The word “ombudsman” has a soothing quality. It could almost be used as a mantra for newspaper executives who are worried about their sagging credibility with readers — ombudsman.
But the debate that it sets off is anything but restrained.
To wit: Robert J. Haiman, former executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times and now president of the St. Petersburg-based Poynter Institute for Media Studies, calls ombudsmanship “a sham.” Rather than making a paper more responsive and accountable to readers, he says, an ombudsman only serves to make it more isolated, by putting a buffer between editors and readers. Alfred JaCoby, ombudsman at The San Diego Union, calls Haiman’s argument “pure, unmitigated bullshit.”
James Gannon, editor of The Des Moines Register, told Time magazine last year that “the person who should handle the complaints is the editor, not someone in a corner with no real power.” Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, who appointed the country’s second ombudsman in 1970 and who has been a strong supporter of the concept since then, says, “It’s a very cheap and easy shot to say that the editor should be the ultimate ombudsman, and nobody disagrees with that, but anybody who says he or she can manage to read everything that goes into that paper is kidding himself.”
Haiman discontinued an ombudsmanship at the St. Petersburg paper in 1980, after a disagreement with the person who held the position. At least six other papers also have tried, but subsequently dropped, the idea. Still, the overall number of newspaper ombudsmen has risen steadily, by two or three a year, since the appointment of the first, at the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times in 1967. There are now twenty-nine in the United States (serving thirty-six papers) and another four in Canada. Included in the ranks of ombudded papers are some of the largest and most prestigious in the country, among them The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Interest in ombudsmen has increased in response to all the polls showing that readers do not hold newspapers in particularly high regard. This problem is hardly a novel one. Similar circumstances led Ralph Pulitzer to establish a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play at his New York World in 1913. According to a 1916 issue of American Magazine, Pulitzer had become concerned about the increasing blurriness between “that which is true and that which is false” in the paper. He had reason for concern. One of the questionable practices uncovered by the bureau’s first director, Isaac D. White, was the routine embellishment of stories about shipwrecks with fictional reports about the rescue of a ship’s cat. After asking the maritime reporter why a cat had been rescued in each of a half-dozen accounts of shipwrecks, White was told, “One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat the feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck there was no cat but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take chances, and put the cat in. I wrote the report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in a cat.”
In 1947, the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press, a group of notable non-journalists convened by magazine publisher Henry Luce, measured the press, found it wanting, and warned that it must either monitor itself or be monitored by government. “One of the most effective ways of improving the press is blocked by the press itself,” the commission reported. “By a kind of unwritten law, the press ignores the errors and misrepresentations, the lies and scandals, of which its members are guilty.” The commission’s report was largely ignored. Twenty-seven years later, when A.H. Rankin of The New York Times suggested that newspapers appoint “an ombudsman for the readers, armed with authority to get something done about valid complaints and to propose methods for more effective performance of the paper’s service to the community,” the message fell on at least a few receptive ears.
By the late 1960s, newspapers were beginning to realize that while to err may be human, to admit it can be good for your credibility. “All the major institutions began to be inspected and criticized,” says Ben Bradlee, “institutions that had been almost immune from criticism for centuries before: the church, the universities, big business, certainly government, and — God knows — the press.”
The Post was the first newspaper to appoint an ombudsman who not only answered complaints from readers and corrected errors, but who also commented publicly and critically on the paper’s performance in a weekly column. (The ombudsmen at the Louisville Courier-Journal, the first paper to establish the position, have n ever written columns.) Twenty-one of the twenty-nine American ombudsmen today write regular columns; the rest work behind the scenes, using memos, newsletters, phone calls, and such. Bradlee is among those who believe that “going public” is an essential part of the ombudsman’s role: “It prevents editors from sweeping anything under the rug. You have a representative out there who’s saying, ‘Don’t do that. You guys goofed. You fell short of your goals.’”
