First and foremost, Stars and Stripes’ standing as an independent source of news is threatened by a wrongheaded government response to the WikiLeaks disclosures that raises the specter of censorship. Like the rest of the federal workforce, the paper’s journalists were told last year that they may not look at classified documents that have been leaked to the public.

Reporters and editors must be able to consult information in the public domain if the concept of a free press is to have any meaning. This isn’t something new.

“We simply cannot in good conscience send troops abroad to lead the struggle for freedom — and censor Stars and Stripes,” Sen. William Proxmire said in 1987. “Our people overseas deserve better than second-class treatment.”

Economically, the paper’s survival is imperiled by federal budget cuts and the same challenges other media face — declining audiences and shifts in how people get news and information.

Stars and Stripes can slow or even stave off a dire fate if it defends its editorial integrity, hews to its roots, stays relevant to its readers and remembers their interests come first. And that includes their sensibilities.

This military is an all-volunteer force. Stars and Stripes should deliver hard truths, but never in a tone that says “gotcha” or that disrespects its readers’ chosen life. As the late Washington columnist Mary McGrory counseled journalists, “Be nice to people, but not to power.”

It’s not easy, this job of telling hard truths to people who may not want always to hear them. It takes skill, savvy, sensitivity and a real feel for your audience. But it’s important. A hallmark of a free and open society is a willingness to hear and face uncomfortable truths about itself.

Stars and Stripes could use a champion like the late Proxmire now, but it’s caught in a crossfire of perceptions that do not inspire one.

To some, especially in upper echelons, its pesky pursuit of news beyond official statements undermines command messages and priorities and places it under suspicion.

To others, mostly in the ranks or the civilian world, Stars and Stripes is anything from irrelevant to a costly anachronism to a shill for the defense establishment. A while back, a newly hired editor was quoted elsewhere saying the paper was “tame” with “a tradition here of people pulling their punches when it comes to covering the Pentagon.”

That rankled a staff that had earlier watched a censorship dispute culminate in an editor’s resignation, and that itself had reported aggressively on an improper movement of Pentagon funds through Stars and Stripes accounts. When the publisher refused to provide documents, several editors publicly accused him of “stonewalling” and demanded he resign.

That may have been a lot of things, but tame it was not. If they gave Purple Hearts for career wounds, some would have oak leaf clusters.

As for the ombudsman post, I have no idea who will succeed me. Unlike my predecessor, I was not asked to share my thoughts on the job with the search committee, such as there may be, and my requests to do so have been ignored.

More troubling is language in ads for the position suggesting it will be weakened by curtailing the ombudsman’s ability to report to Congress unilaterally, as we have for two decades, and by cutting the three-year term to two with, I understand, only the possibility of a third.

Both changes rein in an ombudsman, lest he or she prove too noisy in advocating reader interests, critiquing the paper or protecting its promised First Amendment rights (not “privileges,” as stripes.com mischaracterizes them).

These measures were tried in 2000 — and scrapped after appeals to Congress and the Pentagon by former Ombudsmen Bill Monroe and Phil Robbins and the Society of Professional Journalists.

Sadly, I suspect the impetus for resurrecting these discredited limits on vigorous, independent ombudsmanship now comes as much from Stars and Stripes as the Defense Department.

My work has irked the paper’s masthead as well as the Pentagon. My credentials, character, abilities and even sanity have been assailed in comments to me, to staffers and beyond. I have been threatened with legal action once I no longer have the protection of this office.

Ruffled feathers aside, the leadership needs to understand that this is what ombudsmen do: critique what is published, field and investigate complaints from readers and staff without interference and, at Stars and Stripes, defend the staff’s right to gather and report the news without fear or favor for a global audience that is often in harm’s way and unable to get a full accounting anywhere else.

An unfettered ombudsman gives a government-owned news outlet credibility. Putting its ombudsman on a leash does not.

Although I don’t know who is on the search committee, I’m pretty sure who isn’t — an SPJ representative, as there was in 2008.

