The Beltway’s newest ombudsman brings her “system” to the newsroom

By Richard P. Cunningham
Quill © 1992

The Washington Post has hired Joann Byrd, a veteran journalist with a brand-new graduate degree in philosophy, as its ombudsman, and she is coaching readers in which ethical questions they ought to be asking the newspaper.

“One reason any institution ignores people who call is that people don’t know the institution’s process and therefore can’t ask the right questions,” she says.

In her first column, Byrd told Post readers she has “an obsession with journalism ethics.”

“I find ethical implications under bushes,” she wrote. “To my mind ethical journalism is a reasoning process, a careful weighing of moral…