Friday Nugget Blogging, Three Cups of Tea Edition
By “People should just chill. He’s done a lot of good in this world.”
This was my daughter’s general reaction to the 60 Minutes expose on Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea who now stands accused of misrepresenting his charity’s efforts in Pakistan.* While it’s true that he may have made himself look needlessly bad by exaggerating the success of his efforts, in her mind the emphasis is on the words “needlessly” and “success.”
Nicholas Kristof urged us last week to explore the accusations but also not lose sight of the broader picture, and I think those are wise words – especially since Mortensen’s climbing partner has now taken issue with the way Jon Krakaeur characterized his remarks about Mortensen.
Of the things of which Mortenson stands accused I think the worst is probably the misrepresentation of individual Pakistanis in his promotional materials. And the relationship between his charity and his private proceeds from his book is worth a look. The Central Asia Institute has also clearly failed in basic financial accounting and transparency: if he was so disorganized, why didn’t he hire a bookkeeper?
But the use of charity funds for awareness-raising is something that most NGOs do – have to do – in order to raise money for programs, so that in itself doesn’t raise my eyebrows the way it’s raised some. And let’s not kid ourselves: most NGOs mislead the donor public in order to channel money to good causes. Remember all those women and children being saved from land-mine injuries by the Ottawa treaty? Actually, most land-mine victims are men. Remember those 300,000 child soldiers we heard about for years and years? Actually that number was just made up a meeting: it’s never been precisely calculated, and if it were, it would no doubt have changed somewhat year by year, though for advocacy purposes it remains constant. That 1 billion people who are hungry right now? FP’s new expose points out how simplistic this number is.
But is the world better overall because savvy activists have harnessed the empathy of the well-meaning public into championing these causes? Absolutely.
Of course exaggerating the nature of a problem for PR reasons isn’t the same as exaggerating the nature of your charity’s impact on the problem. Mortenson didn’t have to lie about this, and shouldn’t have. It will be a real shame if the important work – and worse, the cause he’s promoted – takes a hit because of his carelessness.
*As for my son, he pointed out that the Young Readers’ edition of Three Cups of Tea he’d read in class had fewer of the fabrications being discussed from the full-length version. I haven’t done a content analysis on that yet, but it would be interesting to see if that’s true.