In 'Reporter,' Nick Kristof's beat is the Congo

THE DOCUMENTARY "Reporter"

WHEN | WHERE Thursday night at 9:30 on HBO

WHAT IT'S ABOUT A few years ago, The New York Times launched an unusual contest called "Win a Trip With Nick Kristof," in which first prize was a trip to sub-Sahara Africa with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter-columnist, who brought attention to the genocide in Darfur. ("What's second prize?" Stephen Colbert later wondered in an interview with Kristof. "Two trips?")

"Reporter" is based on Kristof's 2007 trip with winners Leana Wen, then a medical student in St. Louis, and Will Okun, a Chicago high school teacher. This documentary contains redundant testimony to Kristof's probity, world-class reporting and upstanding citizenship - he's a liberal darling and people like Mia Farrow recall how profoundly their lives were changed by his work. Then, it gets down to business. Kristof heads into Congo to interview a warlord named Nkunda.

En route, he finds a woman named Yohanita Nyiahabimama, who is dying from an infection and starvation. A teacher, she lost her livelihood after a soldier raped her. Kristof uses her plight to tell the story of millions in a column.

MY SAY "Reporter" is the sort of program to spark debate. Liberals see Kristof as representative of the highest ideals, as someone who shines a light on atrocities, and, by so doing, jams a sharp knife into the conscience of world powers. Conservatives might see him as an out-of-touch ideologue who refuses to recognize that the problems of, say, Congo are intractable and unsolvable. They both miss the point.

Kristof is a member of a dying breed - the globe-trotting reporter who parachutes into unspeakably dangerous places to tell the story of desperate, powerless people who would otherwise be utterly invisible. He does this because that's what great reporters and great news organizations are supposed to do. Tragically, other brilliant, courageous reporters are being shed by U.S. news organizations - broadcast and print - one by one. That bodes ill for Kristof (he even admits it), the nation and, especially, the subjects of their stories.

BOTTOM LINE A good story, with valuable insight into how a top-flight reporter works.

GRADE A