By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Ellen Clegg and I were thrilled to have a chance to speak with Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr on her podcast, “Justice by Design.” We talked about our book, “What Works in Community News,” as well as the importance of community journalism and how it’s being revived in hundreds of places across the country. You can watch us on YouTube, listen here or subscribe using your favorite podcast app.
There have been rumblings for a while that it was time for news organizations to bring back the position of ombudsperson, also known as the public editor — an in-house journalist who would look at issues in coverage and render a judgment.
At one time the job was fairly common at many larger news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. But as the business model for journalism deteriorated, the position was increasingly seen as a luxury.
On Tuesday, The Dallas Morning News took a step in the right direction, hiring a public editor who will be independent of the newsroom and report directly to the publisher: Stephen Buckley, a journalism professor at Duke University, who is a longtime journalist and has worked for The Washington Post, the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute. His first column will be published on May 12. According to a press release:
Through active reader engagement and a regular column, Buckley will use an independent lens to help provide readers with understanding and clarity and hold the News accountable for adhering to its high standards. Buckley will be an observer and advocate while informing readers how the News reported controversial topics and issues as they arise.
In an interview with Tom Jones, who writes Poynter’s daily newsletter, Buckley called his hiring “a really bold, counterintuitive move. And the motivation is exactly right, which is: the most important issue for our industry is reestablishing trust with the public.” Oddly, Buckley also said, “I don’t represent the newsroom and I don’t represent the readers.” The public editor’s position has sometimes been described as that of a reader representative. But if Buckley wishes to emphasize his independence, that’s not a bad thing.
A year ago I called for the Globe to restore its long-abolished ombudsman position after the paper published a flawed investigation of MBTA executives who worked from distant locales. It turned out that the story wrong was about some of those executives, and it led to the departure of veteran investigative reporter Andrea Estes. The Globe has never explained what went wrong or why Estes, a respected journalist, was fired. Estes is now doing good work as a reporter for the nonprofit Plymouth Independent.
More recently, Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr wrote that it was time for news organizations to bring back the public editor, taking note specifically of the oft-voiced criticism that The New York Times’ political coverage is too often marred by both-sides-ism — a criticism I’ve been making for many years. For a long time, the Times employed excellent public editors, culminating in Margaret Sullivan, its penultimate and best in-house critic. But the position was abolished after Sullivan’s successor, Liz Spayd, clashed with the newsroom over a few questionable judgments she offered.
NPR still has a public editor, Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, and she demonstrates why the position is valuable. She was a guest on last week’s public radio program “On the Media,” offering some thoughtful insights into the recent controversy over former senior business editor Uri Berliner, who resigned from NPR after writing an error-filled essay about what he regards as the network’s liberal bias.
For many news organizations that are still facing financial challenges, bringing back a paid in-house critic may seem like a bad idea. Large newspapers like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are losing money and cutting staff. But The New York Times and the Globe are profitable and growing. At a moment when trust in the media is at a historic low, hiring a public editor can represent a small but significant step to restoring that trust.
I did not watch Ronna McDaniel’s appearance on “Meet the Press” Sunday. Brian Stelter has a detailed summary on Threads, and that’s plenty for me. It sounds like host Kristen Welker found her voice and really went after McDaniel, who in her previous job as chair of the Republican National Committee regularly lied and engaged in election denialism on behalf of Donald Trump.
What I did see was former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd’s remarkable takedown of NBC News executives for hiring McDaniel in the first place. Neither Welker nor Todd has a reputation for tough questioning; quite the opposite. But Welker really went after McDaniel, and Todd took the network to task, telling Welker that they “owe you an apology” and that it was impossible to “know what to believe” given McDaniel’s previous lies.
Good for both of them. A previous announcement that McDaniel would also pop up on MSNBC has been rescinded, so it’s hard to see what value she can provide to NBC News given the limited amount of time that it commands the network’s airwaves.
My instinct, as I wrote the other day, is to rip the presence of any partisan players on television news shows, whether Democrat or Republican. Clearly, though, the hiring of McDaniel has resonated in a way that, say, the hiring of Jen Psaki or Mick Mulvaney did not. Tom Jones of Poynter Online put it this way:
There’s no issue with NBC News hiring McDaniel as a contributor based on her politics alone…. However, the problem isn’t McDaniel’s views on, say, the economy or immigration or crime or abortion. The problem is McDaniel has a serious credibility problem. And her actions, most notably around the 2020 election, put the country and our very democracy at risk.
Similarly, Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review said that “the glaring problem with her hiring is not that she was (or is) a partisan hack or anything to do with her policy positions, but her deep complicity in Trump’s election denialism.” But he also offered some optimism, adding:
Perhaps ironically, this desperate episode has given rise to what I see as a very hopeful one: the performances on air yesterday of Todd and, especially, Welker. In the past, I’ve criticized “Meet the Press” (and the Sunday show format as a whole) for letting lying politicians off the hook, but Welker’s interview with McDaniel yesterday was one of the best I’ve seen on any such show in years: it was tenacious, devastatingly so, without being performatively confrontational or rude.