That’s a mistake. SPJ has a distinguished record in advocating Stars and Stripes’ independence and First Amendment rights, including the establishment and preservation of the ombudsman post.

“SPJ played a significant role in creating the modern Stars and Stripes,” an SPJ leader, Ian Marquand, wrote in 2000 in urging his organization to weigh in on the disputes over censorship and the ombudsman.

He was referring to the 1980s, when Congress tired of receiving complaints from Stripes staffers, or reading of them elsewhere, and asked SPJ to aid a government inquiry. It found censorship, and Congress ordered reforms in 1989 that included appointment of an ombudsman.

Most recently, an SPJ official was among the journalists and First Amendment advocates who joined me in a session with Pentagon officials on how the post-WikiLeaks policy is anathema to the principles of a free press and contrary to official pledges of autonomy for Stars and Stripes.

Earlier, SPJ put a shoulder to the wheel by recognizing my opposition to that policy with its First Amendment Award and a Sigma Delta Chi award. I would hate to think that figured in SPJ’s apparent disinvitation to assist again in the selection of an ombudsman.

Lastly, remember this newspaper belongs, more than any other, to its readers, to you. Not the Pentagon, not the publisher, not the editors. Your subscription has been paid in blood and treasure, by you and generations before you. Defend it, and demand the best from it.

I can be reached at exombud (at) verizon.net.

Godspeed.

This column was originally published in Stars and Stripes on January 24, 2012.

A fortnight ago, the Observer ran a double-page spread on the plight of the reclusive Jarawa people of the Andaman Islands. The tribe, just 403-strong, lives in a jungle reserve that is supposedly protected. A trunk road runs through the reserve, and while photography and human interaction are forbidden, police are accused of accepting bribes to encourage half-naked young women to dance for convoys of tourists and their video cameras.

An undercover Observer reporter joined a “tour” and saw people throwing biscuits and bananas at the Jarawa “as they would to animals in a safari park”. To illustrate his story, he obtained a video of the forced dancing from a tour operator. After the girls’ faces had been obscured by our web team and the policeman’s instructions translated and subtitled, it ran on the paper’s website and quickly attracted more than 500,000 hits, making it the second most viewed item that week. But some considered that to use the illicit video was to join in the very exploitation that the story set out to condemn.

Part of the problem was that the video appeared in two places on the site: as an illustration to the article, which placed the whole subject in context, and as a stand-alone film with very little context apart from a headline and introduction but, crucially, without a link to the main story. Some who saw this considered it exploitative, accusing the Observer of posting a prurient “look what we’ve found” video.

I put these concerns to Survival International, a body that campaigns on behalf of tribal peoples, and asked them how they use photographs and video on their website. “It is a dilemma,” said Sophie Grig, “but it is a sad fact that campaigns are not effective without pictures. However, we are careful only to use existing photographs rather than commission new ones.

“In this case, the results show that it was the right thing to do. The Jarawa quickly became the top news story in India with the government announcing an investigation and the minister for tribal affairs going on TV announcing that steps will be taken.

“It shocked people in India. I’ve been campaigning on this issue for 16 years but it was only after the Observer wrote the story and posted the video that things have taken off. I’m more hopeful today than I have ever been that we will see some action. I believe it was right to use it when it was presented in the context of the story.”

A follow-up article last week repeated the video and reported on the measures being taken by the Indian government to crack down on the “human safaris”. It also cited the number of hits the film had attracted. “Isn’t this the same as exploiting people?” asked a comment posted under the story. “The article seems almost proud of this statistic.”

The reporter replied: “No, I don’t think it is the same as exploiting them. It is a matter of highlighting a gross human rights abuse in a way that has drawn the attention of the Indian government. That has to be a good thing.

“The Indian home minister and the minister in charge of tribal welfare have expressed their anger about this abuse, which is widely regarded in India as a national shame.

“The Jarawa are Indian citizens too: they have rights and one of them is not to be treated as animals in a zoo.”

