Finding light beyond the bad news

When I reported from Darfur, Congo, Yemen or other places inhabited by people of color, woke critics sometimes scoffed that my reporting was that of a “white savior.” The same charge was made against other white writers and photographers reporting in the developing world, and against white doctors and aid workers there.
It reflected the notion that white American busybodies preen as they engage in moral crusades abroad, without acknowledging their own severe problems at home. There was a kernel of truth to this. It became “cool” for Americans to volunteer in Rwanda or Tanzania rather than at a prison or school in their hometown, and journalists and aid workers alike can be condescending or disrespectful to people abroad. Then again, the fundamental conceit of the white savior critique — that white people are eager to help people of color — doesn’t ring true to me.
The blunt truth is that the big problem isn’t white saviors but white indifference. Americans intervened in 1999 to protect white Kosovars and in 2022 to protect white Ukrainians, but did much less to help Black Rwandans, Black Darfuris or Black Ethiopians, or to rescue Arabs in Syria or Yemen, or to support other dark-skinned people like Guatemalans or the Rohingya. Given all that, is it really true that the fundamental problem is a surplus of white saviors? White activism, particularly from the Jewish community, saved many lives of Black people in Darfur, and anything that discourages white people from activism against atrocities against people of color is likely to mean more people dying unnecessarily in places like Tigray or Myanmar.
Another thread of the white savior critique emphasizes that coverage or activism often portrays those suffering as two-dimensional “victims,” and that the right to tell these stories belongs to people from these countries rather than to Western journalists or aid workers. Again, there’s some validity to this critique. Simplistic narratives abound in journalism and the humanitarian community, and too often we drop into countries and report without knowing enough about local conditions.
That said, the critique is also simplistic. How would it work to have stories told primarily by local people? Were Germans really the best people to cover the Holocaust? Should Rwandans have been the voice of the genocide there? Should European newspapers have hired only Southerners to report on the American Civil Rights Movement, and if so, which Southerners? If a news organization wanted to hire a local person to cover the genocide in Myanmar, where repression of the Rohingya was popular, the majority of those local people would have said that there was no genocide at all and that the Rohingya didn’t exist as a people.
I’m also shaped by my interactions with extraordinary people who are sometimes perceived as “white saviors” but in my view are heroes. A white Australian doctor named Catherine Hamlin moved to Ethiopia in 1959 and started a hospital to repair obstetric fistulas and treat some of the most forgotten women in the world. Dr. Hamlin became the world’s leading advocate for women and girls with fistulas and raised enormous sums for corrective surgery (credit Oprah Winfrey, who put Dr. Hamlin on her show and also contributed personally). Even during the most perilous periods of the Ethiopian dictatorship, Dr. Hamlin continued her work as so many others fled. For six decades she gave her all, enduring danger and difficulty, to alleviate suffering in Ethiopia. Dr. Hamlin, who died in 2020, was regarded by many Ethiopians as a saint.
Likewise, when I reported on the civil war in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, I heard legends of “Dr. Tom,” an American named Tom Catena who ran a hospital in a rebel-held area and provided the only medical care in one of the most dangerous and disease-ridden parts of the world. I was scared reporting in the area for just a few days at a time. Sudanese government planes dropped bombs in the rebel areas, so we camouflaged our vehicle so it couldn’t be easily seen from the air. When we saw a plane overhead we would rush for caves in the rocks.
The caves had spitting cobras, so even hiding from a bomb could be lethal. The only road into rebel territory in Nuba was a dirt path, and the day before I took it on one occasion, government soldiers ambushed civilian vehicles and opened fire on them. Dr. Tom endured all this year after year after year.
Dr. Tom treats bombing victims and leprosy patients, he delivers babies and sets broken arms, he pries shrapnel from women’s bellies and amputates their children’s limbs. Somehow he manages a 435-bed hospital with no reliable electrical power or running water, not even an X-ray machine. He is always on call, except when he periodically falls unconscious from malaria — and then the entire Nuban community holds its breath to pray that he will survive. Dr. Tom is motivated by his conservative Catholic faith to save lives half a world away, and I am in awe of him. It’s easy for Americans sitting on a university campus to scoff at missionaries like Dr. Tom, but impossible when you see him working by himself in a hospital that has been bombed 11 times.
A Muslim paramount chief compared Dr. Tom to Jesus. The chief explained that Jesus healed the sick, made the blind see and helped the lame walk — and that is what Dr. Tom does every day. It’s because of witnessing people like Dr. Tom that I’m more friendly to evangelicals and conservative Catholics than most liberals are. Yes, there is religious intolerance and bigotry, but there’s also irreligious intolerance when people on the left mock people of faith.
American university students sometimes complain to me that American news coverage of humanitarian crises is exploitative. They see news organizations profiting off the suffering of people in the developing world. But in truth, coverage of overseas crises invariably loses money. For me, one striking moment came when I filed a Yemen column back-to-back with one about the nomination to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh. The Kavanaugh column, which I whipped off in an afternoon with no dangerous travel, had seven times as many page views as the Yemen column.
That’s why most news organizations don’t cover Yemen, which at the time the United Nations called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. George Bernard Shaw wrote: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them.” And that indifference, toward people of any complexion, strikes me as a far more urgent concern than the willingness of some doctors or aid workers to help people of a different race. If Western news organizations weren’t willing to lose money to cover these crises, the suffering would be even greater.
