{"id":9913,"date":"2014-02-17T05:00:31","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T10:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=9913"},"modified":"2014-02-17T10:40:10","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T15:40:10","slug":"my-other-beef-with-kristof","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/9913","title":{"rendered":"My Other Beef with Kristof"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend, New York Times<\/em> columnist Nicholas Kristof caused an uproar among academic bloggers when he published an op-ed titled “Professors, We Need You!<\/a>,” in which he decried a supposed generalized lack of public engagement among academics. The response from those academics who are on social media was “Just because you don’t read us doesn’t mean we’re not here<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

I don’t want to add to my publicly engaged colleagues’ outrage regarding this last Kristof crisis beyond the fact that in my job, my social media engagement (insofar as it relates to my research and teaching, of course) counts as “outreach,” which is a distinct portion of our annual review, so maybe Kristof should look to land grant institutions for solace: Just on my part of the University of Minnesota campus, my colleague Jonathan Foley<\/a> finds time to be publicly engaged, even though I’m sure being director of the Institute on the Environment (on top of his own research, teaching, and other committee responsibilities) keeps him very busy.<\/p>\n

I did want to comment, however, on how this should not have surprised anyone in light of past experience.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of actress Mia Farrow and film director Woody Allen, wrote an open letter in which she accused Woody Allen of sexually abusing her. You can read that letter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Besides how horrific what Woody Allen has allegedly done to Dylan Farrow is, does anything strike you about that letter?<\/p>\n

What I found striking about it was that instead of having been published as a regular New York Times<\/em> op-ed — and I’m sure Ms. Farrow could have gotten it published as such had she tried — this was published as… a post on Kristof’s blog!<\/p>\n

In a short preface to Dylan Farrow’s letter, Kristof writes:<\/p>\n

So why publish an account of an old case on my blog? Partly because the Golden Globe lifetime achievement award to Allen ignited a debate about the propriety of the award. Partly because the root issue here isn\u2019t celebrity but sex abuse. And partly because countless people on all sides have written passionately about these events, but we haven\u2019t fully heard from the young woman who was at the heart of them. I\u2019ve written a column about this, but it\u2019s time for the world to hear Dylan\u2019s story in her own words.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The emphasis is mine. To me, this really reads more like “it’s time for the world to hear Dylan’s story in her own words–as curated by me, Nicholas Kristof!”<\/p>\n\n

What Ms. Farrow claims to have suffered at the hands of Woody Allen is horrible and, as such, I believe it needs no commentary. So for one to cast oneself front and center of that story is, in my view, very distasteful, and it reeks of attention seeking.<\/p>\n

In July 2012, I wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I am not a Kristof\u00a0fanboi<\/a>. In fact, I thought Kristof\u2019s live-tweeting of a police raid on a Cambodian brothel he had been invited to join in on was in poor taste, and I find the \u201cWhite Savior\u201d persona \u2014 in Kristof or anyone else \u2013\u00a0off-putting. (UPDATE: I also thought his criticizing a poor Malawian for smoking, drinking, and visiting prostitutes in\u00a0this column<\/a>\u00a0to be beyond patronizing.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The live-tweeting of a police raid on a Cambodian brothel that employs children as prostitutes, the curating of Dylan Farrow’s letter, the ignorance of the academic blogosphere — all this, to me, points to a degree of self-centeredness that borders on the solipsistic, something that is best captured by Corey Robin in his response<\/a> to Kristof (again, the emphasis is mine):<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re flying so high up in the air\u2014Kristof tends to look down on most situations from 30,000 feet above sea level\u2014you\u2019re not going to see much of anything. And Kristof doesn\u2019t. He only reads The New Yorker<\/em>, and then complains that everyone doesn\u2019t write for The New Yorker<\/em>. He doesn\u2019t see the many men and women who are in fact writing for public audiences. Nor does he see the gatekeepers\u2014even in our new age of blogs and little magazines\u2014that prevent supply from meeting demand.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But in my July 2012 post, I also wrote:<\/p>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0is in the business of selling newspapers. Space in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u2018 editorial pages comes at a premium. Don\u2019t think for a second that the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0would publish Kristof\u2019s columns in its editorial pages if they didn\u2019t correspond exactly to what the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u2018 readership wants from a foreign correspondent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given the high degree of narcissism the baby boom generation exhibits and transmitted to its children<\/a>\u00a0and the resultant narcissism epidemic<\/a>,\u00a0is it any surprise that that what the so-called newspaper of record offers its readers are solipsistic, self-centered musings in which one casts himself front and center amid other people’s greatest tragedies? The New York Times<\/em> is merely selling what its readers want to buy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof caused an uproar among academic bloggers when he published an op-ed titled “Professors, We Need You!,”<\/p>\n

Continue readingMy Other Beef with Kristof<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-2zT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9913"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9929,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9913\/revisions\/9929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}