It sounds good in theory. In practice, the concept is something less than fully realized. A reading of some 800 columns written by ombudsmen around the country shows that apologia is more the order of the day than incisive criticism. There are numerous explanations of how difficult the conditions are under which journalists work. Some ombudsmen specialize in eye-gumming discourses on lofty but largely irrelevant issues; others are preoccupied with trivia. Most are inclined to explain rather than examine, and often the explanations amount to something on the order of: We do it that way because that’s the way we do it; it’s our policy.
There are some exceptions. Among them is Art Nauman of The Sacramento Bee, an excellent writer who unblinkingly airs his paper’s dirty linen in public week after week. In one column, Nauman faulted a series on commercial marijuana cultivation, saying its lack of balance and use of unattributed, inflammatory assertions were the result of “strong bias” on the part of the writer. Another column concluded that the paper had wrongly published damaging material about a teacher accused of sexually molesting female pupils. A reporter and an editor were given equal shares of blame in a column that described how a badly written but accurate story came to be published in a more readable but inaccurate form. One time Nauman chastised the paper for running a correction column that carried no correction on ninety out of 208 days. “Does this mean that more than half the time journalistic nirvana is achieved at The Bee, with papers unblemished by glitches and goofs?” he asked. “Hardly. It means that some mistakes called to its attention The Bee chooses not to fix or acknowledge publicly.”
Nauman is not an unremitting scold. He readily defends writers he thinks are being unfairly attacked, and he praises work he considers particularly noteworthy. Regarding a five-part series on Sacramento’s black population, for instance, he wrote: “It was the kind of journalism every newspaper worth the name ought to be performing regularly. It is journalism that goes beyond agendas, police blotters, news releases, public hearings, press conferences, official reports, and interviews with high mucky-mucks. It digs into the places where real people live and work and worry, casting some light where little has been cast before.”
The columns of Pat O. Riley of the Santa Ana Register are distinguished by a light, folksy touch that serves to humanize his paper. For instance, in response to a reader who wondered why the headline said “Long-term interest rates up” while the story said “Long-time interest rates fell slightly,” Riley wrote: “I presume [the reader] doesn’t appreciate the fact that we offered a choice, but it does provide an opportunity for an invaluable hint: The rule of the fractured thumb is, when the headline and story differ, bet your grubstake — if it’s not too much — on the story.” His columns are often witty and entertaining, whereas the typical ombudsman is inclined to stuffiness. But Riley can also take on a steely tone, as in columns dealing with the use of unidentified sources (“…the practice is offensively pervasive”), overly interpretive writing (“it’s nothing more than creative writing masquerading as fact. It has no place in a newspaper that cares about accuracy…”), and faulty reporting (“the story…was irresponsibile…weak and overdone.”)
Harry F. Themal, “public editor” of The Morning News and Evening Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, consistently holds those newspapers (both owned by Gannett) accountable for lapses in judgment. He has been especially critical of their coverage of problems at an antipoverty agency in Wilmington. “The News- Journal papers took a relatively minor incident and made it look like a major scandal by the length of the story, the play it got on the front page, and the headlines,” he wrote in December 1981. A year later, he complained that the papers were still violating standards of fair play in covering that situation. “A festering mark on the News-Journal papers’ generally excellent record on fairness has been the coverage of Community Action of Greater Wilmington within the past year,” he wrote. In another column, Themal found the papers guilty, as charged by readers, of lack of fairness in four stories on unrelated topics. He wrote one column about the unfortunate changes in the life of a gay man who was forced “out of the closet” when his arrest on a minor morals charge was reported in the papers, in violation of their policy. Themal recounted his story as a reminder of the human consequences of carelessness or insensitivity on the part of journalists.
On occasion, Themal gives himself over to ruminations on weighty journalistic issues, balancing these somewhat tedious columns with others that deal with the things readers gripe about most: too much ink on the paper, or not enough; mistakes in the TV listings; the selection of comics.
In contrast, some ombudsmen rarely untangle themselves from either the cosmic, on the one hand, or the picayune, on the other.
