Despite the turmoil across the globe, Nicholas Kristof says he still has hope.

The two-time Pulitzer-winning New York Times opinion columnist and author shared his perspective on hope, humanity — and journalism — during his keynote address at the HJ24 awards luncheon on Saturday.

Kristof’s memoir “Chasing Hope, a Reporter’s Life,” recounts his years of bearing witness to history, including the Tiananmen Square massacre, genocide in Darfur, and sex trafficking of young girls in Cambodia. He’s used his deeply reported columns to help readers worldwide take notice of these and other crises at home and abroad.

He has borne witness to terrible things. And yet there are always humans who rise and amaze us. That fuels his storytelling — and his hope.

 “When we humans are really tested in a way that frankly in the U.S. we’re often not,  when warlords are rampaging through your town, there are some people who will behave clearly terribly, and you see evil,” he said. “But when tested, we humans can be just an amazing species.”

As a foreign correspondent and then an op-ed columnist, he has had datelines all over the globe but he also writes about what unfolds here at home, both about the toll opioids and addiction and suicide have taken, and about the strains on the political system.

“Many in the U.S. don’t always appreciate the importance of the democracy that we’ve inherited, of the guardrails, the institutions, the referees that make it work,” he said. 

Collectively, we could learn a lot from the heroic rickshaw drivers Kristof saw in Tiananmen Square, 35 years ago, who pedaled  toward the gunfire to scoop up the bodies of wounded pro-democracy protesters. 

“Things are invariably more nuanced, more complicated than you think,” he said. That’s been a particularly good lesson to remember when parachuting into countries where he didn’t understand the language or culture. Learning the nuances led to deeper reporting, such as the “disappearance” of tens of thousands of baby girls in China, because they weren’t born male, and therefore lacked the same access to food and care as boys. That helped shape his interest in the plight of women and girls throughout the developing world. 

He related the story of a village in Cambodia where dozens of girls, some as young as 11, were sold into sex work, and no one seemed to care. That led to reporting more broadly on sex trafficking in Malaysia, Vietnam, India and Pakistan and then, to trafficking in the U.S. 

“We don’t have the moral authority to tell Cambodia what to do unless we make greater efforts ourselves,” he said. His experience in Cambodia inspired him to take on Backpage where “young girls were being sold like pizzas” and to call out Pornhub for similar behaviors.

After becoming a Times columnist in 2001, Kristof realized that he was unlikely to change many minds on hot button issues like guns or abortion because the thinking was often entrenched. However, he learned that he could have a great impact in the role of gatekeeper.  “It’s our capacity to project issues that people are not paying attention to, and through our reporting, project it onto the agenda.”

Good journalism can be a tremendously powerful force for change, especially if  reporters are willing to take on difficult topics, whether it’s domestic violence or sexual and reproductive health. He encouraged his audience of health journalists to write about issues no one is really talking about. That can be the first step toward improving policy.

‘Individual stories’ matter

Narratives, people’s stories, can make readers care, particularly about issues in far-off places. “It’s fundamentally two things,” he said. “It’s individual stories. It’s an emotional process and a rational one.” But don’t overwhelm readers with too many stories. The ideal entry point is  an “n of 1,” he said, flipping a phrase that’s often used to disparage thin data.  But in journalism a story, an “n of 1,” can create an emotional connection with the reader. Then the journalist can expand it and present the larger context.

Kristof has come back again and again to the tragic toll that drugs, alcohol and violence have taken in the U.S. including taking the lives of many people he grew up with in Yamhill, Oregon. “I don’t think the public has come to grips adequately, with the pain around the country and the suffering around the country, or galvanized the resources and the political will to address that crisis in behavioral health,” he said. 

Although today’s political and science-skeptical environments can be dispiriting, and young people may often feel overwhelmed, Kristof still feels optimistic about the future. Globally, childhood death rates have plummeted. Literacy has improved. And women have become more empowered. As he said, we can be an amazing species.