Our website’s technology dictates that to be able to embed a video in an article, an additional video page has to be generated, so special care needs to be taken to explain why the film is running on that page, with clear links to the main article.

As in so many things in life, it’s all a matter of context.

This column was originally published in The Observer on Jan. 21, 2012.

Changes have already occurred in the S.A. Life section and the weather page on top of the back page of the Sports section. The rest are scheduled to be a “go” Tuesday.

The changes involve different fonts, which will be readily noticeable in headlines, and a cleaner layout with more white space. Type size will not be reduced and, designers say, the type will be easier to read.

“This will be a cleaner, more modern yet classic look that highlights our great content,” Express-News Editor Kyrie O’Connor said of the new look.

As often happens with change, the reaction is to resist. Readers have told me for years, nearly every day, that reading the newspaper with their morning coffee is a ritual they have followed most of their lives, some for as many as 70 years.

They feel comfortable with their paper. Many have scrapbooks full of Express-News clippings — wedding announcements, obituaries, a story about a son or grandson leading his team to victory or a box full of advice columns and various items that were worth saving.

But as we get older — and many of our most loyal readers are seniors — we tend to resist change. I haven’t had many complaints about the new S.A. Life (no, Jenny Stevens, Michael O’Rourke‘s column isn’t coming out, but it’s no longer on Page 1 of S.A. Life on Saturday), but I received resistance about the weather page.

Paul Foerster, the esteemed Alamo Heights High School math teacher who the Express-News praised last spring on his retirement after 50 years of teaching, wrote a letter to the editor printed Friday questioning the weather page changes.

“Gone is the graph of 24-hour temps which mathematics teachers use to help our students make mathematical models of natural phenomena. Gone also is the table of S.A. Precipitation, which we use for the same purpose,” he wrote.

Others beefed about cities removed from the “Across the nation” list; others missed yesterday’s local highs and lows; those who rely on the daily UV count wanted it put back. The good news is the highs and lows are listed, next to the UV rating, right below the forecast boxes atop the weather page.

That should please reader Edward S. Reiss, “a long-time subscriber,” who emailed: “I do not like the new weather page in the newspaper. But I will get used to it. However, I have kept the high/low report each day from the paper for the past 10 years and keep our report from our thermometer reading each day to compare.”

And, as I write this Thursday, I think Duluth and Fairbanks will return to the cities list.

Meanwhile, Dean Lockwood, the paper’s hardworking director of news production — the choreographer of the redesign — asked me to tell readers that lost space meant that “some things had to go,” that it’s “tricky” to find a list of cities “everyone would agree on,” and that he and his stalwart staff will “continue to tune, adjust and improve.”

And I urge readers to do as Mr. Reiss said he would do, and try to get used to it.

Yet the opposite can also be true. American photojournalism can also be lurid and sensational in its foreign coverage and, in the process, dehumanize its subjects.

Indeed, a seldom discussed, deep and troubling ethical double standard exists regarding who has the right to dignity in news photography.

Read more of “Troubling double standard, American photojournalism’s different treatment of foreign victims”

Obviously, the news is often serious business. Death and disease are unavoidable parts of life, and the struggles against strife and poverty have always been with us. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a voice arguing seriously that The Star should avoid a piece of news simply because its subject matter isn’t appropriate for young eyes.

In fact, I sometimes speak to readers who think The Star errs on the side of oversensitivity. I can recall several instances where readers have felt that writing about an unnamed euphemism for profanity provides insufficient detail to understand the situation.

For example, a political “Buzz” column last month mentioned that firebrand commentator Ann Coulter had called John McCain an unidentified “vulgar term” on a TV show.

Vulgar means different things to different people, one caller pointed out the next day. She suggested that if the item was important enough to merit a mention in the column, then it should also have specified the word for readers to decide for themselves whether it was offensive or not.

That’s logic I can get behind. “The Buzz” is aimed at those who follow the grown-up world of politics (inasmuch as it can be called that), and I’d agree that it shouldn’t necessarily hesitate to print terms that may be controversial.

