[Assam] The Ian Mayes Lecture 'The news ombudsman' - The Hindu

[Ram Sarangapani]

The last few weeks, many of us have been contemplating the role that the
news media ought to have. Many have felt that news organizations have not
lived up their mark and have been irresponsible in their reporting.

Well, those interested might be interested in this lecture by Mayes. Mayes
makes some very valid points, and this idea of a news ombudsman is quite
intriguing.

--Ram

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/nic/indialecture.htm

 Lecture presented by The Hindu in New Delhi and Chennai, January 2006

"The news ombudsman – a visible presence, an independent voice"

 Ian Mayes

Readers' Editor,

*The Guardian* & President, Organisation of News Ombudsmen (ONO)


The ombudsman works independently within news organisations at the interface
between readers, listeners and viewers on the one hand, and journalists and
editors on the other. I sometimes compare the position to that of a referee
in a football game, one that can get pretty rough at times. He or she – the
ombudsman, that is – represents a form of self-regulation that differs in
one important respect from all others relevant to the media, such as the
Press Complaints Commission in the United Kingdom, which apply across a
whole industry. It is the only kind of self-regulation that has the effect
of building trust between a specific news organisation and its readership or
audience, through the systematic, impartial and public handling of
complaints, and through the open discussion of issues raised by readers
concerning its journalism. I would put it a little stronger than that and
say that for any news organisation that recognises a responsibility to the
society it serves, it offers a real chance to build a new, more open and
responsive relationship with its readership or audience. It is also,
incidentally, something which readers are increasingly demanding in the new
electronic environment in which email and quick and easy access and response
are expected.

That the presence of an ombudsman fosters this relationship with positive
benefit to the employer as well as to society at large seems to be supported
both anecdotally by ombudsmen who believe that their activities strengthen
trust and loyalty, and by more formal tests. In a recent survey of *Guardian
* readers, for example, 75 per cent said they believed that the existence of
an ombudsman made the paper more responsive to their complaints and queries.


The appointment of an ombudsman is a unilateral act by the newspaper or
broadcast outlet that sends a strong signal to readers, listeners or
viewers. It represents a positive answer to this question: Why should a
newspaper or news programme that by its nature is constantly calling on
others to be accountable for their actions not be accountable for its own
actions? I shall say more in a moment about the benefits, the side effects
if you like, that may flow from the appointment of an ombudsman but I want
to emphasise here that – in my opinion and experience – any benefits depend
on the altruism of the initial motivation. You appoint an ombudsman because
you want your news organisation to be an honest self-correcting institution
with dedication to getting it right and no interest in getting it wrong. To
put it a little higher, you want to feed into the arena of public debate
accurate information upon which the citizen can rely when he or she is
forming an opinion on the affairs of the day. The questions for an editor or
individual journalist are: Would I say this if I was talking directly to an
individual reader or, say, to a respected friend, rather than communicating
through the medium of a newspaper or broadcast programme? If I slipped into
error wouldn't I naturally correct it?

Just before we come back down to the realities and pressures of day-to-day
journalism let me quote Savonarola on the spirit of truth: "This is a moral
rather than a legal duty, insomuch as it is certainly a debt of honesty owed
by every man to his neighbour…" A debt of honesty owed by every man to his
neighbour. Could we say that truth is a debt of honesty owed by every
newspaper to its readers….?

The first step along this road is, I suggest, a very simple one – one that
may work better if accompanied by the appointment of an ombudsman but which
does not absolutely need one. It is the voluntary, regular and systematic
publication of corrections: an easy matter for newspapers and now made much
easier for broadcasters of news through the happy advent of related
websites. One only has to look at the way in which the BBC is now using its
website for this purpose. Why has it been so difficult for news
organisations to take this simple step? After all – if I may quote a Spanish
proverb – he is always right who suspects that he is always making mistakes.
I can only suppose it is because of the strength of the cultural fallacy –
and the strength with which, historically, it has gripped journalism – that
the frank admission of error somehow undermines authority. There is no
evidence for that.

