SPIES, WARS AND MASSACRES: The ethical dilemmas of a foreign correspondent

Annual Ruhl Lecture
University of Oregon
May 7, 2001
by Nicholas D. Kristof

Thank you. Well, I'm delighted to be back here in God's country. A few days ago - to get myself in the right state of mind - I showed my three kids the "Prefontaine" video, and that helped; but it's much better to be here in person.

The annual Ruhl Symposium at the UO School of Journalism & Communication honors the late Robert Ruhl, former editor and publisher of the Medford Mail Tribune. For more information about the annual symposium, contact Jennifer King.
I feel a little bit subversive in coming here today and talking about journalistic ethics because one of my messages is that a good deal of what we traditionally think of in terms of journalistic ethics--or journalistic principles--does not always work as planned, especially when one goes abroad. Don't get me wrong; I think it's enormously important that we wrestle with ethical issues and that we deal with them constantly, in fact, more than we do in this industry of ours. But to think that ethical issues can be neatly distilled into a dozen principles, or into a conflict of interest policy, or into something neat and precise that actually works well in real life is, I think, an illusion.

When I first went abroad as a correspondent for The New York Times, I thought I understood various journalistic principles and journalistic ethics. You know, the basic rules that journalists should never lie, should never deceive anybody--that the paramount effort should be toward reporting the full truth, to getting sources to go on-the-record, not to break local rules, certainly not to break the law. And then I arrived abroad, and all of a sudden nothing seemed quite so simple anymore. As soon as we moved to Beijing, my wife and I were stationed in an apartment that was the official residence of The New York Times Beijing bureau chief. We knew that the apartment was bugged and the telephones tapped and everything else. We even knew where the people who listened to our conversations were. It was on the top floor of our building. We would see State Security teams go up and change shifts and so on, and we always were curious about where the bugs were. Well, my predecessor had told me that there was a video monitor inside our apartment behind a little recess near the ceiling covered with a metal grill, and he told me he'd covered it with tin foil so that the authorities couldn't spy on us all of the time that way. As we moved in, I was hanging pictures on the wall, and I happened to be on a stepladder right near this little grill. I got curious, so I took off the foil and got a flashlight and peered through the grill. Sure enough, it looked like a camera. I thought, "what the heck," so I got a hammer, pounded the grill down and, well, it wasn't a camera, but it was a bunch of electronic gadgets. They had Chinese characters on them, and I read the characters and my eyes lit up because the Chinese characters read "Electronic Sound Carrying Device." My wife and I went off a little bit and conferred in whispers: "what do we do?"

At first, our thought was to just smash the bugs, destroy them. But then we got nervous. I mean, then the authorities would know that we had found it; they would just rely on other bugs, and we might get in trouble for destroying state property. We thought, well, maybe we'll use it to feed disinformation to the Chinese authorities; tell them what we're getting, that our sources are so and so, and name some hard-liner in the leadership--this kind of thing.

At this point--to help make my point about some of the difficulties of these issues--I want to poll you. Now you're in this situation. What do you do? I'll give you three choices: you leave the bug there alone; second, you leave it and use it to give disinformation; third, you destroy it. How many of you would just leave it? How many of you would leave it there and feed disinformation into it? I'm taking down your names to report you to the Chinese authorities. And, third, how many of you would destroy the bugs? I'm going to come back to this episode because it underscores a larger truth that I want to drive home. But, my point here is that I arrived at this situation, and I felt totally unprepared to try to figure out what to do with bugs I discovered. It was the kind of thing that I had never thought about and had never been prepared for. The longer I stayed abroad, the more I kept encountering these kinds of problems.

Maybe one of the most essential principles of modern journalism is that if somebody is saying something negative about somebody else, you want to get them on-the-record with their name. You don' t want to give somebody a free shot at somebody else without going on-the-record. Indeed, that makes articles stronger; it gives them the reliability that one yearns for. But one of the first places that I covered from abroad was South Korea during the bad old days of the dictators. One of the first people on whom I applied that reasoning--that anybody who says something critical should go on-the-record--was a young student leader named Woo Sang Ho. We sat down and he said some extraordinarily critical things about the South Korean leadership. He called the then-president a fascist and a Nazi, and he was perfectly eager to go on-the-record and to have his name accompany this. I wrote an article and used his name, and the president of South Korea kind of proved his point. He arrested Woo Sang Ho on the basis of what I had written and locked him in prison, and I began to have a lot of doubts. Woo Sang Ho's family was outraged at me. Their point was that even if he was willing to go on-the-record and say these things, why did I have to take a young man who was about 20 years old and put him in The New York Times, where the president of South Korea--the whole apparatus--could come down on him? Frankly, I began to think that maybe they had a point. On the other hand, it was a far more effective article, and it certainly made the point much more reasonably about South Korea since it had a real person, a real name attached to it... and Woo Sang Ho was very willing. He made an informed decision about going on-the-record.