However, I don’t think there’s any good reason to print gratuitously any number of common, uncreative slurs, which often cause great upset among a large swath of the population. There are instances where “the N word” or “a common denigration of gay men” provides plenty of detail. Context is of paramount importance here.

I know not everyone would agree with this point of view, but I respect fully the argument that I’ve heard from many readers through the years who feel The Star should never print any language that parents would consider inappropriate for young children.

That’s an especially valid criticism when it comes to items intended as entertainment.

One recent illustration came from an emailer who wrote that he’d “never been as disgusted with an editorial cartoon” as he was with one by freelance cartoonist Bob Unell that ran in the Jan. 4 edition of the 913 newsmagazine, which is distributed in the Johnson County area on Wednesdays.

The cartoon depicted two characters with T-shirts that riff on a slogan that many KU fans may be familiar with: “Muck Fizzou.”

Is the cartoonist “a ten year old boy who just learned some pig Latin?” asked the emailer. He wrote that “craftily exchanging the first letters of words” to disguise a statement that wouldn’t have been printed otherwise should have been rejected by editors.

“No Pulitzer Prize winner here. You owe an apology to your subscribers.”

I’m with him 100 percent on this one. It’s one thing for an opinion piece to use profanity if framed as a discussion about decorum or appropriateness. But simply in service of a gag? My experience tells me many readers would call that a bridge too far for a general-interest newspaper.

Even though editorial cartoons aren’t aimed at children, readers often remind me that kids tend to gravitate toward illustrations and graphics of all sorts. That’s why I understand when I sometimes hear objections to even mildly ribald content in the comics pages.

And for those who scoff at that idea, I’d play devil’s advocate: How do you feel about cartoon characters in ads for adult products such as alcoholic drinks and cigarettes?

What we find funny is the essence of subjectivity, but I’d agree that this cartoon was inappropriate for The Star’s audience.

Actually, I think that’s like saying, “It must be wonderful to be the umpire. Everybody loves you!” Well, maybe not so much.

Yes, indeed, sometimes I do criticize The Blade and make reporters and editors unhappy. Sometimes I defend what the newspaper has done, which confirms to a certain group of readers that I am part of the Great Conspiracy to Cover Up the Truth.

And sometimes what I write makes virtually everyone unhappy. But sometimes the ombudsman just gets to explain how things work.

For instance, Jerry Arkebauer of Sylvania likes to clip stories out of the paper. What bothers him, however, is that it seems that increasingly, the continuation of a story (journalists call this “the jump”) is on the back of the same page the article begins on. This makes clipping and saving hard, unless you happen to have a home copying machine, or two subscriptions.

Why is this? he wonders. The reason is partly the economy — and partly the fact that largely because of advertising migrating to the Internet, papers aren’t as rich as they used to be.

When the paper sells fewer ads, Executive Editor Kurt Franck noted, “we must reduce the number of pages. Apart from salaries, newsprint and ink are the biggest expense for newspapers.”

So, better double-sided stories than none at all.

●

A reader from Maumee wonders why the editorials in the Pages of Opinion don’t have writers’ names attached to them.

“Why do Blade editors not have the courage to identify themselves with their opinions?” he asked.

There’s a simple answer. Courage has nothing to do with it. Editorials are a collective effort, at least when the ideas are shaped, and more than one writer often works on an editorial before it is finally published. They are not signed because they are understood to be the policy of the editorial board of the newspaper, which includes Publisher and Editor-in-Chief John Robinson Block; the editor, David Kushma, and the associate editor. The editorials are not signed for much the same reason that a sign spelling out policy at the airport isn’t signed.

By the way, it is important to know that those reporters and editors gathering and editing news, including Mr. Franck, have nothing to do with writing the editorials or making editorial policy. They normally don’t even see the editorial page until it is ready for the printer.

