Nicholas Donabet Kristof (born April 27, 1959) is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.
Born in Chicago, Kristof was raised in Yamhill, Oregon, the son of two professors at nearby Portland State University. After graduating from Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson, Kristof intermittently interned at The Oregonian. He joined the staff of The New York Times in 1984.
Kristof is a self-described progressive. According to The Washington Post, Kristof "rewrote opinion journalism" with his emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa described Kristof as an "honorary African" for shining a spotlight on neglected conflicts in the continent.http://www.achievement.org/summit/2008/ Academy of Achievement Summit 2008
Early life and education Kristof was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up on a family sheep farm and cherry orchard in Yamhill, Oregon. He is the son of Jane Kristof (née McWilliams) and Ladis "Kris" Kristof (born Władysław Krzysztofowicz; 1918–2010), both long-time professors at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. His father, who was born to Polish and Armenian parents in Chernivtsi, former Austria-Hungary, immigrated to the United States after World War II.
Kristof graduated from Yamhill Carlton High School, where he was student body president and school newspaper editor. He attended Harvard College, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate. At Harvard, he studied government, interned at Portland's The Oregonian, and worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper. According to a profile of him, "Alums recall Kristof as one of the brightest undergraduates on campus."
After Harvard, he studied law at Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his law degree with first-class honors and won an academic prize (awarded as an earned Bachelor of Arts at Oxford, and promoted per tradition to a Master of Arts). He studied Arabic in Egypt for the 1983–84 academic year at the American University in Cairo. He has a number of honorary degrees.
Career After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, Kristof worked as a correspondent for the company in Los Angeles. Throughout his career there, he became the NYT’s bureau chief in Hong Kong from 1987 to 1988, Beijing from 1988 to 1993 and Tokyo where he succeeded David E. Sanger from 1995 to 1999, before becoming a columnist in 2001. He rose to be associate managing editor of The New York Times, responsible for Sunday editions. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty, and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area 11 times.
As of 2008, Kristof had visited 140 countries. Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker, a Harvard classmate, has said: "I'm not surprised to see him emerge as the moral conscience of our generation of journalists. I am surprised to see him as the Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists."Daniel J.T. Schuker (June 5, 2006). "Nicholas Kristof," The Harvard Crimson.
Bill Clinton said of Kristof in September 2009: "There is no one in journalism, anywhere in the United States at least, who has done anything like the work he has done to figure out how poor people are actually living around the world, and what their potential is. So every American citizen who cares about this should be profoundly grateful that someone in our press establishment cares enough about this to haul himself all around the world to figure out what's going on. ... I am personally in his debt, as are we all."
Kristof was a member of the board of overseers of Harvard University, where he was chief marshal of commencement for his 25th reunion. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars. Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists, said in a 2013 statement: "Nick Kristof is the conscience of international journalism."
In 2020, Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation described Kristof as "journalism's North Star on issues of poverty, dignity and justice."
Between 2010 and 2018 Kristof wrote three articles about Kevin Cooper, who had been sentenced to death for murdering a family in California. Kristof made the case that Cooper had been framed by a racist Sheriff's department and that the true killer was a white contract killer named Lee Furrow. After the third article, both U.S. Senators from California, Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein, called for a second round of DNA testing. Seven months after the article was published, departing Governor Jerry Brown authorized limited retesting to settle the issue; the testing was ultimately inconclusive and questions have been raised about the impartiality and effectiveness of the investigation.
On November 12, 2016, Kristof chased and tackled an intruder burglarizing his room at the Franklin Hotel near Independence Hall in Philadelphia. In a blog post titled "Why You Should Always Lock Your Hotel Room Door", published in The New York Times later that day, Kristof wrote that the thief threatened multiple times to stab him and was restrained in the lobby with the help of hotel employees.
Oregon gubernatorial campaign In July 2021, research was conducted to establish his potential as a candidate for governor of Oregon in the 2022 Oregon gubernatorial election.Monahan, Rachel (July 18, 2021). New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof Is Exploring a Run for Oregon Governor, Willamette Week. Retrieved July 19, 2021. In October 2021, Kristof left The New York Times after forming a political action committee for his potential candidacy, saying in a statement, "Precisely because I have a great job, outstanding editors and the best readers, I may be an idiot to leave. But you all know how much I love Oregon, and how much I've been seared by the suffering of old friends there. So I've reluctantly concluded that I should try not only to expose problems but also see if I can fix them directly."
On Twitter, a New York Times features editor, Hillary Howard, wrote, "Nick had a remarkable talent for never taking anything personally, for never letting his ego get in the way. At a place as competitive as the Times, this trait really stood out. He somehow seemed like this innocent, unchanged after dining with warlords or interviewing pimps. This trait will serve him well, should he go into politics." Other colleagues described Kristof as a mentor to young journalists.
On October 27, 2021, Kristof officially announced he would run for governor as a Democrat. A day later, on October 28, 2021, the Times published an essay by Kristof in which he wrote, "I love journalism, but I also love my home state. I keep thinking of Theodore Roosevelt's dictum: 'It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,' he said. 'The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.'"
On January 6, 2022, Shemia Fagan, the Oregon Secretary of State, announced that Kristof was ineligible to run as he did not meet the state's residency requirements. Kristof challenged the decision in court but on February 17, the Oregon Supreme Court upheld the Secretary of State's ruling.
On August 1, 2022, Kristof and The New York Times announced that he would return to his job as a columnist. His first new column since returning to the paper was published on November 16, 2022.
Prizes In 1990, Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their reporting on the pro-democracy student movement and the related Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Kristof has also received the George Polk Award and an award from the Overseas Press Club for his reporting which focuses on human rights and environmental issues.
Kristof was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2004 and again in 2005 "for his powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world's often forgotten people and stirred action." In 2006 Kristof won his second Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary "for his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world." Kristof was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize again in 2012 and 2016; altogether, he has been a Pulitzer finalist seven times.
In 2008, Kristof received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
In 2009, Kristof and WuDunn received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award. Together, they also received the 2009 World of Children Lifetime Achievement Award. He has also won the 2008 Anne Frank Award, the 2007 Fred Cuny Award for Prevention of Deadly Conflict, and the 2013 Advancing Global Health Award (from Seattle Biomed). Commentators have occasionally suggested Kristof for the Nobel Peace Prize, but when Media Web named Kristof its "print journalist of the year" in 2006 and asked him about that, it quoted him as saying: "I can't imagine it going to a scribbler like me. That's a total flight of fancy."Jon Friedman, "Kristof is Media Web's Print Journalist of the Year," December 1, 2006.
In 2011, Kristof was named one of seven "Top American Leaders" by the Harvard Kennedy School and The Washington Post. "His writing has reshaped the field of opinion journalism", The Washington Post explained in granting the award. That same year, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. Earlier, in 2007, U.S. News & World Report named Kristof one of "America's Best Leaders".
In 2013, Kristof was awarded the Goldsmith Award for Career Excellence in Journalism by Harvard University. Alex Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning director of Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center, declared in presenting the award that "the reporter who's done more than any other to change the world is Nick Kristof." In the same year, Kristof was named an International Freedom Conductor by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, largely for his work exposing human trafficking and linking it to modern slavery. The last person named to receive the title, two years earlier, was the Dalai Lama.
In 2021, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Kristof and The New York Times opinion video team an Emmy award for their video, "Heartache in the Hot Zone: The Front Line Against Covid-19."
Books
Kristof has co-authored all his books with his wife WuDunn, include China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994), Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (1999), Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf, September 2009), A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity (2014) and Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (Knopf, January 2020). A feature documentary for Tightrope was released in 2019. These were all bestsellers.