Joann Byrd carried 40 years of newspaper experience into her job as ombudsman at The Washington Post, but she also carried a graduate degree in philosophy with a focus on ethics.

That ethics training sets her columns apart from the columns of two dozen or so other North American ombudsmen who write about their papers' foibles. The others tend to make judgments based on that tangle of conventions and ideals call "good journalistic practice."

By contrast, Byrd tends to ask just how good is good journalistic practice.

Here are some recent examples:

On Adm. Bobby Ray Inman

When Inman declined to become secretary of defense because the press was too quick to criticize, Byrd wrote that there seemed to be little recognition that "there might be something wrong with the media climate in this city."

She noted that Inman was "only the latest visible indictment of the conventions of journalism in Washington.

"Could anybody not think immediately of the late [White House aide] Vince Foster writing, "Here ruining people is considered sport."

"It may not be enough anymore for the Washington media and the political leadership to dismiss this [criticism] by protesting that everybody knows you have to have a thick hide to work in Washington."

Byrd suggested, "Powerful positions of national service ought to be conditioned on what a reasonable public -- including a public outside the Beltway -- would want from its servants. It's not what politicians and other journalists find juicy or relevant...It is fitness for the job and vision and knowledge and such. If fitness is largely an ability to repel flak...that's a problem....

"Elsewhere journalism is not exactly what you'd call charitable. But neither does it so readily see criticism as an end in itself.

"Save the public from puff pieces, and from a world in which journalists don't do the digging the citizenry needs them to do.

"But save us as well from an environment in which the approved perspective is cynicism; the price of admission is your ability to withstand the heat, and the rules are written with a chisel."

On media mobs

A Post reporter called the crush of reporters and camera people pressing in on Whitewater Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske "an unruly media mob."

In the same week we had seen similar mobs outside the homes of Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, and Florida teenager Kimberly Mays, Byrd noted, and "it's not pretty."

But, Byrd wrote, we can't ask reliable news media to swear off events the tabloid TV and press will cover. Nor can we allow newsmakers to control the flow of news through news conferences and press releases. "Sometimes face to face at the scene is the only way to get a reluctant public official to react without a script -- and today."

But media mobs do abuse private people who are precipitated into the news involuntarily and "even if it's a public official or a VIP who chose a role in the spotlight, rowdy hordes encourage the public to believe every journalist alive is willing to do anything to get a story."

Byrd suggested, "I wish some media organization or journalist could work up the courage on this. Courage, that is, to confront the assumption that these scenes are the unattractive but necessary adjunct to serving the public interest.

"How about asking, in every case (with its unique characteristics and players): Does the public need to know this badly enough that it would have me participating in treating this person like this and, is this information important enough to risk the public confidence in my work and that of my professional colleagues?

"How about when too many reporters and cameras show up, the assembled masses collectively figure out how to encourage the notion that theirs is a respectable work?

"It looks so predatory, so instinctive, so unprofessional. How can we expect our reporting on any subject to be taken as thorough and thoughtful and trustworthy when we are also willing to play the vulture?...The ombudsman throwing a tantrum can't fix this. But the people who can -- the participants -- also have the most to gain."

On Dan Quayle

According to Byrd, former Vice President Dan Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, learned one thing as they started a national tour to promote his book, "Standing Firm": "The press that would greet a Quayle campaign for the presidency in 1996 is predisposed to remember Dan Quayle as comic relief."

Much of the media treatment of Quayle has been unfair, Byrd wrote, and, "Once journalists decide about somebody, they aren't likely to notice or pursue a story line that goes contrary to that judgment."

Item: Jonathan Yardley devoted a good measure of his review of the book to how Quayle was "mercilessly belittled" by the press. Yet Yardley could not resist leading his review with, "It's tempting to say that the big surprise about Dan Quayle's vice presidential memoir is that every word therein appears to be spelled correctly."

Similarly, another Post commentator, Lloyd Grove, started his story on the book with an account of Quayle getting lost on his way to an interview with Larry King.

The Quayles pay for the gaffes that feed his featherweight image, Byrd wrote, "But if the media cannot bury this caricature, I fear voters [will] pay more by being abandoned to choose between the cardboard clown of the media's creation and the spin formulated by a Quayle campaign."

On hate speech

With reference to Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the demoted official of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, she wrote: "When the story is speech, newspapers think they have to treat hate as if it were an expression worthy of rational attention."

The Post was trapped by the rules governing straight news coverage into saying Muhammad's comments were "described as racist and anti-Semitic" and that "some" find his position offensive. Byrd wrote: "I'd propose that the newspaper be excused from depicting objectively those ideas that violate or encourage violating the rules that govern how we live together.

"We agree that without a good enough reason, it is wrong to kill people or cause them unnecessary harm, to lie, or cheat. We keep promises, value justice, and see people as autonomous individuals who are owed dignity and respect and benevolence just for being humans.

"Under [my] formula, newspapers would not have to dance so carefully around what would be the other side: notions that reflect or promote the opposite of those principles.

"[T]he fact that it's speech shouldn't remove it from the list of things that are prima facie wrong."

On Lani Guinier

"You could count on the fingers of one hand the journalists who actually read and reported from the law review articles that eventually convinced Bill Clinton to withdraw her nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights.

"That left the interpretation to her opponents, who defined her ideas and, effectively, the debate."

So wrote Byrd after the withdrawal. Admittedly, she said, the White House silenced Guinier, and in the consequent absence of response to her critics, journalists may have believed that the opponents were describing her positions accurately.

"In that vacuum, the press did not find or encourage surrogates to defend her ideas. It isn't written anywhere that reporters need to find someone to stand up for people who are, for heaven's sake, sponsored by the president of the United States. If the nominee and her patrons refuse to talk, that makes it tough or impossible for the press to provide balance, but that's the price they pay.

"But that thinking focuses on being fair to the nominee....But coverage is not a service to the nominee. The journalistic obligation is to serve the public. So the press owed its readers -- and simultaneously Lani Guinier -- a thorough, accurate account of her views," an account that would enable readers to make up their own minds.

"The media might well have presumed all along that this would get sorted out in [the] hearings [before the Senate Judiciary Committee] and that readers would learn through that coverage what they needed to know."

But because her nomination was withdrawn, there were no hearings. "And," Byrd wrote, "the possibility of that should be a permanent warning to journalists: The official system might not do what the public needs done.

"And when that happens, the public expects the press to have done its job."

The late Richard P. Cunningham, former readers' representative for the Minneapolis Tribune and associate director of the late National News Council, was a teacher of journalism at New York University. This article appeared in the July/August 1994 issue of Quill.