The New Yorker:

A memoir by Nicholas Kristof and a biography of Barbara Walters invoke halcyon days in the news business. What can we learn from their lives?

By Krithika Varagur

Nicholas Kristof started his journalism career as a teen-age reporter for the News-Register, an Oregon county newspaper where he was paid twenty-five cents a column inch. He spent his pocket money on books about how to turn that gig into a career: a textbook on news editing, “The Best of Life,” accounts of White House reporters and foreign correspondents. The latter was particularly fascinating to him; the books claimed that foreign correspondents had “the authority and expense account to jump on a plane and go wherever they think best,” Kristof recalls in his new autobiography, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” But how could he join their ranks? He went back to look for clues. “One book noted that some of them are Rhodes Scholars; I decided I had better be a Rhodes Scholar.” So he became one, and went to Oxford after graduating from Harvard, in 1981. On breaks between terms, he sent himself on assignments to Eastern Europe and West Africa, racking up freelance clips that helped him get hired, at the age of twenty-five, by the New York Times, where he would spend most of his career.

Though Kristof’s story is one of singular—at times nauseating—meritocratic prowess, his impulse to study his predecessors’ paths is not unusual. Journalism is a relatively young profession whose norms have changed constantly; journalism schools started only in the early twentieth century, and many practitioners never formally study the craft. I’m no exception, as I was reminded when I read two new books about the lives of illustrious journalists: Kristof’s memoir and “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters,” by Susan Page, a D.C.-based journalist. Old habits insisted that there was something to learn from careers as disparate as those of Walters, who dominated what her biographer calls the “big TV interview”—her sitdown with Monica Lewinsky, in 1999, was watched by some seventy million Americans—and Kristof, who pioneered the modern human-rights beat and embodied an idealistic, internationalist early-millennium Zeitgeist. Each was indisputably great at their job, but their sensibilities are polar opposites. Walters championed an enduring mashup of facts and entertainment which brought personal and sentimental elements into the fold of news. Kristof, meanwhile, admits that he views journalism “not just as a technical craft but as one with an ethical mission: a better world,” and he pushed the profession’s norms with an activist’s zeal.

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