So, again, I need some hands here. How many of you think that in that situation I should have used his name? How many of you think I should not have used his real name? I think there are a lot of abstentions. Well, in the end, I wrote a number of articles about Woo Sang Ho and about his being arrested. The New York Times ran some editorials calling for his release. Rather coincidentally, South Korea was moving toward democracy. So, in a little less than a year, Woo Sang Ho was released. He became a friend of mine. After he got out, he apologized profusely for his family having been angry with me. He said that I had actually done a terrific thing, and that I had kind of made his career by sending him to prison and giving him all of this publicity.

So, in that case, it worked to name him. On the other hand, if he had been very, very badly beaten in prison or killed, the moral of the story would have been entirely different. It is the kind of decision that one has to wrestle with constantly in these places.

There were also a lot of occasions when we knew that we needed information and that--to serve the readers' interest, to provide the most complete picture that we could to the public and to our readership--getting this information would endanger our sources. We faced that tradeoff. Every time I left our compound where we lived in Beijing, I was tailed, sometimes by teams of people. I would go jogging and there would be a couple of Mercedes Benzes and motorcycles behind us. It looked like President Bush when he goes jogging. And the telephones were tapped.

I remember at one point in particular when there was a report that the Defense Minister, Qin Jiwei, had been put under house arrest. He was in trouble in the leadership. I had a friend who was in the military and who was also a source. He could have told me the truth and could have clarified this. It was a big story. I wanted to get it right, and yet, I didn't want to get my friend in trouble. I had ways of getting in touch with my friend, but they were very complex and usually took a few days to arrange. Just going off on the spur of the moment to try to call him or try to contact him would have put him at risk.

In that case, I sacrificed the interest of the readers--and, in a sense, my role of providing all the information that I could get for the readers--because of my concern for him. More and more, the longer I stayed abroad, I found myself taking that position in the trade off--not being as good a reporter, narrowly construed, as I could have been because of apprehension about the consequences of that reporting.

The time when it came to a head most clearly was one moment when a young man came to me. He wanted to sell me information about China selling missiles to Pakistan. It was a big international issue, a big diplomatic issue. China was clearly selling medium-range missiles, which could pack a nuclear warhead, to Pakistan, and was denying it. If I could prove that China was doing so despite all international assurances that it was not, it would be a terrific front-page story. It would have an enormous international impact. One could argue that the story would make it less likely for China to sell missiles abroad. The story would have a very useful effect on China's proliferation policies.

This young man had the dates of the shipments; he had pictures of the shipments; he had all of the information, and he wanted to sell it. One of the clear policies at American news organizations is that we don't pay for information for fear of getting information that is not true. I met with him on a number of occasions, essentially to try to get him to give me the information for free, to try to find some benefit to him that did not involve payment.

During these meetings as a reporter, I would try to build rapport with him. One way you can do that is by asking about the person's family and building some kind of a human relationship. It turned out that he had a wife and a son who knew nothing about him trying to sell the information. He just wanted more money so that his kid could live a better life. Each time we met to talk about this--me to try to encourage him to give me the information; him to try to encourage me to pay for it--I began to feel more and more concerned.

Even if I was successful and he did give me the information, there was some reasonable possibility that the Chinese government would have gone berserk trying to find out who leaked this information. I think it is unlikely that they would have found my source, but it would not have been impossible. If they had, there is no question about what would have happened. They would have taken him off and shot him.

The more that I talked to him about his wife and his son and built this rapport in a effort to get information from him, the more I began to worry about the whole enterprise in which I was engaged. Finally, by our last meetings, I was telling him, "Just go home, forget about this, don't try to sell this information. Just think about your kid."

It was an extraordinary situation. It felt very strange as a journalist to be within reach of an incredible story and to be telling my source "shut up!" But it ultimately felt right; and more and more, that seemed to be the best arbiter of what to do, rather than broader journalistic principles or ideas that applied only in journalism and not to humanistic obligations from one person to another.

China also provided the moment that I was most challenged to either go to the dark side or not. A young man had helped us report Tiananmen, for which we had won the Pulitzer Prize. We felt rather guilty that we had gotten the glory of the Pulitzer and that many of our Chinese friends, who had helped us, had ended up in trouble. Liu Xiang was one of those friends.

He had been a university student and was about 19 when we met him. He was our contact at Qinghua University in Beijing and had funneled information toward us about the demonstrations at the university. After the crackdown, he had continued--at tremendous risk to himself--to meet with us secretly and tell us how the crackdown was taking shape.

To make a long story short, he ended up in prison; he escaped; he made his way back to Beijing; and he met with us secretly to ask for help in escaping to Hong Kong.