John Caldwell of The Cincinnati Enquirer has devoted columns to such matters as the status of press freedom in the United States compared to other countries; the declining credibility of the press; and whether newspapers inflame juries when they offer rewards in murder cases. He filled one column with a profile of an Ohio-born journalist who covered the Bulgarian revolution of the 1870, another with a roundup of newspaper bloopers collected by Editor & Publisher. Not one of the ten columns sampled dealt with a specifically local issue (although each carried an editor’s note asking, “Do you have a question about fairness or accuracy in Enquirer news reporting? If so, contact John Caldwell, Reader Editor.)
James McElveen, a part-time ombudsman who donates his services to the Alexandria, Virginia, Gazette, gives his columns something of the tone of a Journalism 101 lecture: the function of editors; what to look for in human interest stories; the importance of accuracy; the function of the press in a democratic society.
Jack Gregg of The San Diego Evening Tribune focuses on specific problems at his newspaper, but they tend to be of limited consequence. Many of the items in a sample of his columns involved simple errors: It should have been “flair,” not “flare”; it should have been YWCA, not YMCA; the committee on discipline of lawyers was appointed by a judge, not by the bar association.
At The Cincinnati Post, Richard L. Gordon has addressed more substantial matters, but often with a condescending tone that denigrates the readers. When a reader complained that a front-page drawing was in poor taste, Gordon wrote: “I…had a hard time holding back the laughter.” In a column commenting on what he called the public’s propensity to misinterpret the news, as demonstrated by writers of letters to the editor, Gordon said that one letter writer “was completely off the track.” He acknowledged that the writer’s conclusion had been based on a misleading UPI story printed in the Post, but added, “It is also apparent that the writer didn’t really read the story…” (emphasis his.) In another case, “The news story had been correct, but the letter writer read a great deal more into it. This happens all the time.” When a satirical column generated more confusion among readers than amusement, Gordon wrote: “If you’re writing for a Cincinnati audience, beware of satire. Some readers will never understand it.” (Since the writing of this article, Gordon has been replaced by James L. Adams as “readers’ representative” at the Post. Gordon has shifted over to the paper’s business section.)
More typical is the ombudsman who treats readers with respect, but is likewise respectful of his or her colleagues, to the point of producing columns in which seldom is heard a discouraging word.
One member of this sotto voce school of criticism is Lane Smith of The Seattle Times. His columns rarely deal with major sins of commission or omission at the Times, looking instead at points of grammar, minor errors of fact, matters concerning the comics or the crossword. He regularly advises readers how to order reprints of Times special sections. He calls well-written headlines to their attention. When the newspaper added the word “please” to its front- page jump lines, this was pointed out in the ombudsman’s column. When Smith does find fault with a significant story, his criticism tends to be muted. For instance, when a reader complained that a business reporter had mixed editorial opinion with fact in writing about the business climes in Washington state, Smith agreed that he had, but he used most of his column to explain the reporter’s side of the story, and he concluded that it had all been done “somewhat inadvertently.”
The question at the center of the debate about ombudsmen is deceptively simple: Do they make papers any better? Coming up with an answer has defied the efforts of at least a dozen researchers. In a recent study, done for a master’s thesis at California State University at Chico by Bradford J. Bollinger, ombudsmen around the country were asked if they thought that they had any demonstrable effect on the accuracy, fairness, or overall quality of their papers. They said they didn’t know. Bollinger also asked colleagues of one of the country’s most respected ombudsmen — Art Nauman of the Bee — if they thought he was credible. They said yes. He asked if they thought the ombudsman made the paper more accurate, fair, and accountable. They were neutral.
Nauman told Bollinger that asking to what degree an ombudsman prevents errors is like asking to what degree a priest or rabbi or whatever prevents sinning. Bollinger concluded that “the reporters and editors seemed to be saying the priest and the ombudsman have something in common: Their very existence proves sins and errors are both inevitable and reconcilable.”
