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 the paper and tarnishing its reputation for integrity.

At that difficult moment, then-Executive Editor Ben Bradlee turned to the paper's ombudsman, Bill Green, inviting him to investigate the debacle and report to the readers. Green wrote a thorough, clear-eyed, spare-nobody account of just how the paper had gone wrong.

It seemed appropriate, then, to invite editor Bradlee, now retired, to visit with the Organization of News Ombudsmen to discuss ombudsmanship at its 1996 annual meeting. His comments were intended to launch a series of annual lectures honoring the memory and furthering the work of the late Philip M. Foisie, former Post editor and ombudsman for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Over lunch with ONO members and members of the Foisie family, Bradlee first paid tribute to Foisie, describing him as "the conscience of The Washington Post," for his dedication to ethical journalism and his seminal efforts to establish the ombudsman position at the paper.

The number of news ombudsmen in the U.S. isn't large and may never be. ONO members asked Bradlee what he would say to a newspaper editor who wondered why it is vital to have an ombudsman.

"I'd tell him," said Bradlee, " 'Because you're deluding yourself if you think that you can actually be responsible for everything that goes into the paper, that if you think you are really monitoring this newspaper of yours for fairness and relevance and accuracy you're crazy.'

"And, I mean, that is a fact. It's incontrovertible."

Bradlee said he thinks editors fear an ombudsman "because they're scared of being publicly criticized." But he said they shouldn't be "if you are secure in your sense that you are backed by your employers and that you will really work hard. And if something slips in there that you missed, it isn't the end of the world. But, it is something that has to be corrected and noted."

Bradlee recalled something said to him by Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times -- where ombudsmanship then and now isn't viewed with favor: "You're the ombudsman, Bradlee, and you might as well face it."

Bradlee's reaction: "I guess that's true," he told his ONO audience. "But, if anybody thinks that at a large metropolitan paper an editor can read everything that goes into it, they're really kidding themselves."

Bradlee said that at the time The Post was considering establishing the position, what he and Foisie didn't want was a kind of reader representative who "handled complaints about reader service, like the paper was in the azalea bushes every morning...and that kind of thing."

Instead, Bradlee said, "We wanted [the ombudsman] to get into the nitty-gritty of the newspaper business, as well as answering and being responsive to the newspaper readership's complaints."

Nitty-gritty, indeed. Bradlee harkened back to the Cooke case and Ombudsman Green's massive, 14,000-word report to Post readers.

"There was nothing known about the Janet Cooke story that The Washington Post didn't tell the world," he said. "Not a single fact, not a single nuance.

"And there's no possible way we could have achieved that without an ombudsman.

"I could have talked myself blue in the face and been on every radio station and television station and written a piece of 'Outlook,' and they [the critics and skeptics] would have said, 'Sure, sure.' "

Finally, the subject turned to another incontrovertible fact: An ombudsman who does his or her job conscientiously and fearlessly is bound to raise hackles and temperature levels in the newsroom. Bradlee was asked if he felt any of The Post's ombudsmen had critized his paper unfairly.

"I sure did."

"What did you do in that case?"

"I ate it."