If in general I was skeptical of progressive critiques of foreign news coverage, there was a strand that I found important and valid. I came to think that we in the media had a bias toward negative news that often harmed poor parts of the world. If I think of the places in Africa that I have principally covered over the last quarter century, they are the crisis spots: southern Africa during the AIDS crisis, Darfur, Congo, South Sudan and so on. Somebody reading my columns might get the misimpression that all of Africa is starving or fighting, when in fact some parts of Africa have done well. I undercovered countries like Ghana that were democratic and making progress in education and health care.
That’s a way in which journalism can be misleading: We cover planes that crash, not the far greater number of planes that land. There’s a media bias toward bad news, layered on top of a cognitive bias toward threats. In the context of global development, our audiences learn primarily about failure and setbacks, not the progress that is often the backdrop. As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers once told me, “Events are 75 percent bad, and trends are 75 percent good.” And we cover events more than the trends.
I fear that journalists and aid workers, by focusing on crises, genocide and famine, further a narrative of Africa as a dangerous, failed continent and that this makes it more difficult to attract tourism and investments. So I’ve tried to also write about the successes there, and in my win-a-trip journeys we normally include a stop that highlights progress as well as challenges.
This penchant for bad news misinforms the public. In polls, a majority of Americans say that world poverty is getting worse. That is false.
One of the most stunning trends of my lifetime has been an extraordinary decline in global poverty, disease and illiteracy. When I graduated from college, more than 40 percent of the world’s people were still living in “extreme poverty” — equivalent to a bit more than $2 per person per day in today’s money. Adjusted for inflation, fewer than 10 percent now live at that level.
People meeting me for the first time often expect me to be dour and pessimistic, the Eeyore of journalists, because I spend so much time covering war, genocide, poverty and disease. But the truth is that my travels have left me with a deep appreciation for this positive change — and for the capacity for further improvements. Much of the change in my lifetime has been positive for most of the world’s inhabitants. Just about the worst thing that can happen to any person is to lose a child. Until the early 19th century, almost half of all humans died in childhood. Now that’s down to about 4 percent.
For most of the last 20 years or so, we could have run a front-page headline reading “Another 170,000 People Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday.” Or: “Another 200,000 People Get Piped Water for the First Time Today.” Or: “Another 325,000 People Today Get Electricity for the First Time.” Those are the real figures for the number of people lifted out of extreme poverty or gaining running water or electricity on an average day around the world.
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic marked a setback in this global march forward, and the number of people living in extreme poverty increased. Children also dropped out of school, hunger increased and girls were forced to marry early. But this was a setback of a few years, not longer, and preliminary evidence suggests that global child mortality actually continued to decline during the pandemic, though more slowly than before. Meanwhile, other trends, such as the declining cost of solar panels and improved access to the internet, continued apace.
We in journalism focus mostly on villains, which is fair enough. But side by side with the worst of humanity, you see the very best. You encounter evil, but also heroism. For every genocidal warlord burning a village or throwing a child on a bonfire, there is a Dr. Tom Catena or a Dr. Catherine Hamlin, or some nameless hero showing undaunted courage.
When the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked St. Mary’s College, a girls’ boarding school in northern Uganda, and kidnapped 139 teenage girls, tying their hands and leading them off into the bush, the police and army refused to help. They were terrified of the LRA and its reputation for killing and raping without hesitation. But an Italian nun at the school, Sister Rachele Fassera, refused to be intimidated. She set out, armed only with a rosary, and followed the trail of the kidnappers, in part by the litter they left behind. On the second day, Sister Rachele caught up with the kidnappers and begged them to release the girls. She pleaded, she browbeat them, she refused to give in — and the kidnappers released 109 of the girls to Sister Rachele. Sister Rachele didn’t accomplish all she had hoped, but with raw courage and a rosary she accomplished what the Ugandan army could not.
Sister Rachele, and so many other selfless souls struggling to do justice around the world, inspire me. They remind me of one of my favorite quotations from Robert F. Kennedy: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and … those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Despite the setback from the pandemic, if you had to pick one time to be born in the roughly 300,000 years since the emergence of modern humans, it would probably be this decade. Yes, climate change presents enormous challenges, and there are risks of nuclear war and eroding democracy. But you still would probably be less likely to die, less likely to be malnourished and more likely to be educated than at any point in human history.
Those aren’t just numbers. I’ve seen the progress in my reporting. When I first traveled through West Africa with Dan Esty in 1982, when I wasn’t being held at gunpoint by soldiers in Ghana, what pained me the most was the beggars in every town. Some were blind from cataracts, trachoma or river blindness. Others were disfigured by leprosy. Still others were crippled by clubfoot. Now these terrible ailments are all disappearing.
Cataracts are repaired in a quick $50 surgery by groups like Cure Blindness and Seva Foundation. Blinding trachoma is prevented with inexpensive azithromycin, by groups like Helen Keller International. River blindness is prevented with ivermectin, used to deworm dogs and horses in America, thanks to the work of the Carter Center and others. For less than $1 a person, we can prevent devastating and excruciating causes of blindness.
Leprosy has also declined more than 90 percent, and leprosy hospitals are so empty they are taking on patients with new kinds of ailments — fistula, Buruli ulcer and more. Bravo to Leprosy Mission International for its work! As for clubfoot, it is easily treated in infants by organizations like Miracle Feet, leaving children able to run and play like everyone else; they can grow up to become doctors or teachers instead of beggars.
A journalist following in my footsteps today may never see the leprosy, blindness and genocide that I’ve spent decades covering — and it’s that sense of progress that fills me with hope, and with determination to keep pushing for further gains.
From “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life” by Nicholas D. Kristof. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Nicholas D. Kristof.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.