Exclusive Interview with Nicholas Kristof: Women Hold Up Half the Sky

[tabatha]

Tabby Biddle: You write tirelessly about the atrocities facing women and girls around the world. Why are you drawn to this subject?

Nick Kristof: A couple of reasons...maybe three reasons. One is that some of the worst human rights abuses seem to me to involve gender. Second is that these tend to be neglected, and I think that we in journalism tend to do the most good when we shine our spotlight on issues that are neglected. And third, on a purely practical level, I think it's hard to find a more effective way to make a difference on issues like global poverty, peace and justice without empowering women and turning them into catalysts for change.

TB: You are one of the few voices out there at a major media outlet championing the rights of women and girls. Why is this?

NK: Traditionally what we in the news business do is cover what happened yesterday. These kinds of abuses tend to happen every day. Things that happen every day are frankly what we in the news business aren't good at covering because there is no one day in which they are news. So I think that's part of it. I think that there is also a lot of inertia in terms of what we consider to have news value. If there is something that we have been covering, we continue to cover it because it's on the global agenda. If there is something that we haven't covered, then we think of it as something that isn't newsworthy. So I think it's the combination of inertia and the fact that these are part of the backdrop, and also they are typically issues that politicians aren't quarreling about. I think the result is that they tend to get neglected.

TB: Why aren't politicians quarreling about these issues?

NK: Partly it's because we in the news business and the people in politics tend to reinforce each other in terms of what issues are on the agenda. More broadly these issues tend to be perceived as soft, peripheral issues that don't have easy political solutions and that voters don't usually care about. To some degree the extent of these issues are international ones. I don't think that voters are particularly clamoring to address some of these issues, and likewise I don't think television viewers are clamoring for networks to have more coverage of these issues, which is unfortunate, but I think that's the way it is.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tabby-biddle/exclusive-interview-with-_6_b_1091593.html?ref=tw

(Love this guy. He gave the most coherent and humane reason for helping Libyans that I have ever read.)

[Deep13]

1. Race or religious-based abuses are atrocities. Gender-based abuses are "culture."

Good for him. I hate how the violence and subjugation of women is tacitly accepted.

[applegrove]

2. He's such a good egg.