Problem No. 1 with newspaper ombudsmen (this particular one being at The News & Observer, a fine newspaper in North Carolina): They write stupid columns selling out their own staffers for doing nothing wrong.
When are newspapers going to realize that bending over backwards to be avoid being offensive to every last busybody subscriber is the best way to become the most boring publication possible? That the reason newspapers read like thin cream of wheat is that we pay too much attention to hypersensitive readers who complain about anything we do?
And nothing — I mean nothing — makes me madder as a journalist than the ombudsman’s last couple of paragraphs, which essentially argue that the reporter in question is rendered incompetent when writing about children because she herself has no kids.
What complete and total bullshit. What a cowardly way to undercut a reporter. I suppose this means I’m not capable of writing about: black people, Hispanic people, Asian people; women; children; graduates of state universities; the left-handed; people who watch poker on television; vegetarians; and non-Cajuns, non-bloggers, and people over 30 or under 28.
Newspapers will keep circling the drain as long as we keep thinking offending one reader is a sign that a story shouldn’t have been written. More often than not, it’s a sign that it should have been written.
One other thing: The ombudsman endorses this statement from the newspaper’s high school sports editor:
“We go out of our way to accentuate the positive. We would identify the person who recovered the fumble rather than the person who fumbled, the player that intercepted a pass rather than the player who threw the pass, and the guy who scored the touchdown, instead of the guy who missed the tackle.”
If that’s a rule at the N&O, I’ve just lost a measure of respect for their very fine sports section. News is news, people, and keeping the name of the fumbler out of the paper is idiotic.
2 thoughts on “idiot ombudsman”
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Newspaper ombudsmen can help restore public faith in a paper. The NYT clearly breeched the public trust during the Blair affair and an ombudsman helped reestablish that trust.
Also in this case, isn’t the ombudsman reiterating the editor or publisher’s stance about writing uninformed copy about who actually fumbles the ball?
Like you I’d like the article to report all the facts. But at what point do the readers have to take responsibility for the pabulum they’re being fed since the editor, publisher and ombudsman are serving them at some level.
Maybe they have lower standards for reporting on football games? In the scheme of things Judith Miller feeding the world lies about nuclear bombs in Iraq seem it deserves more factual scrutiny than the local football game.
Roughly 99.9999999% of what ombudsmen do has nothing to do with correcting bad reporting on WMD. It has to do with:
– selling out reporters who have done something that offends some microscopic strain of the public.
– being on the receiving end of organized ideological email campaigns, triggered by both right and left, saying the newspaper is [pick one: pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-Bush, anti-Bush, a secret hive of liberalism, beholden to corporate interests, blah blah blah].
I am so sick and tired of hearing Jayson Blair. One asshole makes up some quotes and the whole profession gets whipped. Ombudsmen do next to nothing to improve the quality of newspapers. I don’t think the presence of Dan Okrent has turned one NYT-hater into an NYT-lover (or even NYT-truster).
Should readers take the blame for making a dull newspaper? No, that’s our responsibility. The problem is that as newspapers have watched their circulations drop, they’ve become obsessive about preserving each and every last subscriber. Anything that pisses off a single reader — like a tiny piece about a nine-year-old playing football — becomes something the idiot ombudsman thinks he has to publicly apologize for. The result is a newspaper industry that’s too scared of causing offense to be interesting. Newspapers are better in just about every way now than they were, say, 20-30 years ago. But they’re less courageous.
And re: football, I said that the ombudsman was “endorsing” the editor’s p.o.v. Doesn’t make it any less dumb.