By Charles W. Bailey
Washington Journalism Review © 1990
Washington Journalism Review © 1990
Twenty-three years after the first U.S. newspaper ombudsman was appointed at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, only 31 of the nation’s more than 1,600 dailies employ an ombudsman. Clearly, we are talking about an endangered species.
Editors continue to insist on their right to monitor the performance of government and business, and to pry into just about every institution in American life. But most of these same editors remain indifferent or opposed to the idea of any serious, systematic oversight of their own performance.
They persist in this attitude despite the painfully obvious fact that the public they profess to serve has become skeptical, irritated, and increasingly resentful of a media establishment that is widely perceived as too intrusive and too powerful.
The prevailing editorial attitude of condescension is typified by Max Frankel, executive editor of The New York Times. When the president of the Organization of News Ombudsmen asked him in 1987 whether he would appoint an ombudsman, Frankel replied:
“The question of how best to investigate complaints about fairness and accuracy is under constant review here. Requests for corrections and Editor’s Notes engage the attention of the highest ranking editors here, including me, and I am not aware that this procedure is itself the subject of any significant complaint from our readers. So I am reluctant to move to the far-from-impressive solutions of other papers until I perceive the problem. But as I said, I am keenly alert to our responsibility.”
Translation: There’s no problem, and anyway we’ve already fixed it.
Other editors offer other excuses for not having an ombudsman. Among the favorites:
The editor should be his own ombudsman. “You’re not doing your job if you hide behind an ombudsman” is a line I used to hear a lot from colleagues in the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
But few editors really have much contact with readers, or with the people their papers write about. They may think they do, but they don’t; even when they try — as some do — they simply don’t have the time.
An ombudsman, on the other hand, may receive a hundred calls or letters a day from those constituents. As editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, I knew that our ombudsman almost always had a better picture of reader reaction than I did.
And if he’s good at his work, an ombudsman will absorb that reaction with a lot more detachment than an editor will. I know from personal experience that no one is more likely than a newspaper editor to take criticism personally — and to react to it viscerally rather than rationally. That’s another reason newspapers need an ombudsman.
I can’t afford one. Many editors, particularly during those recurring sky-is-falling budget panics, say they can’t get money for an ombudsman — and if they ever did they’d spend it to cover more news, not to hire someone to harass an already overworked staff.
Well, an ombudsman does cost money, but most papers can afford the expense — upwards of $100,000 a year including salary, fringes and support costs. Publishers pay many times that much to deal with circulation complaints and missed deliveries, and they ought to be at least as interested in the quality of the news they print.
The truth is, they can’t afford not to have an ombudsman. Newspapers are in the business of collecting and marketing facts. If a paper makes enough errors, readers will stop believing it, and a little later on they will stop buying it.
The ombudsman is paid by the newspaper, so people won’t believe he’s truly fair. There’s something to this, but not much. An ombudsman has to prove himself to the community as well as to the newsroom; if he does a good job he’ll be accepted. As for the source of his salary, nobody outside the industry has yet come up with a better idea — or with the funds required.
Some editors will hire an ombudsman but then undercut him in actual practice. If the editor is just going through the motions, the newsroom will know it instantly — and act accordingly. So the best test of a newspaper’s commitment to its ombudsman is the attitude of the editor. Does the ombudsman report directly to the editor, and only to the editor? Does the editor back up the ombudsman when he or she crosses swords with the managing editor and other newsroom supervisors? Does the editor make sure that supervisors and reporters respond to queries from the ombudsman?
Is the ombudsman routinely present in the daily meeting at which editors decide what goes in the paper and where? Does the regular agenda of this meeting include the ombudsman’s daily report, including his presentation and explanation of any proposed corrections? (The actual decision to publish a correction will, of course, be made by the editor or managing editor.)
Another test of management commitment: Does the ombudsman have the necessary tools, including an assistant, to help handle phone calls and mail? I know from personal experience that this is important. It insures that nearly all callers will speak to a live human being rather than an answering machine; it also allows the ombudsman to be more than a glorified clerk, freeing him to deal with the more important or more complex issues while the assistant handles minor complaints and so on.
This may sound like bureaucratic empire-building, but it isn’t. Any ombudsman will tell you it really matters — and so will the angry readers who call in to complain and are told to leave a message when they heard the beep.
Don’t expect an ombudsman to perform miracles. In the public view, big newspapers are part of the establishment, among the powerful institutions that run things in the community, and it’s unrealistic to expect any one person, however skillful, to change those attitudes. But it remains my impression, after 10 years with three ombudsmen in Minneapolis, that they not only reduced public hostility toward the paper but also increased understanding of how we did our work.
The most useful mechanism for telling the public what we were all about was devised by Lou Gelfand shortly after he became ombudsman at the Star Tribune. Once a month, he suggested, let’s bring in four or five leaders from different parts of the community and let them spend most of a day in our newsroom, learning what we do and why we do it that way.
