The 1996 Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture

The first Philip M. Foisie Memorial Lecture was delivered on May 7, 1996, at the KormanSuites Hotel and Conference Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., by Benjamin C. Bradlee, vice president at-large and former executive editor of The Washington Post.

A chat with Ben Bradlee

The Washington Post wasn’t the first American newspaper to hire an ombudsman. But in 1980 it dramatically showed the journalism profession how important this position can be to a paper’s credibility.

That was the year The Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize when it learned it had been hoaxed by one of its reporters, Janet Cooke, bringing humiliation to…

Watch out for uneven labels…

Some of The Bee’s politically conservative readers for years have been bugged — no, make that angered — by how the paper does or doesn’t label various people and groups.

There’s the Christian right, those readers note, but never a Christian left. There’s the political far right but never a far left. There’s extreme conservative but never extreme liberal. The only left wing you ever read about is in hockey and soccer stories.

In some of these cases, the complaints have substance. The media (It isn’t just The Bee, mark you!) love labels as they go about their…