Obviously, ombudsmen don’t prevent sins. The criticism of Harry Themal of the News-Journal did not keep those papers from recurrent sins in the coverage of the Wilmington antipoverty agency. The presence of a very distinguished ombudsman, Bill Green of The Washington Post, was not enough to prevent the flaming sin of Janet Cooke.
The Janet Cooke case, often cited as a triumph of ombudsmanship because of Green’s 18,000-word report on the faked story, was, in the view of Robert C. Maynard, editor, publisher, and owner of the Oakland Tribune, and a former Washington Post ombudsman, “as much a failure of ombudsmanship as it was a failure of any other part of the system.”
Maynard adds, “People tend to say, ‘Gee, it took the Post by surprise; they didn’t realize there was a problem until after the Pulitzer.’ Well, that’s not true. There were plenty of reporters and people in the community who had serious complaints about the story at the time it was published, but the ombudsman made no attempt to find out for himself whether there might be validity to those criticisms.”
Maynard believes that the concept of ombudsmanship is basically sound, but he has some reservations about the way it has been applied. “I’m afraid there are times when an ombudsman is used as a buffer between the editor and the public,” he says. He has not appointed an ombudsman at The Tribune. He says that he has put his faith, instead, in community advisory boards, composed of citizens who critique the paper, suggest stories, and propose policy changes…
Ben Bradlee bristles at the suggestion that the Janet Cooke case represents a failure of ombudsmanship. “That’s bullshit,” he says. “The case represents a failure on our part to check references on new employees, and a failure on our part to demand from reporters the degree of sourcing that we do now. But I don’t know how you can stretch it to indicate a failure of the ombudsman.”
Bradlee, who recently appointed Sam Zagoria to be the Post’s seventh ombudsman, says he doesn’t think the paper will ever outgrow the need for that position. “I think any newspaper can benefit by having someone who is totally independent and who monitors the newspaper for fairness, relevance, accuracy, and thoroughness. It’s worked for us at any rate.” Bradlee believes that the main value of the ombudsman is in “influencing attitudes of reporters and editors, by pointing up where we fall short of our goals.” But the list of specific accomplishments is modest. He points to the anchoring of corrections on page two as something that was done because of an ombudsman. However, that policy wasn’t adopted until after management had been bombarded with memos from two consecutive ombudsmen (beginning with Maynard and continuing with Charles Seib) for over two years.
Robert Haiman, of the St. Petersburg Times, once agreed with Bradlee on the merits of ombudsmanship. When the Times appointed an ombudsman in 1971, Haiman thought it was a fine idea. “I was infused with the same enthusiasm that infused most editors at that time — that we needed to be more in touch with our readers, more open, and the ombudsman was the way to do it.” In 1974, a study of the Times staff found considerable support for the ombudsman. In June 1980, Dorothy Smiljanich, who was functioning as an ombudsman at the time, wrote a column in which she questioned the assignment of three black journalists, and no whites, to cover race riots in Miami. The blacks contained that their integrity had been unfairly questioned. Haiman agreed with them, and ordered Smiljanich to publicly apologize or quit. She quit, and he scrapped the position.
“When Dorothy left,” Haiman says, “I went up and had a chat with the switchboard operators and I said, ‘From now on, all the calls that used to go to the ombudsman, you put those calls through to the editors involved. If someone says your sports department did blah blah blah, send that call to the sports editor. The same is true for the city desk. And if someone calls up and says who is the head son of a bitch, let me talk to him — I said you put that call on my line. Now, I doubt that some people at The Washington Post or The New York Times could take all their calls. But to say that because that’s so, we simply have to have ombudsmen everywhere, that’s absurd.”
Richard Cunningham, former ombudsman at the Minneapolis Tribune who became associate director of the now-defunct National News Council, and who is editor of the monthly newsletter of the Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO), is among those who would beg to differ with Haiman’s position. “He is absolutely wrong,” he says. “Bob Haiman knows as well as any other editor that when someone comes in with a complaint that the editor thinks is nonsense…we immediately go into a bunch of defensive techniques. We look at the person who’s calling and say, ‘Oh, he’s a known crank. He’s a commie or a John Bircher or whatever.’ If the person is a gay, we say, ‘Oh, the gays are after us all the time.’ If we can find some way to dismiss the complaint by dismissing the person, we do. We are astute and automatic in our professional defenses.”
