Response

Over the weekend I attended the True/False Film Festival, a documentary film festival that returned to Columbia this year for its sixth straight year. I attended the film "Reporter," where director Eric Daniel Metzgar followed the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and a couple of college students into the Congo, as Kristof hoped to connect the Congo's ongoing humanitarian crisis to his western readers, mostly in the continental United States. 

As Metzgar cites phycological studies that show that the human brain cannot comprehend giving aid to more than one person in a difficult situation, Kristof set foot in the Congo to find a person who will illustrate the problems of that country, which has been a successful method he has used in previous columns. He finds his story in a 41-year old woman, Yohanita, who was dying of starvation and weighed no more than 60 pounds. Kristof pays out of his own pocket to have Yohanita transported out of the jungle to the nearest hospital, where she would, unfortunately, later die of complications. Yohanita never got to see her family before she died, and that raises some ethical problems, namely using a single person as the symbol of the Congo, as well as uprooting her from her family so she could possibly live longer than she would had she stayed at home. What do you think about that?

It was a great film for young, aspiring journalists, because it makes you believe that no matter what happens, you can make a difference as a journalist if you just set your mind to getting the story right and focus on reporting on people and places that might otherwise be overlooked.