With overseers like French, is it too much to ask that CJR also hire some fact-checkers? There is a great deal more to object to in McConnell’s piece, but what matters for now is that by publishing it, and then proliferating it online after admitting that it is the product of journalistic malpractice, CJR has betrayed its own mission as the sort of honest broker of journalistic standards that we all need it to be.

Philip Gourevitch
Brooklyn, NY

[Update: The first two sentences of Gourevitch’s remarks were changed after a negotiation with the author over an edit for accuracy.]

Tristan McConnell responds:

My CJR article is no attempt to “discredit” Philip Gourevitch, nor is it a profile. There is scarcely more biographical detail here than you might find in one of his author’s bios, nor do I make but the briefest passing reference to his years of research and reporting on many subjects beyond Rwanda.

Rather, it is an exploration of the debate over how Paul Kagame and his Rwanda are represented in the Western press, a debate approached through the frame of one Rwanda’s best known chroniclers. It is precisely an article, “about the changing media perception of Paul Kagame…how attitudes toward Kagame have changed over the years”.

I told Gourevitch it was not a profile but that he figured prominently in the piece. It was a discourtesy not to make explicit how focused on him the story was to be, and for that I have already apologized in private. For the rest, there is no apology to be made.

That the piece focuses on Gourevitch’s work is a function of his position as the most high-profile journalistic voice on the subject in New York, where both this magazine and his main outlet, The New Yorker, are published. He may not like the public position, centrality to the Rwanda debate, or scrutiny of his work that his success brings, but it is his to bear.

Of course, journalists were not taking “dictation” from Gourevitch. Rather his writing captured an image of Kagame that existed at the time. He didn’t create or invent it; he just described it better than most, and in a magazine that carries more influence than most, and in a book (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families) that sold more copies than most.

The Rwanda narrative with Kagame at its heart captured by Gourevitch (and others) was powerful and so it held sway. But as that story has been assaulted by more recent events and revelations, this shift has not been reflected in his reported work.

I would point readers who want to draw their own conclusions to two of Gourevitch’s New Yorker articles that bookend his Rwanda reporting thus far: “After The Genocide” (1995) and “The Life After” (2009). The latter is analyzed in some detail in my article and clearly illustrates my argument that Gourevitch’s narrative does not reflect recent events and revelations.

Contrary to Gourevitch’s claims, “The Vanishing” (1997) contains plenty of kind words about Laurent Kabila, including the description of Congolese liberation hero Patrice Lumumba as his “mentor.”

I know that Gourevitch has not written about Meles Zenawi (a basic search on the New Yorker website reveals this), but what I wrote is that, at the time, he fell for the then-popular concept of the “New African leadership” which included Zenawi.

Gourevitch’s complaint that my piece wasn’t sufficiently fact-checked is nothing more than rhetoric and wishful thinking. Nor is this article a lone voice, rather, it makes explicit what many discuss in private, surely one of the aims of worthwhile journalism.

I spoke to leading Africanist professors such as David Anderson at Oxford and Rene Lemarchand at Florida to explore the intriguing distance between media and academic views of Kagame and his regime. For the same reason, I interviewed human-rights advocates and experts on Congo.

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The Editors is a contributor to CJR.