●

Never let it be said that Blade readers don’t have good ideas. Toledoan Thomas Schoen noted that the newspaper recently included a guide to understanding terms mentioned in the portion of the daily log that includes information about dogs.

He suggested a similar key to understanding crime terms, adding, “I doubt that many readers could define exactly how ‘robberies, thefts, and burglaries differ,’ ” for example.

Managing Editor Dave Murray agreed that Mr. Schoen had something there. “I think this suggestion has merit,” Mr. Murray said. The Blade has begun including definitions to run with the newspaper’s weekly crime map.

●

Matt Zaleski asked why The Blade hadn’t published the story of the birth of Jesus as an editorial last month. “I thought it was a bit of a tradition with The Blade,” he said, adding that he enjoyed reading it.

Mr. Kushma noted that the previous year, the paper did indeed publish a nativity editorial. Last month, however, The Blade’s Christmas editorials were about other topics. That’s not because anyone on the editorial board hates Christmas. It’s partly because, well — newspapers are supposed to be purely nonreligious institutions.

“Those who do want to read the account have other, better options, starting with their church,” the editor noted.

Your ombudsman agrees with him; I think it is a mistake for any newspaper to lock itself in to any tradition, no matter how noble.

The Blade undoubtedly will continue to note the meaning of Christmas in a variety of ways … and hope that nobody, not even the ombudsman, ends up that morning with only a hunk of coal.

●

Finally, most of the mail I receive is critical, for one reason or another. So I was pleasantly startled to receive this email last week:

“I LOVE The Blade!” writes Jeff Nelson, who moved here about eight years ago from the Washington, D.C., area. “It distresses me to hear so many otherwise intelligent friends and acquaintances belittle The Blade … I don’t think they realize what an asset The Blade is, and how even-handed it is, and how important it is to have a paper that will investigate anyone who merits investigation.”

Those are comments that could even make an umpire proud.

This column was originally published in the Toledo Blade on January 15, 2012.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message to the public editor. He wrote:

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign debates, The Times has employed a separate fact-check sidebar to assess the validity of the candidates’ statements. Do you like this feature, or would you rather it be incorporated into regular reporting? How should The Times continue a function like this when we move to the general campaign and there’s less time spent in debates and more time on the road?

Please feel free to leave a comment below or send me an e-mail at public@nytimes.com with the subject line: Readers Point the Way: Correcting Untruths. Please adhere to my comment moderation policy when posting.

This column was originally published in The New York Times on January 12, 2012. An update was also published on January 12, 2012 and includes a statement from Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times.

But Jose Suarez of Los Angeles wasn’t upset by anecdotes about the candidate’s inability to name a book he’d read or to quote the price of tortillas. Suarez questioned The Times’ spelling of the candidate’s name: Enrique Pena Nieto.

“I noticed you keep calling him Pena Nieto even though his name is Peña Nieto,” Suarez wrote. “I cannot understand why a newspaper doesn’t respect the spelling of a presidential candidate of a country.

“The ‘ñ’ is an official part of a major language, and word meaning changes if you don’t use it. ‘Peña’ means a big rock or a place of reunion; ‘Pena’ means shame. When you report about the meteorological phenomenon of El Niño, you don’t call it El Nino. Spanish (Español) should be taken seriously.”

The reader is right. The article should have used a tilde in the spelling of Peña Nieto’s last name.

Editors had good intentions here. They were following one entry in The Times’ stylebook that says diacritical marks generally are not used in stories in the news sections — with a couple of notable exceptions, including El Niño.

However, a separate style note states that the tilde should be used in “all proper nouns (generally, capitalized names of people and places) where it is known to be appropriate.”

Assistant Managing Editor Henry Fuhrmann, who heads The Times’ style committee, said, “The reader’s point is well taken. Our style guidelines are clear on use of the tilde, though in day-to-day practice we have tended to rely on having the subjects of our coverage tell us their preferences. Here, with a major political figure and potential future president of Mexico, it should have been easy to establish what’s appropriate. We’ll use ‘Peña’ henceforth.

