DATE: Sunday, June 1, 1997                  TAG: 9705300025

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM

                                            LENGTH:  105 lines

REPORT TO READERS PRESS WOES HAVE A GLOBAL SAMENESS

Recently, Mario Vitor Santos, ombudsman at the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo in Brazil, posed this question to his readers:

``During a visit to Rondonia state, in northwestern Brazil, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso stumbles and falls on wooden steps leading up to the presidential stage. He is helped by security. Would you publish a photograph of the fall on the front page?''

The question should sound familiar. It was a variation on a ``You Be the Editor'' question that ran recently in The Pilot and in other newspapers. In the U.S. version, the president who stumbled was George Bush. But the Brazilian quiz was a reminder, to me, that wrestling with journalistic ethics is a worldwide issue.

This common ground is what brings together, each year, members of the Organization of News Ombudsmen - better known as ONO, for the journalistic cry of anguish (``Oh, no!'') that greets a mistake or ethics lapse.

This year, in early May, more than 40 newspaper ombudsmen met in Barcelona, Spain - our first meeting outside of North America. The ombuds-titles vary: public editor, defensor del lector (reader defender), reader advocate, l'ombudsman.

And the way we do our jobs is often equally diverse:

In Sweden, a single ombudsman deals with press disputes for 150 different newspapers. Last year he ruled against more than half of them, resulting in a retraction and/or fine.

In Japan, the chief ombudsman of Tokyo's Yomiuri Shimbun (circulation: 10 million!) heads up a department of 16 ombudsmen, who not only take reader criticism six days a week but review the newspaper's content daily.

In Amarillo, Texas, the public editor fields complaints from readers, writes a weekly column and ``mediates'' reader-press disputes. Ditto for newspapers in Norfolk and Richmond, Connecticut, California, Missouri, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc.

But no matter how we do our job, I'm always struck more by the similarities in reader issues than by the differences. Take the chronic complaint that ``there's not enough good news in your paper.''

A Dutch newspaper, we learned at the meeting, decided to respond by experimenting with a good-news-only edition. Alas, it picked a day when an important local company held its annual meeting and announced major layoffs. The paper ``happily'' reported only that profits had improved, but decided to ditch the good-news experiment forthwith.

And Osami Okuya, chief ombudsman at Yomiuri Shimbun, laughed when he read a column by the reader representative at the Hartford (Conn.) Courant, about the irritation of curling corners of the newspapers. They get the same complaints in Tokyo, he told Miriam Pepper. (I have to admit that, in four years, I haven't heard that one!)

Holding the ONO meeting in Barcelona was particularly interesting because, as Luis Foix reminded us, the country was a model of how to go from a dictatorship to a democracy. And the press, too, made a remarkable recovery, added Foix, deputy editor of the daily La Vanguardia.

``The extraordinary thing is that most people believe us,'' said Foix, speaking of the media in general. ``That's the dangerous thing.'' And, he added, a ``tremendous responsibility.''

Presumably, it's among the reasons that his newspaper, and others, decide to appoint an ombudsman.

Our meetings were held last month at a press institute in downtown Barcelona. Led by our host, La Vanguardia ombudsman Roger Jimenez, the three-day session was a bit like attending the United Nations. There were ombudsman from 14 countries, including Canada, The Netherlands, Colombia, Israel and Portugal. A translator gave us the English or Spanish version of every speech or panel session.

In past years, we've been greeted by the mayor of Philadelphia and Fort Worth and other American or Canadian dignitaries. But I have to say there's something particularly impressive about being received by the president of the Catalan government. El presidente, Jordi Pujol, held a reception for us in an ancient, fortresslike castle beneath a chandelier the size of our entire newsroom.

But several ONO speakers effectively kept our heads from swelling. Ombudsmen are the ``abogados de causas perdidas'' (``lawyers of lost causes''), said university professor and former senator Victoria Camps.

On a more positive note, La Vanguardia reporter Margarita Riviere acknowledged that we do have our uses. When speaking to the public, Riviere said she frequently must apologize for being a journalist and doing everything wrong. By responding to the public, she acknowledged, ombudsmen can ``turn journalists into human beings, humanize the profession from something diabolic.''

I don't know if we always fulfill that role. Asked by Riviere, who wrote an ombudsman Q&A, how reporters react to reader complaints, she dutifully printed my response:

``Se esconden detras de la mesa, ja, ja.'' (``They hide under their desks, ha, ha.'')

POSTSCRIPT ON ZAIRE. Several readers weighed in on last Sunday's discussion about whether the Zaire execution photo on our May 19 front page was too graphic.

North Carolina reader Tony Sylvester pretty much summed up the counter-sentiments, e-mailing: ``Let's put that Zaire photo in context, in the long tradition of photojournalism going back to Mathew Brady and the Civil War. . . .

``Should photo editors have withheld the two classics of Vietnam: the summary Saigon street execution of a suspected Viet Cong by a point-blank gunshot to the head during the Tet offensive of 1968, or the 1972 photo of a young Vietnamese girl naked and screaming after being napalmed in error?''

I had suggested that just showing the Zaire victim prior to his execution might have made the same point. But Sylvester said: ``No other photo would have served the unvarnished truth as well'' as the sequence that ran on our front page. MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475 or e-mail

lynn(AT)pilotonline.com

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