Indeed there is mounting evidence that it has the opposite effect: the
Danish newspaper, *Politiken*, in two surveys which produced similar
results, found that for the majority of its readers trust was enhanced by
the systematic publication of corrections, and only 3 per cent of those
surveyed said that their confidence had been undermined. *The Guardian*,
similarly, has found that the number of readers who say they trust its news
reporting – more than 80 per cent – is significantly higher than the
prevailing level in Britain, which falls into single figures for the
so-called redtop tabloids.

What I believe does undermine trust among readers, listeners or viewers is
not the admission of error – even when the error is of an extremely serious
nature – but the discovery or revelation or forced admission of a
significant error that has gone uncorrected. An honest piece of advice to
readers might be: never trust a newspaper which never appears to get
anything wrong, and treat the others with the degree of skepticism your
experience advises. Every journalist who has ever worked in newspapers knows
that the portrait is incomplete and misleading without the warts. The same
goes for radio and television news. It is product of the way we work. Last
year *The Guardian* published more than 1,600 corrections. Some of the
larger newspapers in the United States exceed 2,000. When I began this job,
as the first ombudsman of this kind in the history of journalism in Britain,
a colleague from a tabloid newspaper – one that very very rarely indeed
carries corrections – said, "Tell them about the chaos!" The way to break
free from the culture of denial – a denial of the realities of news
production – is to acquire the habit of correcting as you go.

To come back to the football analogy. The rules of the game, in Britain as
in many other countries, are set by the industry regulator, in this case the
Press Complaints Commission, the PCC. These rules are embodied in a document
correctly called the editors' code – because this again, it is important to
emphasise, is self-regulation. It is called the editors' code because the
editors wrote it. It applies only to printed journalism. The institution of
ombudsman is perfectly compatible with the PCC and similar organisations. At
*The Guardian* the editors' code, or the PCC code as it is more usually
called, is the rule book by which the game I referee is played. In fact, *The
Guardian* has its own editorial code – published on its website – which
incorporates the PCC code and extends it, for example to cover declarations
of interest, the need for reporters to avoid outside activities,
particularly political ones which are incompatible with their
responsibilities to *The Guardian* and its readers, and so on. Many of these
extra provisions, going beyond the PCC code, have come in response to points
made by readers through my office as readers' editor or ombudsman.

I have mentioned corrections at some length. Most newspaper ombudsmen and
most of those working in the broadcast media now combine a responsibility
for corrections with a regular (in my case weekly) column or programme in
which it is possible to discuss issues raised by readers, particularly
ethical issues, at greater length. The reporting of suicide was one subject
I dealt with, in fact, in several columns. Another was the manipulation of
pictures, including one that *The Guardian* used across its front page taken
in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack in Atocha station in
Madrid. One advantage of the regular appearance of such columns is that they
create a kind of running debate on the ethics of what we do, making it easy
and normal for that sort of discussion to take place. In fact my columns at
*The Guardian* fall into three main categories: those dealing with ethical
issues; those explaining how different parts of *The Guardian* work,
recently, for instance, several columns explaining aspects of the change
from broadsheet to the Berliner format and the philosophy behind it. The aim
of columns in this category is to inform the questions and criticisms that
readers level at the newspaper – theoretically regular readers of the column
should be able to ask better, more searching questions. And the third
category of columns is that dealing with questions about *The Guardian'*s
use and misuse of the English language.

I want to come very soon to the possible benefits to the newspaper that I
mentioned at the beginning, but just before I do that let me insert a short
historical note:

The idea of having resident ombudsmen in news organisations, although still
taken up by only a tiny minority of publications and broadcasting channels,
has been around for a little over 50 years. It originated, in the principal
form in which it now exists, in the United States in the 1960s. It has
existed in Japan, in a somewhat different form, for much longer than that.
Most of those now practising as ombudsmen, in newspapers, television and
radio channels around the world, owe a good deal to the American model.
Whether they are known as ombudsmen, readers' representatives, public
editors, or – The term I believe I invented when I took up my appointment at
*The Guardian* in 1997 – their functions are more or less as I have
described. Most commonly, but not always, they are appointed from within the
news organisation. Exceptions include *The Washington Post* and *The New
York Times*, where the ombudsman may be someone who has distinguished
himself or herself elsewhere in the industry. *The New York Times*, of
course, appointed its first ombudsman fairly recently in the aftermath of
the Jayson Blair affair. I remembered the words of its managing editor
Joseph Lelyveld in a remark made to me before all that blew up. When I asked
him why *The New York Times* had not appointed an ombudsman he said, "We are
the ombudsmen." The editor of The Times in Britain made a similar remark
apparently when appointing only a few months ago someone to write a weekly
column dealing with the readers' complaints. He rejected the title "readers'
editor" with the reported remark, "I am the readers' editor", and settled
for "feedback editor."

