Ombudsman: Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Briefly in the early 1990s, the Amarillo Globe-News employed an ombudsman-- a "public editor." His job it was to criticize the newspaper-- "criticize" in the obsolescent sense, meaning "to judge the faults and merits, to analyze and evaluate." (Diminishingly small amounts of true analysis and evaluation go on at newspapers these days.)

The ombudsman system is used by a few dozen newspapers to police themselves. It actually made news in mid-2003 when the "paper of record", The New York Times, appointed an ombudsman in response to the growing growing inability of reporters and editors to maintain basic journalistic standards.

The Times fretted at the time that the ombudsman system would "foster nit-picking and navel-gazing, that it might undermine staff morale, and worst of all, that it would absolve other editors of their responsibility to represent the interests of readers."

But the editors had abdicated that responsibility long before.

How to put this delicately? It, um, seems unlikely that a paper like the Globe-News would employ a full-time ombudsman in the current bottom-line climate. But a paper is about more than selling advertising. The Panhandle Truth Squad calls on the Amarillo Globe-News and other papers to police themselves by appointing an ombudsman or establishing some equivalent system. We're not promising we'll stop doing it, too, but--jeez, at least make this more difficult for us.

SPACEDARK