Jones, a former New York Times media reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize at the Times for his series on the collapse of the Bingham family’s newspaper empire. After leaving the Times, he co-authored (with his wife, Susan Tifft) “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,” among the best books written about the most powerful newspaper in the world. He’s currently the director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. He used to host NPR’s On the Media program.
The ombudsman post-which, caveat of caveats, doesn’t yet exist-seems tailor-made for Jones, the perfect, poetic braiding of the two dominant strands of his career. The Bingham family’s two Louisville papers, The Courier Journal and The Louisville Times, were the first papers in the country to feature an ombudsman (in 1967). Since leaving the Times, Jones has become one of the most quotable experts on his old employer, doling out succinct, and always on-point, analysis about the latest imbroglio to hit the country’s paper of record. He’s serious but not sermonizing. He’s smart, and believes in the sanctity of institutions.
Of course, before Jones can get the job, it has to be created. That can’t happen soon enough. The Jayson Blair fiasco has pulled back the curtain, Oz-like, on the process by which newspapers (and magazines, and Web sites, and TV and radio broadcasts) get their information out to the public. And surprise! That process is sometimes dictated by things other than news judgment. Sometimes petty rivalries or stupid jealousies come into play. Sometimes editors get so punch drunk with their own power that they lose some ability to be clear-eyed about the news.
For all those reasons, an ombudsman is a good thing. One thing I’ve learned from working on the Blair story in the past few weeks is the profound sense of distrust the American public has for the nation’s news-gathering organizations. I’ve received hundreds of e-mails on the topic, and many of them ask why we’re shocked by the story. We haven’t trusted what we’ve read in the papers for years, my correspondents report. (Indeed, one of the most surprising factoids to come out of the Blair story is that few of the many people he misquoted or whose homes he incorrectly described ever bothered to complain. Another interesting tidbit is that apparently the editors at the Times don’t bother to read the competition, or otherwise they might have realized Blair’s stories were oftentimes suspiciously similar to accounts that had already appeared elsewhere.) An ombudsman’s job is, literally, to be a reader representative, to take the side of the newspaper’s audience when dealing with a vast, and often unresponsive, bureaucracy.
Another reason an ombudsman is needed is that, as the Blair case has shown, it’s impossible for a newspaper to police itself, and often unfair to expect it to even try. There were five reporters, three editors, and two researchers responsible for producing the Times’ May 11 account of l’affaire Blair. They’re among the most respected, diligent, and well-liked people in the Times’ newsroom. For that, they got royally screwed, assigned to write a piece that was going to be critical of their bosses–the people who, after all, are still in charge and still responsible for deciding who moves up the ladder. If it was too critical, what would be the cost? And if it wasn’t critical enough, they’d get slagged by their peers, both inside and outside the newsroom. As it was, they still had to produce a report that essentially accused either the paper’s managing editor, Gerald Boyd, or its national editor, Jim Roberts, of lying. (Here’s the pertinent passage: “‘I went to Jim and said, ‘Let’s check this out thoroughly because Jayson has had problems,” Mr. Boyd said. Mr. Roberts said he did not recall being told that Mr. Blair had had problems.") At last Wednesday’s town hall meeting to address concerns about the fallout, Jacques Steinberg was barred from attendance because he had the unenviable task of writing up the meeting for the next day’s paper. Hopefully he didn’t have anything he actually wanted to get off his chest.
It’s impossible to say for sure whether an ombudsman would have stopped Jayson Blair somewhere along the way. But it seems fair to say that his work would have been more closely scrutinized. More than a year before his flameout, there was at least one case where the subject of one of his stories wrote a letter complaining about serious problems in his work; that letter was seemingly ignored. A representative from NEWSWEEK sent Blair a letter after his first big sniper scoop, complaining that the information had appeared first in our magazine. Blair said he’d check with his editors. An ombudsman could have sorted through the messy layers and figured out if anything needed to be done sooner.
So, Alex, your next challenge is upon you. I can’t wait to write in with my complaints.
