Newspapers need ombudsmen (An editor’s view)

By Charles W. Bailey
Washington Journalism Review © 1990

Twenty-three years after the first U.S. newspaper ombudsman was appointed at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, only 31 of the nation’s more than 1,600 dailies employ an ombudsman. Clearly, we are talking about an endangered species.

Editors continue to insist on their right to monitor the performance of government and business, and to pry into just about every institution in American life. But most of these same editors remain indifferent or opposed to the idea of any serious, systematic oversight of their own performance.

They persist in this attitude despite the painfully obvious fact that the…