A monkey was walking along a river and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, Look, that animal is under water, he’ll drown, I’ll save him. He snatched up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, Look how happy he is. Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, Oh, what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.

The Mozambican novelist Mia Couto told me that story last year when I wrote about the American philanthropist Greg Carr’s effort to save the Gorongosa National Park and its ecosystem. The parable of the monkey and the fish come to mind again as I receive responses to my recent Critic at Large column, “Alms Dealers,” which discussed the moral hazards of humanitarian aid, which is liable to do harm as well as good. Noble intentions—like the monkey’s—are not a credible alibi, yet humanitarian agencies are almost never held to account for doing wrong, even as they do not hesitate to take credit when they do good. What’s more, I wrote, the humanitarian claim of political neutrality is a fiction: humanitarian action always has a political consequence, and one cannot deny responsibility for it. My focus was on humanitarian responses to armed conflict (rather than, say, natural disasters, or peace-time economic development) and on how, time and again, aid serves to cater conflicts, or to transform a crisis into the status quo. (You can read the piece, which was previously available to subscribers only.)

Last week, the magazine published three letters in response to the piece, written, like the bulk of the mail, by officials of the complex of agencies that the aid critic Alex de Waal calls the humanitarian international. What is striking about these letters—and the rest that were not published—is that they all accept, implicitly or explicitly, that the problems I described are real and need to be addressed.

A number of readers—including some who thought I was too unforgiving of the humanitarian international, and some who thought I was too forgiving—took me to task for not being harder on Linda Polman, the author of “The Crisis Caravan,” even though I called a good deal of her book slapdash and flippant. That’s not the sort of judgment that a writer under review will confuse with praise. Still, Polman also makes some good points that I did not discuss at length, warning, for instance, that the total lack of regulation of N.G.O.s allows just about any freelancer to set up shop as a humanitarian. This phenomenon, which Polman cutely calls the MONGO (My Own N.G.O.), was recently celebrated by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times Magazine, although, as Polman notes, it can often have dire consequences. Just this week NPR ran a story about the damage done by MONGO activity—NPR calls it “voluntourism”—in South African orphanages which could have been plucked from Polman’s pages.

Polman may be ham-fisted, and she will be dismissed for that by the subjects of her critique, but she is not a crank. In my piece I pointed to a number of superior books on the same subject that marshal better evidence more convincingly and that make deeper arguments more intelligently than Polman’s. I drew far more heavily on those books—by Alex de Waal, and David Rieff, and Michael Maren, and David Kennedy, and Fiona Terry, and by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, to name just a few—than on Polman’s, although hers was featured because it is newly published, and because it is a polemic that, for all its flaws, demands attention.

Of course, some readers disapproved of other books under discussion, while some flinched at the tone of the debate, and others still insisted that they don’t need to be told—that humanitarians are all too aware of the moral risks of their work and are their own fiercest critics. This last argument is part of the problem: a public institution that is self-policing is effectively unpoliced, and deflecting the critique by claiming the critique is not a serious form of reckoning. Humanitarians scoff at politicians, governments, and corporations who say that they hold themselves to account, and yet in themselves they find this an acceptable form of impunity.

One question that many readers have asked, and that none of the authors under review really answers, is: What is to be done? I don’t pretend to have answers for the humanitarians. But surely at least we who work in journalism can do a public service by treating humanitarianism the same way we treat other powerful public interests that shape our world. Too often the press represents humanitarians with unquestioning admiration. Why not seek to keep them honest? Why should our coverage of them look so much like their own self-representation in fund-raising appeals? Why should we (as many photojournalists and print reporters do) work for humanitarian agencies between journalism jobs, helping them with their official reports and institutional appeals, in a way that we would never consider doing for corporations, political parties, or government agencies? Why should we not regard them as interested parties in the public realms in which they operate, as giant bureaucracies, as public trusts, with long records of getting it wrong with catastrophic consequences, as well as getting it right?

As Aryeh Neier, President of the Open Society Institute (a project of George Soros, who is also the chief bankroller of Human Rights Watch), writes in his letter, humanitarianism is an industry. So we should examine it and hold it to account as such. To treat humanitarian or human-rights organizations with automatic deference, as if they were disinterested higher authorities rather than activists and lobbyists with political and institutional interests and biases, and with uneven histories of reliability or success, is to do ourselves, and them, a disservice. That does not mean—as the many books I reviewed, and many more still, make clear—taking a hostile stance toward N.G.O.s. It simply means not accepting their hostility to critical scrutiny. It means not letting them claim to do our work for us. It means insisting on asking the questions for which they may have no good answers.

In my mailbag I received an excellent example of the sort of reporting I’m talking about—a link to a “This American Life” show from May, the lead segment of which asked the excellent question: How can you have ten thousand N.G.O.s working in Haiti, and yet in the fifty years that that country has been receiving humanitarian aid it has gotten poorer every year? Since then Haiti has only gone from grim to grimmer, and one of the few proud claims of the humanitarian international that largely rules the place these days—that it had succeeded in preventing the outbreak of cholera—can no longer be made. The report on “This American Life” describes the deep wariness and even animosity many suffering Haitians feel toward N.G.O.s, and how, even as they yearn for help, they may often wish that most of the current crop of self-appointed helpers would just leave them alone.