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Others, including media watchdog CAMERA, accused Kristof of both timing and designing the column to distract from a comprehensive Israeli report detailing Hamas’s widespread weaponization of rape and sexual violence on and after Oct. 7, 2023.
But the worst enemy of Kristof’s column is arguably Nicholas Kristof himself. Indeed, his pilloried piece betrays some of the most important lessons he himself claimed to have learned during his long career.
In his 2024 memoir Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life, Kristof maintained that experience taught him to be cautious about interviewees’ accounts and warned that even stories from sympathetic speakers can be lies. A good journalist must be highly critical of personal accounts, he wrote:
And:
In his May 11 column, however, Kristof opts for speculation over skepticism. He writes that “some may wonder” if Palestinians lied about rape and sexual assaults only to smear Israel. But he dismisses this viable concern, deeming that possibility “far-fetched” because none of them sought him out and some were reluctant to speak.
Thus, Kristof was skeptical of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, China—fact-checking what he described as their “lurid ‘eyewitness reports’” and writing “we were instinctively sympathetic to the protestors, and this risked making us gullible when they lied.” (Chasing Hope, p. 177)
But he was not at all skeptical of the lurid reports of his Palestinian interviewees. Suddenly, he forgets that victims lie, that they exaggerate when they suffer, that it’s a way to fight back and that he is susceptible to it. By Kristof’s own standards, his column does a disservice to his audience.
Kristof also knows that some journalists, especially those writing “opinion journalism” like himself, can disseminate weaponized, unsubstantiated stories. He reflected in his memoir:
So said the man whose explosive column appears in the opinion section. In his piece on sexual abuse, Kristof is the epitome of the reckless pundit who simply reports what he hears, weaponizing the unverified account. On one thing, he is right: Readers and listeners deserve better.
In his memoir, Kristof admitted he made many grave mistakes during his career and that he otherwise produced not-so-great reporting. Especially notorious is the 2014 Somaly Mam controversy, when he vigorously promoted a Cambodian woman he presented as an anti-sex-trafficking activist and described as “the Harriet Tubman of Southeast Asia’s brothels.” It later emerged that Mam apparently fabricated parts of her story, and Kristof was forced to apologize to readers, publishing a mea culpa column titled, “When Sources May Have Lied.”
Addressing the fiasco, Kristof defended journalists’ mistakes:
We journalists write while hunched over our laptops of deadline with incomplete information while battered by salvos of lies. We must be comfortable with imperfection, because our work is full of it.
Myriad mistakes punctuate my career. I stumbled badly in my column by writing about the FBI “person of interest” who some agents suspected of involvement in the anthrax attacks; he was later declared innocent. Likewise, I wrote about a Cambodian woman, Somaly Mam, whose claims of having been a sex slave are now suspect. In other columns, I was too credulous, or too glib, or too simplistic. (Chasing Hope, p. 422)
Kristof owned his own record of being abjectly false and producing subpar reporting. He does not have a choice. But he also comes up with a poor excuse regarding why journalists (read: him) make mistakes.
He previously brushed off allegations of double standards in his coverage of Israel, saying that applying higher standards to Israel’s actions is justified since the country receives substantial U.S. aid. But in a 2024 interview about his book, Kristof conceded that double standards and antisemitism exist in “people’s narratives” at least “in some cases.”
Abuse of prisoners undoubtedly exists in Israel, as in most Western countries. This we know from other sources, including Israeli analysts and the country’s Public Defender’s Office, which Kristof could have used to write a well-sourced, credible article. But this fact does not make Kristof’s explosive claims correct, nor does it mean that we should believe him.
