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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Critics blast the CPB's unprecedented move to hire competing, "Crossfire"-style ombudsmen, saying the move is intended to make public broadcasting toe a right-wing line.
May 17, 2005 | Seen as a way to shine light on the news-gathering process and encourage transparency between reporters and news consumers, ombudsmen traditionally help build a sense of trust. But the announcement by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- the federally funded nonprofit group that oversees public radio and television -- that it was creating an ombudsmen's office seems to have done the opposite, raising questions and suspicions about the group's true intent.
Specifically, observers wonder why the CPB, which is largely a funding organization, would get involved in critiquing news programs that it does not create, schedule or broadcast. More disconcerting, though, was the CPB's unique decision to hire two ombudsmen to check PBS for balance. The dueling-ombudsmen format is unprecedented in mainstream journalism.
"It mystifies me," says Geneva Overholser, a Washington-based University of Missouri journalism professor who served as the Washington Post's ombudsman from 1995 to 1998. "What in the world does it mean to have two? It makes no sense." She argues that ombudsman responsibilities are specifically designed to be carried out by just one person as way to demonstrate that a single journalist can be open-minded and listen to all sides of a dispute. By setting up a sort of left-vs.-right, "Crossfire" approach, Overholser says, the CPB model "participates in the ideological charade that journalists can't be fair. This is a perversion of the ombudsman. I'm surprised Ken Bode would feel comfortable with this."
Bode, a former NBC and CNN reporter, is one of the CPB's newly hired ombudsmen. He most recently worked as a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, where readers often wrote angry letters deriding him as a liberal, though he endorsed a Republican last year for governor of Indiana.
When asked last year to write about his worst day as a journalist, Bode detailed the afternoon President Reagan was shot, recalling, "Like many Americans, I never saw President Reagan quite the same again. As someone said at the time, he went into the hospital as Ronald Reagan; he came out as John Wayne."
The CPB's other new ombudsman is William Schulz, an avowed conservative and former editor at Reader's Digest, which the National Review once described as "the quintessential magazine of 'red-state' America." Schulz worked alongside CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, a Republican, for decades at Reader's Digest.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that during a meeting in February with the head of National Public Radio, Tomlinson outlined the CPB ombudsmen's responsibilities and specifically noted that the board planned to hire one liberal ombudsman and one conservative one.
Both Bode and Schulz declined to comment for this article.
The two-person, right-vs.-left approach "is antithetical" to the ombudsman position, says Jeffrey Dvorkin, who holds that position for NPR and serves as president of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. "The value of the ombudsman is as an ideological and political independent."
"Why stop at two ombudsmen? Why not have four or a committee of 12?" quips Carl Stern, a former correspondent for NBC News who teaches journalism ethics at George Washington University and, like Overholser, is a member of PBS's Editorial Standards Review Committee. "Balancing ombudsmen -- when will this end? Are we going to have armies of ombudsmen? This is silliness."
The CPB's unorthodox action comes against a backdrop of increasingly heated allegations about liberal bias at PBS's 349 stations nationwide. Tomlinson has been making several moves to counter what he says is PBS's lack of "objectivity and balance" or, more specifically, the perception of a lack of balance at PBS.
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