The Vanishing Ombudsman
by Paul Giacobbe
A pilot friend once told me that flying an airplane was hours and hours of boredom interspersed by moments of stark terror. To a less dramatic extent, the ombudsman job is a little like that.
There are frequent complaints, comments and inquiries, but sometimes months can pass without a substantive challenge to the NBC10 “Viewers’ Voice” goal of insuring fairness, accuracy and balance. Some of the complaints are interesting, but not the substance of great journalistic principles. For example:
- “Stop saying the bear is still loose. The bear has always been loose.”
- “There’s too much chit-chat and not enough news.”
- “How come there’s not more NASCAR news?”
The extent to which a story will arouse viewers is unpredictable. There were, for example, never more calls or emails than the day when Chef Terranova, explaining the proper method of preparing baked stuffed lobster and oblivious as to the chain of events he was about to unleash, slit the still wriggling crustacean from stem to stern..
But the Viewers’ Voice program is at its best when it addresses a complaint where a viewer feels that a person or an issue has been unfairly or inaccurately portrayed in a news story. That happened earlier this month when the governor of Rhode Island felt he had been unfairly treated by a story and a reporter. Complaints also come from people not so high profile, and in those cases the viewer has as great an opportunity to have his grievance independently reviewed as did the governor.
That’s why it’s distressing to read that the ranks of ombudsmen in America are thinning, and quickly. Newspaper ombudsmen are more common than in the electronic media, and ombudsmen utilized by local broadcasters, such as NBC10, are truly rare. Until a few months ago there were no others, but recently Gazette Communications in Iowa, which operates a local TV station as well as daily newspapers, has added an ombudsman. There are about 35 U.S. newspaper ombudsmen, primarily in the big city newspapers, and significantly fewer than there were when the NBC10 Viewers’ Voice program started 11 years ago.
A very few ombudsmen, such as those at the New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio (and NBC10), are hired from outside the organization and have little actual newsroom contact. But most newspaper ombudsmen are full time employees who generally are reporters or editors who have rotated into the job for a fixed period of time – and that’s where the problem arises.
A current article in the American Journalism Review notes the “reassignment” of ombudsmen at the Baltimore Sun and Minneapolis Star Tribune to editorial duties, and recently the ombudsmen jobs at the Orlando Sentinel and the Dallas-Fort Worth Times were either eliminated or left to remain vacant. In all those cases the reason given was economic—in tight financial times the money may better be spent on a reporter. The ombudsmen are seen as luxuries, to be utilized when times are good but abandoned at the first sign of fiscal distress.
Alex Tilitz, the author of the American Journalism Review article notes: “No amount of outside scrutiny can build credibility as well as a news outlet’s own efforts to confront its mistakes.“
We are in a time of ever increasing distrust in the media and it’s shortsighted to conclude that the public interest will be less served with an ombudsman than with an extra story out of the state house, or off the police blotter.
NBC10 provides the space for this blog, but the opinions are mine alone – Paul Giacobbe
