Jacob Kushner has an impressive record of thoughtful reporting from places such as Kenya, Uganda, Germany and the Caribbean.
His reporting covers topics ranging from migration and statelessness to global health, history and foreign aid. He covered the 2013 Westgate Mall terrorist attack in Nairobi, Kenya, investigated terrorism against immigrants in Germany and reported on LGBTQ refugees in East Africa. He is also the author of “China’s Congo Plan”, a book that chronicles China’s interest in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mineral wealth.
Kushner has a degree in journalism and Latin American Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. He has freelanced for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, National Geographic and VICE, and will teach a course on international reporting at the UW–Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication next fall.
Kushner spoke with us from Nairobi about his career and ethical issues in international reporting. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
What are some of the ethical challenges in international journalism? How do you cope with those challenges?
I think one big one that we talk about a lot in journalism is the role of ‘do no harm.’ I think that is more obvious when you’re dealing with particularly vulnerable people. And that can be refugees, it can be LGBTQ people in a place where homosexuality is illegal. It can be Indigenous people living in a forest that’s under development. It can be so many things, but I think making sure that your presence there doesn’t draw undue attention from authorities that could cause problems for somebody. But then also making sure that your reporting that comes out later doesn’t make things worse for people. And I think that’s one thing that is important when we talk about ‘do no harm’ — we need to make sure our reporting itself isn’t putting anybody in danger or potentially worsening their situation, even if indirectly.
I’ve dealt with that a lot in my reporting with LGBT refugees in East Africa. Having to make sure people are comfortable or safe sharing their names or comfortable with photos of themselves being published. And if not, we need to work to protect them, to use pseudonyms and discuss these things with our editors. And we need to make sure these people feel protected, not just when we’re interviewing them, but when the story comes out and even afterward in the months that follow. So I think one big rule is do no harm.
I think that includes managing expectations of people who might expect that, ‘Oh, you’re a foreign reporter coming in, maybe you’re gonna help change our situation, potentially.’ It is important to keep people aware of when that’s not likely to be the case, and also aware that that’s not necessarily your mission. Your mission is just to help them tell their story or something to that effect. So I think managing expectations is a big part of doing no harm. But also on the flip side, it’s an international journalist’s responsibility to do everything they can to help faithfully tell that person’s story to the world and get that story out there. So I think it comes with a responsibility as well.
Often, being an international journalist means going into places where the culture and customs differ from your own. How do you ensure you are being as accurate as possible in how you document events and issues in places you aren’t native to?
One thing that international journalists do often is work with local journalists, translators or fixers who can really help translate the culture and make sure you’re understanding. I’ve worked with journalists or been on press trips where I’ve seen journalists sort of ignore the advice of these fixers who might be trying to speak up to explain ‘what the person is really trying to say is X, but they’re telling you Y because they’re embarrassed or because they’re fearful or because whatever reason.’
I think it’s really important for journalists to be attuned to not only what sources are trying to tell you, but what other people around you are trying to tell you as well. In addition, studying and reading up as much as you can about a particular issue and place before you go report there, that’s huge as well. Reading the existing news, maybe a book about the subject. I think it’s good to inform yourself, but then it’s also good to be dynamic and pick up on those signals that people give you as you’re doing the reporting.
A journalist’s access to information is often dependent on the place from which they report. How do you navigate governments that do not want certain information shared or block access to certain information? In many countries, journalist safety has also become a major concern. How do you balance your own safety with your sources’ safety when you report?
When it comes to access, there are governments that don’t want certain stories told. I was asked by the LA Times to go cover the Civil War in Ethiopia, which started a couple years ago and has killed far more people than the war in Ukraine but gets very little attention. But the Ethiopian government has largely refused to allow journalists in to cover the conflict. The government forces and their allies have committed terrible atrocities there. Access is tricky. Sometimes we don’t have access. In that case, I had to report from afar and report via phone. So I would meet Ethiopians in Kenya who had family back in Ethiopia, and then we’d call their family to get witness reports of what was happening there at the beginning of the Civil War. So, access is definitely an issue.
Safety, of course, is another one. Not just safety of your sources, but also safety for yourself.
Luckily, I think news organizations are doing a better job of putting safety measures in place and making sure that their journalists are trained and have health insurance. International journalists can usually, in the worst case scenario, get deported or leave the location. Local journalists and local sources can’t usually do that. They’re stuck there with the consequences of your reporting forever. And so maybe your article comes out later and they get put in danger, or the government doesn’t like what was said, and the government knows that a local journalist helped you with it, that could really put that person in danger. So you have to talk those things through with your sources and with the local journalist you’re working with.
What is a story you have done that challenged you ethically? How did you deal with it and what did you learn?
I was covering the Westgate Mall terrorist attack in Kenya 2013, in which a terror group called Al Shabaab attacked the mall, killed many civilians and held some others hostage briefly. During that attack, I found myself outside the mall with at least 60 other journalists who didn’t really know what was going on. I also found myself at a morgue nearby, where I was assigned to try to get an accurate assessment of the death toll of the attack. So that meant trying to station myself at the morgue and basically count bodies.