Hardly anyone in the newsroom, from the managing editor on down, liked the idea. Reactions ranged from skepticism to outrage. Why invite people — especially people who were likely to turn up in our stories — to look over our shoulders and second-guess us? I shared some of these reservations, but finally decided to try it as an experiment.
That was in Febuary 1982 — and the “Citizens Observer Program” is still going strong. Several hundred men and women from all sectors of the community now know at least a little about how a newspaper is put together. They have sat at editors’ elbows, talked to reporters as they assembled stories, listened at the daily news huddle as play and placement of stories were decided. Some have stayed on into the evening to watch the production process.
They have asked questions and gotten answers. And they have gone back to the community and talked about what they learned — including the fact (which surprised many of them) that a lot of hard thinking and agonizing goes into the handling of the news.
One visitor, a businessman who had been a frequent critic of the paper, said he was impressed with “the openness of thought” and “the opportunity to see who makes the decisions and how they are made.” Another was struck by “the inevitability of the deadline and its impact on the quality and direction of the news….It is clear that the mechanics of your business severely limit your choices.”
Such observations may seem obvious to people who work in newsrooms. But they show how little most people understand our business — and how useful it is to demystify it. Inviting people to watch seems only fair: After all, we insist on doing just that — watching other institutions — as we gather the news.
Abe Raskin, a superb reporter for The New York Times, is often credited with inspiring the newspaper ombudsman movement in a 1967 Time magazine article. In fact he must share credit with press critic-curmudgeon Ben Bagdikian, who suggested the idea at about the same time.
It is noteworthy that these two men, both fiercely independent and reporters to the core, did not shrink from the idea of in-house critics. By contrast, a great many journalists who couldn’t carry either man’s typewirter find that idea distasteful, even threatening.
If there’s one feeling that all ombudsmen have in common, it’s the sense that the people they work with don’t really enjoy having them around. It’s not just paranoia: Reporters and editors do tend to regard an ombudsman with suspicion. They think, sometimes with reason, that there are already too many people looking over their shoulders.
So ombudsmen are not beloved in the newsroom. When one of The Washington Post’s ombudsmen left, the newsroom presented him with three cakes labeled “Picky,” “Picky” and “Picky.” Our first ombudsman in Minneapolis hung a clothesline over his desk. On it he clipped a copy of every memo for which he was awaiting an answer from an editor. I liked that a lot, because it made it easy to see who was stalling; the addresses on the notes disliked it a lot, for the same reason.
But the ombudsman’s job is not to make himself, or his editor, or even his newspaper either popular or beloved. His job is to retain (or regain) the respect of readers. It’s not a wholly disinterested goal: In the long run, respect is the only sentiment that will keep the public reading, believing, supporting — and buying — a newspaper.
There’s a lot of confusion about what an ombudsman should do. Here’s one ex-editor’s opinion, based on a decade of happy coexistence with three different ombudsmen:
- The ombudsman’s main function is to receive and investigate complaints from readers, report his findings to top editors, obtain and deliver responses directly to the complainant and, where justified, in print.
- The ombudsman must produce a daily report to the news staff on what he’s heard from the public. He should write memos to top editors as often as he thinks necessary; those, too, should be available to the staff.
- The ombudsman may also write a column to be published in the paper. When he does this, he should write about his own newspaper’s performance in the areas of fairness, accuracy, taste, bias and so on. He should not try to be a press critic, writing on broad general media issues — except as they apply to specific situations at his own paper.
- The ombudsman can use the column to tell all the paper’s readers what he has already told the one who had a complaint. He can use the column to help provide a window into the often mysterious, and even more often misunderstood, workings of a newspaper.
- He can also use the column to “go public” when the editors stonewall him — when, for example, they refuse to publish a correction that he has recommended.
When ombudsmen do write about their own papers, readers seem interested. A September 1989 readership survey focusing on the Minneapolis Star Tribune op-ed page showed a 59 percent readership for ombudsman Gelfand’s Sunday column. That figure was topped only by one syndicated columnist, George Will (63 percent), and one local columnist, a colorful, controversial former police chief (66 percent). Gelfand ran ahead of Russell Baker, David Broder, William Safire and all the other nationally known columnists published in the paper.
Still, the ombudsman’s column is less important than his fact- finding fuction. Richard Cunningham, the first ombudsman in Minneapolis, wrote that “people are intrigued by the picture of the ombudsman tilting with the newspaper in the newspaper’s own columns, but that’s of secondary importance.”
Even lower on the priority list for an ombudsman is broad, generalized media criticism, and most seem to eschew it. That bothers some observers, including Reese Cleghorn, the president of this magazine. He wrote in WJR last November: “The hopes that many people had for the ombudsman movement in its early phase have been dashed. Some ombudsmen are merely reader-service representatives, fielding minor complaints. Many others offer little fundamental analysis of their newspaper’s shortcomings or of the larger failings of the press in general.”
