The Om-Buddy System
The New York Times ombudsman position is a year old this week. Has it been effective?
By David S. Hirschman – December 8, 2004
- David S. Hirschman is mediabisto.com's news editor and a reporter at Metro New York.
Three days a week, New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent arrives at the Times building on West 43rd Street and confronts a stack of mail that would leave people with weaker constitutions popping anti-depressants and begging for mercy. It's a ritual that began with his inaugural ombudsman column, which ran a year ago this week and will end in six months when Okrent steps down from his position and a successor is named.
By then, you'd think he'd be happy to go, given the inherently unpleasant nature of the work. "People only write to me if they're unhappy," he says. "You don't go to the complaint department if your shirt fits perfectly. Sometimes it's bias, sometimes it's arrogance, sometimes it's inaccuracy, sometimes it's lack of credibility." Okrent estimates that 95 percent of the mail he receives is negative. Reader vitriol is directed mostly at the Gray Lady institutionally, but with the occasional personal attack.
Okrent's assistant sorts through most of the letters and emails, passing along 50 to 100 per week which contain serious charges against the paper or which otherwise demand special attention. When large controversies break, sending blogosphere chatter into hyperdrive, like a recent incident where the Times was charged with not crediting news agency statistics in Fallujah, Okrent will get mail from hundreds of people in protest.
He also gets another category of letters that he describes as "beseeching," wherein readers ask him "why does the Times do this?" In other cases, they will tell him they love the paper except for a specific issue. It is to those readers that Okrent says he feels most dedicated in doing his job.
His job, incidentally, was opposed for 35 years by the Times editorial staff. That changed last year after serial plagiarist Jayson Blair "burned down his master's house." A devastating post-mortem of Blair's duplicitous career culminated in a 14,000-word front-page investigation of the same and the creation of an ombudsman position designed to prevent Jayson Blair scenarios from ever happening again. Okrent, a longtime journalist and the author of several critically acclaimed biographies, assumed the title of New York Times ombudsman shortly thereafter.
When he steps down in May, the first ever Times ombudsman can probably expect a post-mortem of his own tenure. The looming question is whether the paper has gotten any better as a result of his oversight and weekly columns in the Sunday "Week in Review" section. And that conclusion will, in some part, reflect the ability or inability of ombudsmen (or public editors) in general to police journalistic institutions—or the ability of those journalistic institutions to police themselves.
Some of the implications are already clear. It's an obvious victory for news consumers when steps are being taken to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of news coverage, but at a large institution like the Times it can be difficult to gauge what, if any, improvements to the paper are directly attributable to having Okrent in the position or to the position itself.
The Times has, however, attempted to structure the position so that it is as effective as possible. The Times ombudsman is hired for a limited period of time that expires at a predetermined date, which offers degree of necessary independence.
The structure also creates limitations. The term limit can also hamper the ombudsman's ability to get inside the culture of the paper and take on long-standing, systemic problems. National Public Radio ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin thinks it is important for a good ombudsman to be among the staff and not just an outside reader of the paper. "A good ombudsman knows how to listen," says Dvorkin. "He needs to be patient and not to take it personally. Take it seriously, but don't take it personally. An ombudsman needs to make sure that he has other ways to compensate for not being part of the newsroom culture. Don't just sit in your office—walk around the building and schmooze frequently so as not to appear to be too Olympian."
Asked who the Times should get to replace him, Okrent said that it would have to be someone with thick skin, energy, and a willingness to give up other aspects of one's life.
"I think [Bill] Keller had a great instinct in picking Okrent and knowing who would make a good public editor," says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, who thought Okrent's replacement should again be someone from outside the paper, and that it should be somebody who is a writer. "Someone very similar would be a good pick."
Like everything else about the position, hiring is a delicate balancing act. "Hiring from the inside has its benefits because the ombudsman knows the internal culture and can't be easily fooled," says Dvorkin. "[But] an outsider comes unencumbered by past struggles inside the newsroom."
And those struggles are a guaranteed part of the job, especially at an established and powerful institution like the Times where journalists and editors are not necessarily accustomed to having their work questioned. "He's gone into one of the most complicated news cultures anywhere in the English-speaking world and done it with great integrity and generosity," says Dvorkin, who believes Okrent has met the challenge. "Any journalistic culture that considers itself unique will always be resistant to outside accountability."
"He can do his job successfully, even while other people at the paper can resist," agrees Rosen. "There's tension in having somebody who writes critically in your own paper and has the authority to take questions to the bureau chief in Baghdad and get an answer. [But] that's important."