Cunningham goes on to say, “What you’ve got when you’ve got an ombudsman is, first of all, a person who strips away all of those elements that might give the editor an opportunity to dismiss the complaint. Now, that is not putting a layer between the reader and the editor. That is catalyzing and encouraging a respectful dialogue between the reader and the editor, a dialogue that is all too often not present.” Additionally, he says, an ombudsman makes it possible for patterns in complaints to be revealed, something that’s not likely to happen if the complaints are scattered throughout the newsroom.
Cunningham is probably the world’s leading authority on ombudsmen’s columns. He reads all of them, from papers in both the United States and Canada, in search of excerpts for the ONO newsletter. He says, delicately, that he finds some of the columnists to be “less than ideal.” But he insists that a bad columnist can still be a good ombudsman. “You have to consider the context of the columns,” he says. “Some of the ombudsmen deal with issues in a low-key way that may not stimulate you or me, but may be very much in tune with their readership. You need to know what else is going on there — how much activity on the telephone, how many letters going back and forth, how good a job the person is doing in answering every question from readers. You just can’t make those judgments by looking at the column alone.”
It is difficult to measure the impact of even the most obviously skilled columnists. In part, this reflects the fact that newspapers that appoint ombudsmen tend to be fairly responsible to begin with; there’s no dramatic turnaround when the ombudsman goes to work. Furthermore, the major benefits are nebulous: the creation of a climate that makes it easier to admit mistakes, a heightened awareness of ethical issues, what Bradlee calls “influencing the attitudes of reporters and editors.”
The Boston Globe, in what can be interpreted as one way to quantify the work of its ombudsman, publishes an annual box score on corrections, listing the number and type that appeared during the year and comparing them with the previous year. Last year, the rate of errors increased from two corrections every three days to four every five days.
A Sacramento Bee reporter once asked Art Nauman if the management had ever told him, “By God, Nauman, we agree with you on this point or that, and we’re going to do something about that.” He had to say no.
During his eight-year tenure as ombudsman of the Minneapolis Tribune, Cunningham says, “there were perhaps half a dozen specific changes in style or policy, but none of them were of great moment.”
At the Santa Ana Register, Pat O. Riley points to a decrease in the use of unidentified sources, an increase in the size of type on the crossword puzzle, an improvement in the TV listings. “Most of the changes have not been significant, but I think they’ve been worthwhile,” he says, adding, with a chuckle, “but that may be just because I need the job.”
“Even if it could be shown that the presence of the ombudsman did nothing to prevent mistakes, the function still would have a high, virtually unmeasureable, but still significant symbolic value,” Nauman wrote in a column last year. “The mere act of ventilating readers’ concerns and the sometimes mysterious — and questionable — practices of modern journalism surely must have a salutary effect.”
The first person to suggest the use of a newspaper ombudsman in print was Ben H. Bagdikian, a respected media critic now on the faculty of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1967 article for Esquire magazine, he suggested that an ombudsman be added to newspapers’ boards of directors. (He later served as an ombudsman for The Washington Post.) Bagdikian is ambivalent about the way it’s all turned out. “It’s been a kind of self-indulgent, self-congratulatory gesture by a lot of publishers,” he says, “but I think it’s also been a useful mechanism, and frequently very effective. It’s a beginning step in the realization that most newspapers are increasingly detached from their communities, and it may be a way to get the leadership of the paper more closely acquainted with the real community, and not just the community they go out to lunch with every day.
“On the whole, it’s been a healthy development. It’s certainly been better than nothing.”
This article is reprinted from the May/June 1984 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. Cassandra Tate, a freelance writer who lives in Seattle, Washington, is a frequent contributor to the Review.
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