But Cleghorn and others who think there is too little “fundamental analysis” by ombudsmen miss the point. Those “reader service” duties are in fact the most important ones — because they bring the ombudsman into contact with people who read the paper and are written about in it.
Cleghorn is entirely right in asserting a need for analysis of “the larger failings of the press in general.” But that’s what journalism reviews are for; it isn’t the job of an ombudsman. He should concentrate on specific issues of fairness and accuracy, as well as questions of bias, taste and sensitivity in his newspaper’s columns. Those are the qualities on which people base their judgment of a newspaper.
One ombudsman kept track of the subjects people complained about over a full year. The most frequent complaint was about inaccuracy, followed by arrogance, lack of fairness, disregard of privacy and insensitivity.
Editors like to think that the public supports freedom of the press, and when asked, most people say of course they do. But nowadays many also seem to believe it’s even more important for the press to be fair. Unlike most journalists, the general public seems to define press issues in pragmatic rather than constitutional terms. Increasingly the public attitude seems to be, “You’ve got so much power that you must be fair — and if you won’t do it yourself, someone ought to make you be fair.”
Of course, readers don’t agree on what the word means. Sal Micciche, former ombudsman at The Boston Globe, once said that readers have difficulty understanding that “columnists are supposed to write opinion and that editors are supposed to exercise daily judments which do not necessarily agree with everyone.”
But editors shouldn’t have too much trouble deciding whether a story is fair. As an editor, I found fairness to be a little like obscenity, which one Supreme Court justice said is hard to define but easy to recognize when you see it.
The need to be fair, and to be perceived as fair, is especially urgent in the case of monopoly newspaper, particularly large ones. They have a special obligation because they’re the only game in town; there is no competitor to blow the whistle or redress the balance. So the monopoly paper needs to be especially careful about saying — or even seeming to say — “It’s none of your business; we were right and you are wrong.”
That makes it even more important for newspapers to explain how they do things and why they do them that way, to admit it when they are wrong and to run corrections even when the error seems trivial.
An ombudsman helps his news paper to be fair, and helps persuade the public that it is fair, when he acts as an arbitrator — one who is dispassionate and who can explain the reader and the paper to each other.
Ex-ombudsman Richard Cunningham put it this way: The ombudsman “strips the complaint of the abusive language, the fuzzy thinking, the ignorance of journalistic norms and sometimes even of the identity of the complainant. The ombudsman strips away anything that might make it easier to disregard the complaint.” Then he takes it to the responsible editors “as a clean journalistic issue” and seeks a response.
I was on the receiving end of a number of Cunningham’s “clean journalistic issues,” and I can testify that it’s an uncomfortable feeling. If your ombudsman is skilled at eliminating “anything that might make it easier to disregard the complaint,” he won’t leave you much room for evasive action, and your response is likely to embarass you.
That response, as Cunningham noted, is critical: “The ombudsman must provide an answer to every complaint — promise of a correction, publication of a letter, a new story, a change in policy or a defense of what the news organization did, a defense that won’t make the ombudsman gag when he or she delivers it to the complainant.
I found that the ombudsman’s presence, and his distillation of complaints, made it a whole lot easier to admit error frankly. “We were wrong, we just blew it,” was often the correct response. Not incidentally, that answer almost always disarmed the complainants, who usually seem to expect the paper to ignore their arguments or reject them out of hand.
That’s one thing I learned from having an ombudsman: Most people expect journalists to be resistant — and often rude to boot – - when questions are raised about their accuracy or fairness. So when a complaint evokes a civil answer, they’re surprised. That doesn’t speak well for our reputation; it does suggest a need for change.
Our experience in Minneapolis leads me to some other conclusions about the positive effect an ombudsman can have:
- We appeared less often before the Minnesota News Council than would otherwise have been the case because our ombudsman satisfied many unhappy readers who, in his absence, would otherwise have taken their grievances to the council.
- A good many complainants who began their conversations in a rage ended by saying how much they appreciated “your taking the time to talk with me” — because our ombudsmen were good listeners who made callers understand that someone was taking them seriously.
- Reporters were just a little more careful because they knew the ombudsman was there — and readily available to any reader who wanted to blow the whistle on factual error or perceived bias in a reporter’s story.
A lot of readers in Minneapolis regarded the paper as their own. They had an emotional investment in it; they wanted it to be first-rate; they were pleased when it was, unhappy when it was not. They didn’t say this in so many words, but we could infer it whenever they objected to something as “not what we want to see in our paper,” our complained that a story “wasn’t up to the usual standard.”
That attitude can be a tremendous asset for a newspaper. But it also demands an understanding reponse from those who write and edit that paper. Such a response certainly should include a credible and readily accessible system for the submission, discussion, investigation and — where justified — redress of grievances.
But don’t hold your breath.
This article is reprinted from the November 1990 issue of Washington Journalism Review. Charles W. Bailey is a former editor of the Minneapolis Tribune.
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