Late in 2003, The New York Times, against all its inclinations but desperate to exorcise the ghost of Jayson Blair, cracked open its door to the alien presence of a public editor. The message to readers was clear: the Times would do anything -- yes, even that -- to regain their shaken trust.
Building institutional credibility through the person of an independent intermediary was hardly a new idea. When Daniel Okrent took that historic job, he swelled to thirty-nine the U.S. ranks of the Organization of News Ombudsmen (appropriately, ONO), a dedicated band of seasoned journalists in similar service around the country at outlets big and small, mostly (though not exclusively) newspapers. Together they carry forward a movement that began some forty years ago in response to the public's alarming disaffection with an unaccountable press. Whatever the nuances of their various titles -- reader representative, public editor, reader advocate, ombudsman -- they are, in effect, the complaint department of the news business.
The complaints, for the most part, are ordinary, and easily dispatched: This is why the paper was delayed, why the ink stains the fingers, why the late sports scores have vanished, why the comic strip was dropped. But there is nothing ordinary about the war in Iraq, nothing ordinary about the fury that the war -- or, more precisely, that the news of the war -- has unleashed upon its messengers. Layered as the criticisms are with frustration and fear, politics and patriotism, hate and hope, the relentless expressions of outrage and disgust present to the nation's ombudsmen an unprecedented challenge. To be sure, some ombudsmen simply register the readers' charges, dutifully record an editor's reply, and let it go at that, while a few have pressed the newsroom to hurry up and find the good news readers have been demanding. But the best ombudsmen have recognized the opportunity for civic instruction -- of readers and newsroom alike -- and grasped it.
For example, the visceral reaction, including canceled subscriptions, aroused by those now-iconic photographs of the antiwar protests, of the flag-draped coffins of American soldiers coming home, of the bodies hanging from the Falluja bridge, of the torture at Abu Ghraib, of the beheading of Nicholas Berg -- photos relentlessly attacked as "offensive," "intrusive," "unpatriotic," "sensationalistic," "sadistic," "pornographic," or worse -- has been thoughtfully addressed by, among others, Don Wycliff of the Chicago Tribune, C.B. Hanif of The Palm Beach Post, Gina Lubrano of The San Diego Union-Tribune, Connie Coyne of The Salt Lake Tribune. Their columns make clear their respect for readers' feelings even as they go on to explain, gently, firmly, and sometimes with eloquence, how the publication of the admittedly awful photo serves the public interest and therefore American democracy. By the same token, Michael Getler has rebuked The Washington Post for its buried placement of the protest story, Pam Platt the Louisville Courier-Journal for not leading the charge against government censorship of the coffin photos, Tony Marcano The Sacramento Bee for waiting a week to run a picture of Abu Ghraib. "I would urge both editors and readers," Marcano wrote, "to weigh the obscenity of the images against the obscenity of silence and denial in the face of injustice."
Okrent, for his part, had been steadily establishing his bona fides in all manner of significant topics unrelated to Iraq when he decided this spring to break his self-imposed rule against commenting on journalism produced by the Times before his tenure began. His May 30 examination of the paper's overly credulous prewar reporting on weapons of mass destruction had been started weeks before. and was published only days after, the appearance of an editors' note acknowledging the Times's less than rigorous coverage. Okrent's analysis went deeper, weighing the practices that encouraged the lapses, naming the names that the editors had not, and concluding that the failure was "institutional." Such criticisms soon found their way into the columns of other ombudsmen -- Getler, for instance, faulting the Post for not giving more prominence to dissenting reports on WMD; others, particularly those whose newspapers had picked up the Times's original WMD reports, stressing a newly felt need for skepticism. Indeed, Okrent's column was nothing less than perfect proof of the Times's paradoxically wise judgment -- both in opening its door to a first-class ombudsman and in its gut resistance to that move. As the Times is learning every day, and as those other enlightened news organizations that support an ombudsman can testify, readers' trust does not come cheap.
Meanwhile, complaints continue, centering now not only on how the grievous injuries and horrifying deaths -- of soldiers and civilians, Americans and Iraqis -- should be covered, but whether. Like the war, and the news of the war, the ombudsmen's work goes on.
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