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Andrew Pochter, 21 Years Old, RIP

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Amid the sadness over the murder of one young man, Trayvon Martin, I’ve also been terribly saddened by the violent death of another young man, Andrew Pochter, who went to Egypt to try and do some good. Reporter Karen Tumulty chronicled the story in the Washington Post:

“Andrew Pochter, a 21-year-old Kenyon College student from Chevy Chase, Md., was stabbed to death on June 28 during anti-government protests in Alexandria, Egypt. Pochter, a bystander to the demonstrations, was in Alexandria on an internship for a non-profit organization to teach English to Egyptian 7- and 8-year-olds. His family said the young man ‘went to Egypt because he cared profoundly about the Middle East. He had studied in the region, loved the culture, and planned to live and work there in the pursuit of peace and understanding.’
Pochter’s compassion and his determination to make a difference had begun much closer to home. For most of the past five summers, starting when he was 16, he had volunteered as a counselor for a program called Camp Opportunity. It is a weeklong sleepaway camp for at-risk children, aged 6 to 12, from the Baltimore area.
Each camper is assigned his own counselor, and the relationship continues each year. In June, Andrew Pochter’s camper had turned 12, and was moving on from the program. Unable to attend the ‘graduation’ picnic, Pochter sent the child a letter—one that summed up the way he was living his own life, and what he hoped to have passed along. It was read by Andrew’s sister Emily at Pochter’s funeral on Friday (text of Pochter’s letter is below):”
Andrew Pochter letter

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The Washington Post, Slouching Toward Irrelevance/Part II

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What a crock. As predicted here on Feb. 16, the Washington Post has gone ahead and dumped the position of ombudsman at the newspaper. In an unctuous letter published this afternoon, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth insults the intelligence of her readers with these words:

The world has changed, and we at The Post must change with it. We have been privileged to have had the service of many talented ombudsmen (and women) who have addressed readers’ concerns, answered their questions and held The Post to the highest standards of journalism. Those duties are as critical today as ever. Yet it is time that the way these duties are performed evolves.

We will appoint a reader representative shortly to address our readers’ concerns and questions. Unlike ombudsmen in the past, the reader representative will be a Post employee. The representative will not write a weekly column for the page but will write online and/or in the newspaper from time to time to address reader concerns, with responses from editors, reporters or business executives as appropriate.

Beginning Monday, you may send questions or complaints to readers@washpost.com.We know that media writers inside and outside The Post will continue to hold us accountable for what we write, as will our readers, in letters to the editor and online comments on Post articles.

In short, while we are not filling a position that was created decades ago for a different era, we remain faithful to the mission. We know that you, our readers, will hold us to that, as you should.

There is so much phony talk in those paragraphs, I hardly know where to begin picking them apart.

What about the evolving media landscape makes the position of ombudsman out-moded? Is accountability so totally out of style? Aside from Ms. Weymouth’s specious argument that the media world has somehow evolved in a way that it’s no longer necessary to have an independent eye keeping watching over the paper and critiquing it when necessary, the most damaging admission in her letter is that a new, downgraded, reader representative will be a Post employee, lacking independence from the editorial and business sides of the newspaper. The Public Editor, as the position is named at the New York Times, has a contract that keeps that person free from influence of the classic fiefdoms at a daily newspaper. I believe that Post ombudspersons always had this status, but no more.

Weymouth claims that “we remain faithful to the mission,” but unspoken is what that purpose is. It surely can’t be a willingness to be accountable to readers and to history. She takes for granted that we will just what know it she means by that optimistic allusion. Alas, I do not.

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The Washington Post, Slouching Toward Irrelevance

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April Update: As I anticipated below, the Washington Post did eliminate the position of ombudsman and replaced it with a down-scaled “reader representative.” The new rep is Doug Feaver, who was invited to take the part-time job and brought out of retirement by Post editor Fred Hiatt, author of some truly horrible Post editorials during the run-up to the Iraq War. Craig Silverman of Regret the Error recently interviewed Feaver for poynter.org. Unlike ombudspersons who work independently from a newspaper’s editors, Feaver conceded to Silverman that “people in the newsroom will always get a heads up about what he’s looking into.” While blowing the whistle on newsroom mistakes is not part of the new post’s mandate, at least Feaver won’t be harboring career ambitions. Maybe he’ll be a bit more independent as a result, or maybe I’m just trying to find a bright side in an otherwise gloomy development at the Post.
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Though I don’t live in Washington, D.C., I’ve been a reader of the Washington Post for many years. I read it online and will buy the paper when I can find it in NYC, even though I’ve long been disappointed in some of its editorial stances, particularly over the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as articulated by Fred Hiatt, the newspaper’s editorial page editor. It was also a terrible move when in 2008 they let Dan Froomkin go from washingtonpost.com, where he’d long assembled White House Watch, a daily aggregation of news about the executive branch.

My latest disappointment with the top paper in the nation’s capitol is that, according to media reporter, Harry Jaffe of the Washingtonian, they are evidently thinking of eliminating the post of ombudsman at the news organization. The ombudsman, or public editor as the job is described at the New York Times, is a key person who serves as a go-between readers and the management of a news outlet.  They are often the only person in a news organization where readers concerned about errors and biased reporting can turn to for redress or clarification. Virtually all news orgs fill this position–from PBS to NPR to the Toledo Blade, to dozens of others–and do it in such a way that the ombudsman is insulated from lobbying and pressures from the newsroom, since it’s his/her job to call out editors and reporters when they make mistakes. At the Times, Margaret Sullivan currently holds the job of public editor. According to Jaffe, the contract for Patrick Pexton, the Post‘s current ombudsman, expires March 1, and Fred Hiatt is making no promises about replacing him:

“’We are in the process of thinking about whether we want to replace Pat with no changes in the role or do it differently,” . . .  Hiatt wrote in an e-mail. “We have not made any decisions.’”

Sounds to me that the position of ombudsman is on its way out at the Washington Post, unless some public pressure is brought to bear on Hiatt over the next couple weeks. H/t Dan Froomkin, @froomkin, who tweeted about Jaffe’s column this morning.

 

 

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Dumbest, Funniest Thing I Read this Week

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Roscoe Bartlett is an 86-year old Repub congressmen, a kind of buffoon, given to outrageous, often incoherent, statements. Somehow, he’s a 10-term incumbent, reliably  embraced by conservative voters in a district that’s been redrawn to favor a Democrat challenger.  And it is looking as if he will lose his western Maryland seat and not make it to an 11th term. Especially with howlers such as his latest, as reported in the Washington Post:

“This isn’t the politically correct thing to say, but when we drove the mother out of the home into the workplace and replaced her with the television set, that was not a good thing.”

Insane though these out-of-touch remarks are–supposedly having something to do with married women working outside the home–I laughed at the non sequiturs this unabashed Tea Partier managed to toss in to such a brief statement. I’m hopeful he’ll be replaced soon by a DEM.

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