It’s pretty obvious that McDaniel’s hiring has set off a crisis at NBC News, one that may end only with the cancellation of her contract. For instance, Ryan Lizza reports in Politico that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke out against the hiring on air earlier today. I’m not entirely sure what I think about this. As I’ve said, I would lock the revolving door and not hire any of these folks, going right back to George Stephanopoulos, who years ago jumped from the Clinton White House into a cushy job at ABC News. A pox on all of them.
But McDaniel, as Jones and Allsop write, is different. We almost lost the country on Jan. 6, 2021 — and she brazenly told Welker that she saw it as her role to “take one for the team” rather than speak out. As Todd said, if she admits she wasn’t telling the truth then, how can we know that she’s telling the truth now?
More: I want to add that joining Todd on the panel were Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr and Stephen Hayes, editor of The Dispatch, a Never Trump conservative website. They were both excellent as well, with Atkins Stohr pointing out that McDaniel worked with Trump in an attempt to toss out 2020 ballots cast by Black voters in her hometown of Detroit. The entire panel discussion about McDaniel can be seen here.
On our latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Emily Rooney, the longtime host of “Beat the Press,” an award-winning program on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). I was a panelist on the show, a weekly roundtable that offered local and national media criticism. It had a 22-year run but was canceled in 2021. You can watch the 20th-anniversary episode here. The show, which is much missed by many former viewers, had a brief second life as a podcast.
Emily has got serious television news cred. She arrived at WGBH from the Fox Network in New York, where she oversaw political coverage, including the 1996 presidential primaries, national conventions, and presidential election. Before that, she was executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” with Peter Jennings. She also worked at WCVB-TV in Boston for 15 years, from 1979–’93, as news director and as assistant news director — a time when WCVB was regularly hailed as the home of the best local newscast in the U.S.
“Beat the Press” may be no more, but there’s a revival of interest in responsible media criticism from inside the newsroom. Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr recently wrote an op-ed calling for the restoration of a public editor position at The New York Times, The Boston Globe and other news outlets.
In our Quick Takes, I’ve got an update on one of our favorite topics — pink slime. Wired has a wild story out of rural Iowa involving a Linux server in Germany, a Polish website and a Chinese operation called “the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”
Ellen recounts a legal saga in Southeastern Minnesota involving the sale of a newspaper group and allegations of intellectual property theft. It’s all about a single used computer and its role in creating a media startup.”
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr calls for the return of the ombudsperson, sometimes known as the public editor — an in-house journalist who holds their own news organization to account. As she observes, at one time such positions were common at large media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
They were eliminated, for the most part, when financial pressures made such a position seem like an unaffordable luxury. But as Stohr argues, with the Times and the Globe once again profitable and growing, “They can easily bring them back as a signal that they value public trust.” (Note: Stohr interviewed me.)
I suggested the Globe bring back its ombudsperson last spring after the paper published an extensive correction about a story involving top executives at the MBTA who were reportedly working from distant locales. Instead, the Globe fired the lead reporter, Andrea Estes, and has never really offered an explanation as to what went wrong. Estes, a respected investigative journalist, is now working at the Plymouth Independent, a new nonprofit edited by Mark Pothier, himself a former top Globe editor.
As far as I know, the only major news organization that still has a public editor is NPR, where those duties are carried out by Kelly McBride, who’s also senior vice president at the Poynter Institute. Meanwhile, as Stohr writes, the Times is increasingly under fire on social media from liberal critics who complain that the paper normalizes Donald Trump by treating him like a typical presidential candidate rather than as someone facing 91 criminal charges who attempted to foment an insurrection. I largely share that critique, although I think some of it is overblown.
The presence of a public editor, Stohr writes, “can help journalists be more self-aware while not placing the burden of public criticism on individual reporters, who are usually not in a position to make the sort of organization-wide changes that are often necessary to restore public confidence.”
The public editor was not a perfect institution by any means. Partly it depends on the skill of the person doing it. The Times’ next-to-last public editor, Margaret Sullivan, was the best I can think of, and Stohr quotes a post Sullivan wrote on Twitter/X arguing that the Times needs to bring that position back. Partly it depends on how willing top editors are to provide access. (Sullivan, who still writes media criticism for The Guardian and her own newsletter, is now executive director at the Craig Newmark Center on Journalism Ethics & Security at the Columbia School of Journalism.)
But there are certain things an in-house critic can do that an outside commentator can’t. A public editor has the time to dig deeply and, if they have the cooperation and support of the top leadership, can make a real contribution in helping the public understand why certain decisions are made. And, sometimes, what the story was behind mistakes and misjudgments.
More: There is still an Organization of News Ombudsmen, though I don’t know how active it is. If you look at the U.S. members, you’ll see that most of them hold titles like “managing editor for standards.” I should have noted that PBS has a public editor, Ric Sandoval-Palos.