“The style note makes a good further point about not making assumptions: ‘Be aware that not all Spanish-surnamed people, especially among Americans, use the tilde,’” Fuhrmann said. “With Enrique Peña Nieto, we didn’t have to assume anything.”

This column was originally published on LATimes.com on January 13, 2012.

A proposed rule published in the Federal Register on Nov. 29, and echoed in a Dec. 16 Pentagon advisory to its legion of contract officers, would “strictly limit” and “discourage” identifying recipients of unclassified contracts as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

That practice was brought to light for Stars and Stripes readers in an ombudsman column posted online July 12, 2010. (At 4,000 words, “Behind the Media Contractors’ Veil” was too long for the newspaper.) All told, the column reported, the government spent more than $40 billion on “miscellaneous foreign contractors” during the previous decade.

The column identified established American public relations firms that had received millions of dollars in unclassified contracts for media services in Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of that work involved assisting Public Affairs operations that provide information to Stars and Stripes reporters, other journalists, readers and the American public at large.

(As ombudsman, I am directed by Congress to track “the state of the free flow of information to the armed forces via the Stars and Stripes.”)

Yet those American firms – with offices or headquarters in Washington, Los Angeles and New York City – were identified only as “miscellaneous foreign contractors” on usaspending.gov.

That Web site was created by legislation co-sponsored in 2006 by then-Sen. Barack Obama to raise public awareness and accountability for the trillion taxpayer dollars spent annually on unclassified contracts and grants.

Beginning two months after my column appeared, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the Defense Department and the General Services Administration all issued advisories in late 2010 cautioning against substituting a generic identifier like “miscellaneous foreign contractors” for a contractor’s name and specific ID number, called a DUNS number.

The new measures go further, mandating reform of the practice and an overhaul of contract-reporting procedures.

All official guidance issued in the last year and a half makes note, as did my column, that use of generic ID’s impedes compliance with the Transparency Act and thwarts the purpose for which usaspending.gov was created.

The Nov. 29 rule, along with the Dec. 16 Pentagon memo, takes clear, concrete steps to tighten contract-reporting policy and improve compliance with the Transparency Act.

In his memo, the director of Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy, Richard Ginman, said that because a generic DUNS number “masks the true identity of the vendor,” it “shall not be used” in listing Defense contract transactions – he underlined “shall not” – except under the “rare conditions” detailed in the new seven-page-long rule.

According to that rule, the new policy limits allowable exceptions to “small-dollar” contract “actions valued at or below $25,000 that are awarded to a contractor that is—
“(A) A student;
“(B) A dependent of a veteran, foreign service officer, or military member assigned overseas; or
“(C) Located outside the United States and its outlying areas as defined in 2.101 for work to be performed overseas, and the contractor does not otherwise have a DUNS number;
“(ii) Contracts awarded to individuals for performance overseas; or
“(iii) Specific public identification of the contracted party could endanger the mission, contractor, or recipients of the acquired goods or services.”

This is much closer to the original intent of generic ID’s, which was to give officers in the field flexibility to “micro-purchase” goods and services on a local economy, protect the people who provided them from reprisal, and preserve operational security.

One of the most striking findings I encountered in my reporting was that some established U.S. firms seemed unaware that they had been labeled “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

Indeed, some contractors’ Web sites openly touted the very same contracts that the government had listed as having gone to “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

In one case, Pentagon officials and a senior executive even gave newspaper interviews about a particular contract that the Defense Department had nonetheless quietly listed as going to “miscellaneous foreign contractors.” (See “Behind the Media Contractors’ Veil.”)

One corporate spokesman expressed indignation to me that his firm had been so identified. A contracting executive at another said he had no explanation for his firm’s being listed as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

One possible explanation came from a DOD contract officer in Afghanistan. The officer, who reluctantly spoke with me by phone last winter on condition of anonymity, allowed that “miscellaneous foreign contractors” had become the “default” identifier for any contract listing that contained incomplete or inaccurate data on a vendor.