This does not mean that everyone recognizes the importance, and in addition to responding to complaints from readers, Okrent also has to manage complaints from the staff. "Lots of people at the paper don't like Okrent," says Rosen. "He's really changing the institution."
"It was one thing to consider such a position and another to decide to have it, and then to begin," says Okrent. "Except for a few people who came from newspapers that had ombudsmen, this was entirely new to them—the idea that someone would be questioning them. I began trying to not worry about it. It would be too easy to be intimidated by the legend of this particular culture. But by now I'm sure I've come to make various unconscious adaptive moves. Like any animal crawling through a wilderness, I've adjusted to the wilderness."
Okrent said that, for the most part, he has been received politely, if not warmly, by Times staffers, but says that responses to him have ranged widely among staff, from people who will not talk to him, to others who he says have been very cooperative.
"There are many people who just don't believe in the position," he said. "Then there are people who believe in the position but just don't like me. The least wary are the biggest stars, though. This isn't without exception. If you come up with the ten biggest names at the Times, eight are exceedingly cooperative with me. I think the people who are really, really good, the reason that they are really good is that they are open to criticism. That is what has made them good. They don't think that they have all the answers. Then there's always pure ego; if you're at the top of your profession, maybe you think 'Let Okrent say what he wants to say, I don't care.'"
And Okrent has said enough in his 12-month tenure to cause some controversy and to produce some undeniable changes. In July, Okrent declared the Times a "liberal" newspaper (at least with regard to "the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation"), reflecting an increasing interest in questions of bias in news organizations.
Okrent says that a lot of questions that he gets from people concern the idea of underlying bias at the Times, an issue he has addressed in multiple columns. While not ceding anything about why people think the paper generally leans in one direction or the other ("I'll wait until after my term here to speculate on that"), he believes there are a few accepted principles and that journalists should not let fears of bias charges prevent them from accurate reporting.
"There's no question that news reporters, who are not writing columns, are obligated to see things through eyes other than their own, to take their own perspective and predilections and discount them," says Okrent. "That doesn't mean that you can't end up with a conclusion, or an assertion of fact that you know to be true. What I want to see is that assertions of fact are done by people who have done sufficient reporting to be able ot stand by that fact, without disguising or obscuring knowable truths with a lot of he-said/she-said."
The candor exhibited in Okrent's discussion of bias at the Times is also apparent in his dissection of anonymous sourcing. While Okrent refuses to take sole credit for any changes in the paper during the past year, this is the area in which he likely has had the most impact.
"Anonymous sourcing and unattributed quotations have improved in the paper," Okrent acknowledges. "There's less of it and when it does happen, there is usually better justification for it. There's no question that it's being discussed in the highest levels of the paper and throughout the paper. This is a real issue, and if I've made a contribution on that one, I'm really proud of it."
Okrent says he is not advocating that anonymous sources should be eliminated altogether, and believes that there are subjects that force the writer to use them.
"You could not report on the intelligence community and you could not report on criminal justice without using anonymous sources," he says. "You'd have nothing. You'd be printing press releases. And we need to report on those communities. But I see it as a weapon that is deep in the arsenal and you don't roll it out unless you really need it."
A November 10th memorandum citing Okrent's columns emailed to staff by managing editor Al Siegel announced the formation of a "credibility committee" at the paper that would study ways in which the paper could bolster its accuracy and trustworthiness.
"We want to examine our practices, and our readers' demands, even more thoroughly," read the memo. "We especially want to examine the measures we have NOT yet taken, asking ourselves why not, and whether they could improve our accuracy and accountability." The memo goes on to ask whether the paper could squeeze more anonymous sources out, and make attributions (even the anonymous ones) less murky.
The change is happening slowly, though Slate media columnist Jack Shafer recently counted 22 anonymous attributions in a Times story by David E. Sanger and Steven R. Weisman. Shafer agrees with Okrent's recommendation that reporters abandon blind quotes and attributions like "officials," "other officials," "some officials," and "State Department officials," and despite their continued occasional use, says that Okrent is doing a terrific job—"100 times better than I anticipated."
Small victories, perhaps, but victories nonetheless. If Okrent's tenure is any indication, the Times can expect gradual ongoing improvements thanks to the newly created position.
But to be fair, some requests may be beyond the ombudsman's immediate control. "I also get 'Why was this picture so dark?'" says Okrent. "And 'Why did the ink come off on my hands?'" |
