” Rosen declared in his concluding chapter, “is a question we need to ask for every age: ‘What Are Journalists For?’”
Rosen explored the question for an earlier age, on either side of the millennium, when experiments with “public journalism” were linking reporters and editors more closely with readers and enlisting all concerned in the pursuit of solutions as well as problems.
As did Rosen, Kristof explores the importance of journalistic purpose in the decisions journalists make every day. The purpose of any given story is a starting point of the ethical decision-making process taught at Poynter for decades. What’s interesting about Kristof’s approach is the idea of adopting an overarching moral purpose, as opposed to discerning a particular purpose, story by story. (Editor’s note: We invite discussion of your journalistic purpose here.)
So what are journalists for in the current age, an era marked by a collapsing journalism business model and a populace fractured by culture wars and intense polarization?
Kristof acknowledges that his adoption of hope as his guiding light could come off as myopic or Panglossian (linked on the chance that you, like me, could use a dictionary about now).
“No,” Kristoff argues, “hope is a strategy to follow evidence and achieve the better outcomes that are possible if you work at it.”
He quotes Amanda Ripley in The Washington Post:
Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way.
In an essay adapted from the book and published by the Times last month, Kristof describes himself as a “possibilist” as opposed to an optimist:
Hans Rosling, a Swedish development expert, used to say that he wasn’t an optimist but a possibilist. In other words, he saw better outcomes as possible if we worked to achieve them. That makes sense to me, and it means replacing despair with guarded hope.
Kristof argues for skepticism as well as open-mindedness, noting that the claims of victims as well as perpetrators demand a journalist’s scrutiny.
As compelling as hope may be as a journalistic purpose, I wish he had addressed more directly how it might inform one of journalism’s biggest challenges: covering Donald Trump.
He recounts his own limited history with the former president, including a 2016 essay concluding that Trump is a racist. But Kristof would be the first to acknowledge that such coverage likely had little if any impact on the election.
He warns of the dangers of false equivalency and bothsidesism in covering Trump, but leaves a key question still on the table: What kind of coverage would have an impact?
Kristof spent more than 10 years as a Times foreign correspondent before becoming an opinion columnist after 9/11. Among the ways he has stretched journalistic traditions over the years: Aiding the escape from China of a 19-year-old student who had assisted Times coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, saving two Cambodian teenage girls from the sex trade by buying them himself, raising more than $21 million in reader contributions for causes he has written about.
Kristof attributes his rule-breaking, in part, to the French diplomats and journalists who saved his refugee father’s life by ignoring regulations and helping him escape a prison camp in Yugoslavia.
“I owe them my existence,” he writes.
Core to his focus on hope is an idea Kristof got from Times colleague Thomas Friedman “that columnists can be in the lighting business or the heating business, offering illumination or ramping up emotions.”
Kristof concludes: “I think we do best when shedding light. Journalism functions better as a flashlight than as a bludgeon.”
The 65-year-old author has shone that light far and wide, sometimes at the sort of peril presented by inebriated teenage soldiers wielding automatic weapons or by a prop plane with a body hanging off the wing. Among his resulting rules of thumb: Always a good idea to “shake hands and exchange names with people who might kill you.” And never a good idea for your wife and children to learn from someone other than yourself that you’ve just survived a plane crash in an African jungle.
Family plays a big role in the Kristof story. He and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, were the first married couple to serve as Times co-bureau chiefs. For their coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they became the first couple to share a Pulitzer Prize. Their son, Gregory, was born in Hong Kong; their son, Geoffrey, was born while they were studying Japanese; and their daughter, Caroline, was born in Tokyo. Women’s rights and health care have been frequent topics in Kristof’s reporting and commentary, including the book, “Half the Sky,” co-authored with WuDunn.
Kristof’s childhood friends also show up in the book and figured in his political campaign, mostly as portraits of the American dream gone bad. He says more than a quarter of his fellow passengers on the No. 6 school bus in Yamhill, Oregon, are dead, many of them the victims of job loss, homelessness, addictions of various sorts and fatal overdoses.
“Chasing Hope” recounts a Times career on the road interrupted only briefly with time on the desk. In 2000, he was appointed associate managing editor in charge of the Sunday paper by outgoing executive editor Joseph Lelyveld. In 2001, he was “evicted,” as he puts it, by Lelyveld’s successor, Howell Raines. Kristof says Raines was so “desperate to be rid of me” that he agreed to use the newsroom budget to cover his salary and expenses in the opinion section.
Kristof found himself at odds with colleagues again in 2020 when Opinion editor James Bennet was shown the door. Bennet was forced out because of his handling of an op-ed column by Sen. Tom Cotton that urged armed crackdown on protests following the killing of George Floyd.
More than 800 Times staffers signed a petition criticizing the column’s publication but Kristof was not among them. Although he agreed that Cotton’s op-ed should not have been published as written, he argued that “the ouster of James seemed a surrender of op-ed principles, a sign of weakness and an implicit warning that editors should be wary of publishing conservative views that might outrage liberal staff members.”
Noting that “many of us in the columnist ranks were horrified” by Bennet’s firing, he points out that Roger Cohen was the only one to speak his mind publicly.
“When I saw Roger’s column,” Kristof recalls, “I thought he was right and wished I’d been less deferential to the paper.”
The best journalism memoirs shed light on the author’s life and work with something approaching the rigor and candor he or she inflicts on subjects of their coverage. Humility is not an entry in the index of many memoirs, but it shows up several times in this one. Kristof lists “recognizing that I might be wrong” as a cornerstone of his commentary.
He also acknowledges that his success, which he once ascribed to luck, is really all about privilege. “I had hit the jackpot with my parents, and then I had been exceptionally lucky to be admitted to Harvard,” he writes. “That made it easier to win the Rhodes Scholarship, and winning that caught the eye of editors.”
Noting that “one advantage leads to another,” he added: “In the Kristof household, anything felt possible … it was another kind of privilege and it too built on itself.”
It built on itself to the point that, in 2021, he shared a video with his 1.9 million Twitter followers declaring his candidacy for governor of Oregon. His announcement echoed a recurrent theme of his journalism: As bad as things are, it’s possible to make them better.
At one point while trying to decide whether to run, he got a phone call from President Joe Biden about one of his columns. He didn’t tell Biden about his possible candidacy, but says the call got him thinking “that I might have less influence on the White House as a governor than as a columnist.”
With that in mind, he recalls a comment from William Safire, “a former columnist with a sharp wit, (who) once was asked if he would take the job of secretary of state. Safire responded with puzzlement: ‘Why step down?’”
Kristof decided to go for it, doing well in early polls and building a record-setting million-dollar campaign fund. Among his donors were Bill and Melinda Gates ($50,000 each); Angelina Jolie ($10,000) and Liu Xiang, the student (now an American) whom Kristof and WuDunn helped escape from China ($5,000).
The campaign was upended just four months after it began when the Oregon Supreme Court declined to review the secretary of state’s conclusion that Kristof’s off-and-on residence on the family farm fell short of requirements for state office.
“Minutes after the secretary of state booted me off the ballot,” the author writes, “my phone buzzed. A.G. Sulzberger texted me, ‘If you find yourself at a dead end, please make me your first call.’”
That’s what he did. Nine months after Kristof wrote a column headlined, “A Farewell to Readers, with Hope,” Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote a memo welcoming him back as “an excellent journalist who has redefined what a modern columnist could be.”
Looking for a recommendation for another good journalism memoir? We’ve got you covered.
