Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof on new memoir 'Chasing Hope' and finding light in a dark world

Nicholas Kristof believes that in dark times, journalism is an act of hope.

It’s a bold statement for a reporter who has spent his storied career covering human rights abuses and war torn countries for The New York Times. Kristof recently spoke with guest host Julia Paskin on LAist's daily news program AirTalk, which airs on 89.3. FM, about his new memoir Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life.

On his time in L.A.

Looking back on his year reporting in Los Angeles for The New York Times, Kristof said that it was not the great weather, afternoon deadlines or time as a business reporter that he remembers most fondly.

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It was finding his wife, fellow journalist Sheryl WuDunn, that he recalled as the greatest thing about his time here.

Shortly after the two were wed, they were assigned to The New York Times newest bureau located in Hong Kong in 1989. Their assignment came at a pivotal time in China’s political history.

Lessons in reporting

After witnessing the atrocities that occurred at Tiananmen Square, he noticed that many reports written by student protesters distorted the number of people killed and exaggerated details. Approaching the dilemma of good sourcing was a great challenge, but a useful lesson for Kristof.

“It's very hard for us in journalism to be as skeptical of victims as we are perpetrators of massacres,” said Kristof.

Kristof also recalled that when it came to selection bias in his reporting he was well sourced in contacts that were against the violence against the students that had occurred, but not as well sourced in hardliners. Noticing this discrepancy in his reporting made him realize the value of reaching out to diverse sources.

“If we're going to do good reporting, we have to especially make an effort to reach out to people who have very different ideologies from us, who have different points of view,” said Kristof. One of the toughest ethical decisions Kristof had to make was during his time reporting on the Tiananmen Democracy Movement.

A tough choice nearly cost him his job

A 19-year-old student who helped Kristof and his wife in their reporting asked for help fleeing the country. Kristof was hesitant at first. The student had just escaped from prison in Beijing. He was concerned that helping the young man escape would not only get him killed, but land himself and WuDunn in jail and shut down the NYT Hong Kong bureau. But with guidance from WuDunn, they decided to help him flee from Hong Kong.

The 19-year-old, Liu Xiang, became a U.S citizen and finished university. “It maybe the most unprofessional thing I've ever done in my career, but it's one that I'm proudest of.” he says.

Both WuDunn and Kristof would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for International Reporting for the coverage of the democracy student movements in Beijing.

Making the switch to columnist 

Kristof's jump from foreign correspondent to renowned op-ed columnist came at just the right time. With tension mounting between himself and a fellow editor at The Sunday Times, Kristof says he was excited by the freedoms that came with being a columnist.

In particular, he was eager to write about topics he believed were overlooked by the press, such as the fentanyl crisis in rural Oregon and union jobs on the decline.

Approaching journalism with humanity and humility 

As a columnist, Kristof said he understands that in today's political landscape opinion punditry can be toxic. And yet at the same time, Kristof has learned from years of mistakes that humility is the key to great opinion journalism.

“I was wrong an awful lot of times about a lot of important things. And so I think of opinion journalism as a bit of a contradiction that, we're shadowing the world and telling what to do, but also acknowledging that we may be wrong,” he said.

Kristof has advice for journalists who find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place out in the field — remember your sense of humanity.

“There are all kinds of things that can go wrong, but fundamentally, I think we, as journalists, are humans first, and when we're navigating these tricky moral contours, we have to think about that.”