This is something that is really a reflection of the type of news that we as Americans or news consumers consume because we always want to know the latest death toll if there’s a disaster. The news articles that get clicked are the ones with the highest numbers, and it’s really quite gruesome. But that’s a big ethical issue with breaking news. Whenever something goes wrong, whether it’s war or natural disaster, we get glued to the TV or to Twitter updates about the latest death toll and it creates this kind of cycle.
I saw firsthand at the morgue how other photographers and videographers would kind of stuff their cameras in the faces of grieving mothers at this difficult time. They’re at the morgue and they were re-traumatized right before my eyes because of this need to feed the news and get this death toll and have your news agency be able to report on the grief and also the sheer number of casualties.
So that’s one example that really is disgusting that happens all the time with the news media. I think it’s not only on journalists to push back against this disaster porn, but it is also on news consumers to read the more in-depth articles or view the documentaries as opposed to just clicking on the latest gruesome sort of clickbait that so often appears after a disaster.
As far as communicating with sources who have experienced these traumas and tragedies, how do you approach that? What are some tips?
As a journalist, you have to think about the sorts of stories you need covered. If there are 60 other people or 20 other people covering the same thing, do you really need to go do that as well? That news is going to get out. Are you really serving a real purpose there? Instead, what if you’re the person who follows up a year later on the survivors of that disaster? That’s the kind of journalism I tend to prefer doing. It’s also the type of journalism I tend to prefer reading and watching, looking at the consequences.
I remember a year after Haiti’s Earthquake in 2010, I found a dancer named Fabienne Jean who was three times on the front page of the New York Times for her story. She had lost her leg in the earthquake, couldn’t dance anymore and American donors promised to help fix her leg. Then she danced again. And then the world forgot about her. She eventually passed away years later, just totally forgotten about. And her story was so emblematic of the way journalists and the public kind of make promises to people in far off places of the world and then eventually slowly move on and forget about those promises. I kept in contact with her and ended up writing a story about her life for the New York Times even after everyone else had forgotten. To this day, it’s the piece I’m most proud of.
That’s a story I did that kind of embodies the way we as news consumers and as journalists tend to build narratives up after an event or a disaster, and then forget about them.
I think it’s really important not to forget about our sources. I would challenge people to always ask yourself, ‘What am I contributing to the world for this reporting beyond what others are already doing?’ I think that’s kind of a good guiding question because I think if we’re just repeating the same journalism that so many others are doing, it’s often a bit of a waste of time.
What advice would you give students who would like to pursue a career in international reporting?
I would encourage students to think of the under-reported stories. What is truly missing? These stories are, of course, the hardest to find by their nature. But by familiarizing ourselves with a particular place, reading books about that place, visiting that place and living in that place, eventually we can start to find these stories that are under-reported. I would highly recommend students consider pursuing those sorts of stories. This is not just for international reporting. It goes for domestic reporting as well.
What is the best part of being an international reporter? What parts excite you about it that you would share with students?
The best part is getting to meet people who you would never otherwise meet.
A few years ago, I was filming a documentary in northern Kenya and I met a village chief and asked him for permission to film with a drone over the village. He kind of used it as a teaching moment. All of the kids and many people in the village came to the drone. It was a school day and the kids were very interested. The chief of the village, who’s a teacher, used it as a teaching moment to kind of say, ‘Hey, aren’t you curious why these people are curious about us? Aren’t you curious what these people are doing? Would you like to learn about journalism?’ He was kind of asking and showing these kids that it was the sort of thing they could do if they stayed in school. It was just interesting to me and it’s a moment I’ll never forget. It’s just one of so many interactions I’ve had around the world doing this sort of work. That is definitely the best part of the job. Getting these slices of life from places that we can only read about in books or through journalism. But as a journalist, you get to actually meet those people and see those places.
Any journalist should always strive for having an impact with their reporting, but it’s not so often that that actually happens, and I think we need to challenge ourselves to do better. But on a rare occasion when reporting does have a demonstrable impact, that’s also a really rewarding feeling and something that I like to strive for. I would encourage students to strive for it as well.
If the most rewarding thing about international reporting is meeting interesting people around the world who you wouldn’t otherwise meet, then it makes sense to keep in touch with those people and see how their lives play out in the years that follow.
Where do you see the future of international reporting going? What should students keep in mind as they prepare to enter their careers?
I think the world continues to become more and more connected. More and more people can travel around the world than ever before. More people are on the move. There’s more migrants in the world than there were at any time in history. I think soon there won’t be much of a distinction between international news and domestic news.
When you have migrants and also refugees and forced migrants traveling the world, especially because of climate change and all sorts of global mass movement, it’s likely that this distinction between international news and domestic news is going to disappear. I would encourage students to think ahead and think about what the world is likely to look like in 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now. And how can they do reporting that sheds light on what is going to lead that to a better place. Or, conversely, investigate trends or policies that are leading us to a worse place.
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