In other words, a couple of digits or letters dropped or swapped could produce a listing showing a contract had gone to “miscellaneous foreign contractors” instead of the actual recipient.

And that could conceal not only who is doing what but who is getting what, both in terms of public disclosure and internal recordkeeping.

The DOD’s Ginman noted that even when a generic ID is allowed, it must “never be placed on the actual contract document” because that “immediately makes any electronic processing of invoices, receiving reports, and payments impossible; and can, in fact, result in mis-directed payments.”

The Nov. 29 rule declares that “use of a generic number is contrary to the Transparency Act requirements to make publicly available the total amount of federal funding awarded to a contractor.”

This “adversely affects the transparency of the Government’s data,” it continues, and “the contractor is not able to access and perform its own reporting requirements, such as Transparency Act subcontract reporting, because the contract is not associated with the contractor in Federal-wide processes.”

And that is of great concern to budget watchdogs like Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League, an advocacy group long critical of “miscellaneous foreign contractors” and the like.

Chapman worries that such devices can disguise big-corporation involvement in ostensibly small businesses, leading to underbidding and the diversion of contracts set aside by law for genuine small businesses.

“The problems in federal contracting are so massive, so horrific,” he said, that the DUNS number reforms may just be “a symbolic concession.”

One can understand Chapman’s skepticism.

At one extreme, the trade press consistently lists “miscellaneous foreign contractors” among top Defense contractors, right up there with Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

At the other end is John Brooks Rice.

The Associated Press reported in September 2010 that the Coast Guard had paid him $9,000 a month to monitor and rate news coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The contract identified Rice, a New Orleans man who occasionally works for FEMA, as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

Yet it still remains that commanders in operational situations must have latitude to buy goods and services in-country without excessive red tape or exceptional risk of reprisal to the providers or to their own forces.

At the same time, Americans, in uniform and out, have the right to know not only how their government is spending their money but also who is helping provide information that shapes public perceptions of national undertakings like war and military operations.

The Obama Administration’s new initiative is a step in the right direction, toward balancing vital, varied and sometimes even competing national interests.

This column was originally published in Stars and Stripes on Dec. 28, 2011.

Born in the Age of Enlightenment, of Tom Paine and The Rights of Man, of Free Trade and of bloody revolution, the Observer celebrates its 220th birthday this weekend.

On 4 December 1791, WS Bourne, a young Irish entrepreneur, addressed his new readers in “the present extraordinary era, which opens upon an astonished World” and hoped his smudgy four-page newspaper would make his fortune. Alas, it didn’t. He was quickly in debt and had to sell to his brother, who in turn sold to an early media tycoon, William Innell Clement, in 1814. Clement was among the first to understand the importance of vivid reporting and simple illustration, but his editor, Lewis Doxat, prided himself on never writing an article “on any subject under any circumstances whatsoever”, an intriguing policy that saw him last 50 years in the chair.

Ploughing on through the 19th century, the paper covered the early reform movement, sided with the North in the American Civil War and was often appalled at the savagery of a justice system that saw nothing wrong with sentencing children to penal servitude for stealing a ribbon.

Lord Northcliffe pulled the paper, as he put it, “from the Fleet ditch” in the early 20th century, installing JL Garvin as editor, who stayed for 48 years. Garvin, a consummate newspaperman, introduced serious politics, book reviews, music writing, the first reporting on the environment and Fleet Street’s first film critic.

But the name most associated with the paper is David Astor’s. Under his editorship from 1948 to 1975, the Observer found its liberal soul, set new standards in reporting on Europe, on the developing world and on Britain’s colonial interests. It challenged readers’ assumptions about Britain’s global standing and it asked hard questions about living in a postwar world dominated by two nuclear superpowers. That tradition of liberal journalism carried on under successive ownerships, and continues today under the wing of the Guardian Media Group.

Today’s era is no less extraordinary than the “astonished World” of 1791. Long may the Observer continue to observe it.

This column was originally published in The Observer on Dec.  3, 2011.