If there is anything a reporter should not be doing, it is meeting with an escaped convict, and certainly not helping him flee the country. I would be jeopardizing not only my own stay in Beijing with The New York Times but, indeed, The New York Times' bureau in Beijing. It could have been closed if I if I had been caught helping Liu Xiang.

Nicholas Kristof gives his speech at the 2001 Ruhl Symposium.
My wife and I agonized for some time about what to do. On the one hand, here was a kid who was in trouble partly because of us. If we did not help him, he might very well be caught again and spend who knows how long in prison. On the other hand, every principle of journalism seemed to tell me not to break the law, not to jeopardize my newspaper's bureau in a place like this, and not to help an escaped convict.

Also going through our mind was a question of how he had escaped. Was it possible that he had been released by the authorities in an effort to entrap us--to get us to help him so that we would then be photographed and kicked out of the country? At that point, the Chinese authorities were trying to expel us, so it seemed plausible. We went back and forth with ourselves about what to do.

Again, I have to ask you. How many say we should have helped him? How many say we should have stayed our distance? A lot of abstentions again. Well, we did help him. We did it very delicately in ways that, to the degree possible, allowed us to keep our fingerprints off. We did our best not to be in any situation where we could be photographed helping an escaped ex-convict, but we did help him and he was able to get to Hong Kong. I remember he escaped into Hong Kong on Christmas Day because he thought there would be fewer border guards on the Hong Kong side because it was a holiday. We were able to help him come to the U.S. and he now lives in this country. In the end, there is nothing I did that so breached my obligations to The New York Times , if you will, or traditional principles about what correspondents should be doing, and yet, there are few things that I did when I was in China of which I am prouder. Those were some of the tradeoffs that, in an extreme case, we faced one way or another on a regular basis. There are other principles that were tested. For example, journalists should not lie or deceive others. But that was tested, in my case, when I went to cover the civil war in Zaire. I took a trip without permission through the guerrilla-held territory. I was stopped by a guerrilla roadblock. It turned out the guerrillas at that roadblock were busy. They were Tutsi tribesmen and they were busy killing Hutu tribesmen. They clearly were not happy about a Westerner arriving.

I was taken to the guerilla commander by a bunch of kids with machine guns, and I was very alarmed. So I lied through my teeth. I told the guerrilla commander that the overall guerrilla leader, Laurent Kabila, had told me to take this route. I said, "He sends his best wishes."

The commander did not know whether to believe me or not, but he did not want to take any risks. After about an hour of being unable to get a radio link through to Kabila, he let me go. I went on through the jungle blithely in my Jeep. After a week in the jungle, I ended up in Uganda.

I later found out through my Jeep driver that only about an hour after we left the roadblock, that guerrilla commander had managed to get a radio link and had found that my trip was totally unauthorized. He sent a truck to catch up to me, but the roads were so bad that for a week I stayed a little bit ahead of it, totally unaware that it was behind me. Our Jeep would get stuck in the mud for three hours at a time and we would hack a new route with our machetes. Fortunately, the guerrillas' truck would get stuck at places, too, and they never quite caught up with us.

Am I proud of lying? No. But those are cases where the imperative suggested exceptions to the general rule. The lesson, I think, is that ethics as a whole are enormously important in journalism. We need to preserve the public trust. Because much of what we do involves questioning the behavior of others, it is paramount that we try above all to be unimpeachable in every respect.

The point is that while ethics are enormously important, it is difficult or impossible to try come up with permanent rules that govern our conduct unwaveringly in every respect. Ethics are fundamentally not a code of conduct, but an outlook on life, and that is what we have to attempt to live up to.

It is important to wrestle with ethical issues, to think about them, to try to adhere to them, to take classes in them, to come to speeches about them. I think it is also useful to come up with general principles--that you do not deceive, that you avoid any financial conflicts of interest, that you don't break rules, you don't break local laws--but it is impossible for meaningful and comprehensive journalism to be summed up quite so neatly in principles, particularly when abroad. There will always be exceptions, and you don't want people to adhere to policies that lead you to foolish or unethical conclusions.

Winston Churchill at one point supposedly wrote a draft of a speech and one of his aides corrected him in the margin, pointing out a sentence that ended with a preposition. The aide noted that a sentence should not end with a preposition. Churchill responded with a scrawled rejoinder, "This is the kind of insubordination up with which I shall not put."

I do not want to leave you with only the kind of war stories that journalists love to exchange at bars and odd places around the world. To try to elevate this talk, I will venture for a moment into the junction of journalism and philosophy.

Dean Gleason mentioned that I went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. One of the people on the selection committee was (University of Oregon President) David Frohnmayer and ever since then I've been enormously impressed with his sense of judgment.

