Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

navigated outdated technology and propaganda and detailed the regime change as leader Kim Jong-il died and his son Kim Jong-un took over.

But when she returned, thankful to have survived, her project met a wave of criticism. Instead of “undercover reporting,” it was called “lying.” One New York Times headline infantilized her project as “Tales Told Out of School.” Reviewers scrambled to term it anything but investigative journalism: a North Korean defector’s tale (Kim wasn’t North Korean or a defector; she was born in South Korea and educated in the United States); the journey of a woman finding herself; and, in the phrasing of one foreign policy expert, a “kiss-and-tell” memoir. Over her objections, and with the goal of goosing sales, the publisher had categorized the book as a memoir, a label associated with high readership and little respect. As a memoirist, Kim was ineligible for journalism prizes and fellowships and wasn’t considered to be a North Korea expert. She had done something no one else had, infiltrated this incredibly secretive country after a decade of planning, reported from inside for six months, and no one wanted to talk about the subject matter, just critique her methods. The attacks mystified her. It took another female writer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, to point out to her that the book’s reception might have to do with its placement in the female-inflected genre of memoir. (As well as the fact that, as Kim would come to realize, she was an Asian writer in a field dominated by white experts whose skin color was read as “objective.”)

The frustrations came to a head at the 2017 Investigative Reporters & Editors Conference in Phoenix. Kim sat on an undercover reporting panel with Shane Bauer, who had disguised himself as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana for an article in Mother Jones, and Ted Conover, whose undercover experiments included Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Both men had won multiple journalism awards; Conover had been nominated for the Pulitzer. Throughout the session, the moderator, an investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, ignored Kim and aimed his questions at Bauer and Conover. When she mentioned that at a previous journalism conference, she had been dismissed as “that girl,” he followed up by saying, “Great insights from ‘that girl.’” Finally, when the moderator, lauding Bauer and Conover for risking their lives in the pursuit of the truth, asked the two men what would have happened if they had been caught, Kim grabbed the microphone and mentioned that, in her case, if she wasn’t executed, she would have been imprisoned for life.

“You’re a little crazy. Tell the truth. That’s crazy,” the moderator said.

“I have been described as a crazy girl,” Kim answered, composed, though she was seething, and added that if she were a man, she would be called “brave.” The applause and cheers were gratifying, as were conversations with women who came up afterward to thank her for speaking out.

But the sense of betrayal by her profession still haunts her. “I was a published author and, to be immersed, I courted that organization for three years before I jumped into North Korea,” she said of the school where she taught. “It’s not like I was some naive girl who stumbled there to teach English then came home to write about it, which is how it was viewed. No one gave credit that I actually planned it, that it was a professional pursuit.”

Chapter 19

Present

Anonymous Sources

I started forth to test experimentally what treatment a girl whose chastity had been blighted but who was not yet publicly disgraced would receive from physicians in this city.

—Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, 1888

When I first read about the Girl Reporter and her Chicago Times abortion series, I had just quit my job as a journalist. When I was racing around, chasing down leads, friends had called me “Girl Reporter,” a motivational tool, a rallying cry, designed to propel me out the door to battle the interminable city council meetings waiting for me in the Seattle suburbs. It was the mid-1990s, and I had never heard of Nellie Bly, but I knew what “Girl Reporter” implied. Everyone did. She was a character plucked from movies and comic books, and implied fearlessness, a glamorous exterior with a do-gooder heart, all that I wanted to be. But it was a hard image to live up to in an industry that often didn’t have space, or even a framework, to tell the stories I found most important. Among the cute Mother’s Day features, was there room for a reckoning with substandard day care? In the “personal essay” column on the op-ed page, could a colleague write about abortion? The answer at the time seemed to be no.

The Girl Reporter of the 1888 Chicago Times exposé, though, offered a different picture, more complex, no less compelling. Here was someone writing about the reality of women’s lives on the front page. When I encountered excerpts of her articles in Leslie Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime, I found, rather than a roughly drawn cartoon, a flesh-and-blood young woman, trying to puzzle out sex and writing and her place in the world. One wasn’t supposed to discuss abortion (and the Comstock Act banned it), and if one did, it should be a tragic tale of regret, not reports of well-off women mapping out their lives. Yet somehow, the Girl Reporter managed to tell this radical tale.

Like the readers of the World, the Examiner, or the Tribune, who raced out to pick up the next issue featuring stunt reporters’ escapades, after reading the Girl Reporter’s investigations and growing to admire her wit and nerve, I wanted to find out what happened next. But I couldn’t, because after writing the Times piece, the Girl Reporter vanished. No one ever took the credit. But her identity seemed key to the nature of her story. Was it a cautionary tale about a country girl who came to the metropolis and was taken advantage of by a money-hungry