The title is not the main thing. The main things are independence and
visibility to the readers, listeners, or viewers – there seems to me little
point in having an ombudsman if no one knows that you have one. In *The
Guardian* my contact details appear on every day of publication, once on
page 2 and again with the daily corrections column on the leader page of the
paper. This is where all the corrections always appear, no matter where in
the paper the original mistake was published.

So visibility is important, and so is independence. Many of those practising
as news ombudsmen have their independence from the editor and his or her
team guaranteed by their organisations. In some cases this is just verbal or
something that has been established by practice, in others independence is
guaranteed publicly and/or contractually. My independence is guaranteed by
the owner of *The Guardian*, the Scott Trust, and my terms of reference are
published on the Guardian website.

The great majority of practising ombudsmen belong to an international
organisation, the Organisation of News Ombudsmen (ONO), of which I am the
current president. It has something approaching 100 members worldwide and
recently celebrated its 25th anniversary at a conference I hosted in London.
Next year, in May, the conference is to be held in Sao Paulo, hosted by the
ombudsman on Folha de Sao Paulo, reflecting a growing interest in this form
of self-regulation in that part of the world. It also reflects eagerness on
the part of the Organisation of News Ombudsmen to foster that interest and
to make the accumulated experience of its members freely available to those
who believe they might find it helpful. Such is the level of interest over
the past few years and continuing today that ONO has recently appointed
Jeffrey Dvorkin, the immediate past president and the ombudsman for National
Public Radio in Washington, outreach director of the organisation.

The desire to enhance trust through self-regulation is often very strong in
countries with a difficult or complex political situation or inheritance. I
have been involved in several pilot schemes for media self-regulation in
several Russian regions. A book of my columns, mainly those dealing with
ethical issues, was published earlier this year in Russian by the Moscow
Media Law and Policy Institution, and this, I am told, helped to persuade *
Isvestia* to appoint an editor to write a weekly column discussing readers'
complaints and the response of the relevant editors. For many reasons I
believe this form of self-regulation is an idea whose time has come.

Let me finally come to one of the welcome effects that the activities of an
ombudsman can bring. The head of The Guardian's legal affairs department
believes that the prompt action that I am able to take to deal with serious
complaints reduces the number of people seeking to sue the paper for libel
and defamation by between 30 per cent and 50 per cent. Her initial estimate
was based on a comparison between her caseload in the year before my
appointment, and that in my first year. She believes this effect continues,
and something similar is reported by some of the other ombudsmen, from
California to Istanbul. There is almost certainly also a reduction in the
number of complaints going directly to, or going on to, the industry
regulator where one exists. I certainly believe that I reduce the number of
complaints relating to The Guardian that go to the Press Complaints
Commission in Britain. Theoretically it is possible for a complaint against
The Guardian to come first to me, then if not satisfied, to go to the Press
Complaints Commission, and if still not satisfied, to go to law. In the
eight years that I have been ombudsman at The Guardian I think only three or
four people have gone through all three stages. On the rare occasions that
they have done that and a complaint has been upheld, damages have been
reduced because of the efforts already made to satisfy the complainant. It
is worth saying here that the idea that the recognition of a justified
complaint and the publication of a quick and sincere apology aggravate
matters and prompt litigation is in my experience almost totally false.
Other ombudsmen feel the same. All the evidence suggests it has the opposite
effect.

My view is that the greater the real and perceived independence of the
ombudsman, the greater those benefits are likely to be. Thinking people want
responsive, responsible and accountable news organisations. I believe
ombudsmen are one way to achieve that.

Thank you.