At Oxford I studied law, but maybe the most impressive person I met was not a lawyer but the philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. He was one of the great philosophers of the 20th Century. Berlin argued that we all have a deep yearning, a childlike yearning for absolutes, for being able to sum up moral ideas in a single yardstick, a single imperative, a single way of judging. He argued that life is much more complicated than that, that there are many different yardsticks of things we want to advance, of things that will make the world better. He said that there isn†t an easy way of reconciling these different yardsticks. The lack of reconciliation is what makes life an enormously complex and challenging--but ultimately rewarding--task.

I want to briefly quote one of the things that Sir Isaiah wrote in his book, "Four Essays on Liberty." He talked about the desire for guarantees, for having a precise, overarching, measure of behavior. He said that to realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them is, and I quote: "perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. 'To realize the relative validity of one's convictions,' said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.' To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep and more dangerous moral and political immaturity."

What I admire about Sir Isaiah's philosophy is that he describes a world that I recognize: a complex one full of fine gradations, where ethical decisions are often wrenchingly difficult, where we are torn by contradictory impulses, where reasonable people disagree. Yet he does not confuse complexity for futility; he embraces the challenge and urges that we stand firmly even for those ethical convictions that we recognize people can disagree on. Above all, as I remember Sir Isaiah, he stood for wrestling with ideas and seeking to improve oneself not by blind acceptance of ideals or principles but by thinking hard about practical realities. And that is a standard that holds true in journalism as in most fields of human endeavor.

Here in the United States, it works much more easily to have rules than it does for foreign correspondents. For example, it is going to be much more rare that a reporter is going to justify a lie to by saying it will save a human life. Yet after coming back from Asia, I spent the year 2000 covering the presidential election, and I was struck even there about the number of times that things came up that I wasn't prepared to decide neatly and that no overarching principle could decide. One often needed to make ad hoc decisions, based on a broader framework than journalism itself. In the Fall right before the election, I interviewed Karl Rove, George W. Bush's political strategist, in his office in Austin. It was an on-the-record interview. I had my tape recorder between us. Mid-way through the interview, Bush called Rove. I excused myself, closed the door, went out for five minutes, then went back in and continued the interview. That afternoon, as I went through my notes and the tape recording, I came to a section that I hadn't remembered and, sure enough, both Rove and I had totally forgotten that the tape recorder had been running while I had been out of the office. And clearly, neither George W. Bush nor Karl Rove intended for me to have the tape recording of their conversation. On the other hand, I hadn't misrepresented myself. It was as much Rove's mistake as mine. So, what should I have done? How many say I should have used that material? How many say I should not have used it? Frankly, I have a lot of difficulty with that. While there was nothing extraordinary in their conversation, the information was insightful. It would have been useful as a reporter to be able to describe how Rove and Bush talked. It would have added to my article, added to my insights, but there was no single news breakthrough, no "gotcha."

In the end, I did not use any of their conversation. It felt a little bit sleazy. However, if they had talked about bugging the Watergate, if they had talked about dirty tricks against Al Gore, then I might have felt differently. Yet I can't argue that there is a principle involved in that distinction. What would it be: in that situation, it†s okay to use dynamite material but not banal quotes? That's opportunism rather than principles, and I have a lot of trouble with that one.

If there is one thing that I would like you to take away, it is the notion that in the business of journalism, the essence of what we have is our credibility. Impeccable ethics are our credibility insurance. But ethics are a way of life, and not a 10-page code of conduct. You cannot reduce most situations in a very meaningful way to something that is so neatly precise and analytical. The essence of ethics is not following a code of ethics; it is thinking seriously about what is right. Above all, we should never impose our own journalistic practices on those who are outside of them when they have not signed on to those practices. The imperative to get a story or to get people on-the-record should not outweigh the larger humanistic obligations that we have of doing what is honorable, or what just feels right.

That probably sounds terribly serious. But I do not think that journalists should spend all their time cogitating about ethical questions or reading Isaiah Berlin. We need to puzzle over them and we need to be less arrogant as a profession. We need to think more instead of blindly following our own practices or rules and principles. But we also need to lighten up. At the beginning of this talk, I told you about moving into our apartment in Beijing and finding the Electronic Sound Carrying Device. We debated whether I should have destroyed it, used it for disinformation, or simply left it in place. But the world is a complex place, and it does not spin around us as much as we sometimes think. Let me close by telling you what happened. As my wife and I were huddled there puzzling over how to handle the situation, a friend arrived at the front door of our apartment and pressed the doorbell. And we found out what an Electronic Sound Carrying Device is in Chinese. It's a doorbell buzzer!

Thank you very much.

This lecture was made possible by the Robert and Mabel Ruhl Endownment with additional support from the Carlton Raymond and Wilberta Ripley Savage Endowment in International Relations and Peace.