"What is a news ombudsman?
A news ombudsman receives and investigates complaints from newspaper readers or listeners or viewers of radio and television stations about accuracy, fairness, balance and good taste in news coverage. He or she recommends appropriate remedies or responses to correct or clarify news reports.
Why should a newspaper or broadcaster have an ombudsman?
To improve the quality of news reporting by monitoring accuracy, fairness and balance.
To help his or her news provider to become more accessible and accountable to readers or audience members and, thus, to become more credible.
To increase the awareness of its news professionals about the public's concerns.
To save time for publishers and senior editors, or broadcasters and news directors, by channeling complaints and other inquiries to one responsible individual.
To resolve some complaints that might otherwise be sent to attorneys and become costly lawsuits.
"The Center for Science in the Public Interest has sent a letter to the National Geographic Society, publisher of the magazines, complaining about the ads for products like Hostess cupcakes and Kellogg's Smorz cereal in the publications.
"It is unconscionable that the National Geographic Society, with its esteemed reputation and longstanding educational mission for both adults and children, has chosen to cram National Geographic Kids magazine with advertisements for sugary cereals, candy and snack foods," the letter says."
"Harry Potter, probably unintentionally, thus appears as a summary of the social and educational aims of neoliberal capitalism. Like Orwellian totalitarianism, this capitalism tries to fashion not only the real world, but also the imagination of consumer-citizens. The underlying message to young fans is this: You can imagine as many fictional worlds, parallel universes or educational systems as you want, they will still all be regulated by the laws of the market. Given the success of the Harry Potter series, several generations of young people will be indelibly marked by this lesson. "
Many ordinary citizens seek similar insulation in their own lives. They want to be protected from contradictory views or voices. Radio and cable audiences prefer outlets and pundits that confirm rather than challenge their own views. Media moguls pander to this anti-democratic drift by offering up partisanship and polemic in larger and larger doses.
As a result, we are increasingly polarized in our ideologies. Ads that attack rather than inform are the weapon of choice for political campaigns. We regard those with differing views not as fellow participants in a democratic adventure but as enemies to quash. Rather than listen and respond, we prefer to silence by intimidation and isolation or to crush with raw political power.
Our national conventions once were robust and riveting affairs, with gavel-to-gavel coverage on network television. Now, scripted and predictable, they have come to symbolize a tendency among too many Americans toward shutting up and shutting out viewpoints other than our own.
If that tendency endures, our democracy cannot. We should not fear dissenting views but embrace them as opportunities to improve our own positions and to display our confidence in the give-and-take of democratic discourse.
Without disagreement, even discord, political discourse is mere noise and prattle. A people talking only to themselves and shouting at all others gurgles with an awful sound: the death rattle of democracy.
I think young people — those in their late teens and 20s — are particularly susceptible to these one-sided, half-baked news mcnuggets. Thanks to MTV, and instant messaging and other rapid-fire features of the Internet, most young people today want everything in quick, small bites. They get their news — to the extent that they get any — inadvertently, almost by osmosis, absorbing bits of it on various websites or between the radio play of their favorite songs or while clicking the television remote control.
"The wealthier a society is, the more self-consciously individualistic it is and the less an individual feels obligated to consider things outside oneself and one's immediate interests," says Robert Calvert, a political science professor at DePauw University. "The last thing kids want out of a college education today is to learn how to be a better citizen. All they're concerned with is career preparation."
Calvert thinks this mind-set leads to more — worse — than mere civic ignorance.
"You wind up with people working for, and maybe at the top of, major industries who have no interest in institutions or in our cultural and moral environment, and that's a real national problem," he says. "That's how you wind up with Enron."
A team blog discussing media issues, produced by students at the THINK Institute, sponsored by the Davidson Institute and the University of Nevada, Reno. Reynolds School of Journalism, July 2004.
