THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408190008
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines
Overkill on O.J. Simpson, tasteless cartoons, bad grammar, not enough news in the A section, overly graphic photos, switched crossword clues . . . do these gripes sound familiar?
They should. They're typical of calls we've gotten from readers over the past few months. And they're echoed in ombudsmen's columns in newspapers around the country - Florida, Connecticut, Minnesota, California, Missouri, Texas - and in Canada.
``Ombudsman'' is just another term for ``public editor'' . . . aka ``reader's advocate,'' ``reader representative'' or just plain ``reader rep,'' as Jeff Langley calls himself down in Amarillo, Texas.
Whatever the title, as members of the Organization of News Ombudsmen we stay in pretty close contact, swapping columns and problems. Reading a stack of ombuds-columns from June and July made me realize that newspaper readers around the country have a lot in common despite a few regional differences.
A BELLYFUL OF O.J. Many readers told Sacramento Bee ombudsman Art Nauman that they'd read enough about fellow Californian O.J. Simpson, who was on the front page of the Bee for 12 consecutive days. But at the same time, a record 9,000 calls were made to the newspaper's audiotext service BeeLine (like our INFOLINE), which offered even more details of the case.
Further south, The San Diego Union-Tribune got few complaints, said readers representative Gina Lubrano. And in Texas, reader wrath at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was directed at the headline ``Simpson captured after chase''; callers felt the word ``surrendered'' was more appropriate.
Only a handful of Canadians complained of O.J. overkill to Jim Stott, ombudsman at The Calgary Herald in Alberta. ``One said the space should have been used for Canadian news,'' he wrote.
But at the Amarillo Globe-News, reader rep Langley got enough backlash to generate two columns on O.J. Aside from complaints that they'd had ``a bellyful,'' some callers objected to a front-page poll, soon after his arrest, asking readers if they thought O.J. was guilty (939 said no, 681 yes).
Closer to home, the Richmond Times-Dispatch was first chastised for playing the O.J. story on the Sports pages. Later, said ombudsman Jerry Finch, readers were divided between complaining about too much and too little O.J. coverage.
RWANDA SLAUGHTER. At the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas, ombudsman Phil Record writes that he was braced for irate calls when the paper ran photographs of the ``horrifying butchery in Rwanda.'' But Record got only four calls. It helped, he said, that the photos did not run out front but inside its Opinion section.
Henry McNulty, reader representative at The Hartford Courant in Connecticut, had a different concern. In his column, he took the newspaper, and the public, to task for poor coverage of the Rwanda tragedy. ``It could be that most of us - readers and journalists alike - don't care all that much about Rwanda,'' he wrote. ``I think that's appalling.''
RELIGION & GAYS. ``Lack of coverage rained on religious parade,'' was the headline on reader representative Lou Gelfand's column (cleverly titled ``If You Ran the Newspaper'') in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Gelfand got 100 angry callers because a major New York City gay-rights parade made the newspaper's front page but there wasn't ``a single line'' the previous day on the 4,500 people at a March for Jesus in neighboring St. Paul. Gelfand sided with his callers.
We had a smattering of calls on a local March for Jesus. But back in April '93, readers complained loudly when the huge gay-rights March on Washington got front-page treatment but a two-day Azalea Festival air show with 300,000 onlookers was virtually ignored.
RELIGION & CARTOONS. These two items have been an uneasy mix lately. At The Gazette in Montreal, ombudsman Robert Walker heard from dozens of outraged readers over an editorial cartoon caricaturing Pope John Paul and poking fun at his stand against ordaining women as priests.
Finch at the Richmond Times-Dispatch heard cries of Catholic-bashing over a ``Doonesbury'' comic strip suggesting that the church once sanctioned homosexual marriages.
We heard similar complaints here, but none of the other ombudsmen mentioned the ``Family Circus'' cartoon that elicited so much debate in this newspaper. You remember, the one with the little girl holding a doll over the toilet and saying, ``I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son, and into the hole you goes.''
PUZZLES & WEATHER. While local readers were snarling over VP/LS comic-page changes, California readers ``howled'' when the Fresno Bee moved the Jumble and other puzzles out of its lifestyles section and into the Classifieds, where they floated from page to page.
``Management listened,'' reports ombudsman Lynne Enders Glaser, and the puzzles are now back in the Bee's lifestyle section.
GRAMMAR 101. It's some comfort to know that we're not the only paper to get daily grammar and spelling lessons from readers. Mike Clark, reader advocate at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, has gotten a dose, too.
Some of their bloopers: A front-page headline that described AIDS as ``blood-born'' instead of ``blood-borne''; a wire story referring to the ``sight'' of a massacre, when it meant ``site''; and a staff-written story that described authorities as ``shifting'' through debris.
TOMATOES & CONDOMS. Here are some reader gripes that haven't crossed my desk:
At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reader's advocate Larry Fiquette noted that a tomato got better front-page play than Rep. Dan Rostenkowski's plea-bargain negotiations. True, he wrote, ``it was a new, ever-ripe, genetically altered tomato. . . .''
Bob Woodward's new book The Agenda made waves at The Washington Post when it was the topic of a front-page news story as well as excerpts and a book review. Woodward is an assistant managing editor at The Post. Ombudsman Joann Byrd said the book may have been newsworthy, ``but when the author is on the payroll, news judgment isn't seen as pure.''
At the London Free Press (that's London, Canada), reader's advocate Gordon Sanderson fielded complaints about ``the Americanization of the language.'' They were set off by a description of Pierre Trudeau's former wife as ``Canada's youngest first lady.'' First lady, huffed Canadian readers, is strictly an Americanism.
Another outrage to Canadians was an editorial cartoon in the Calgary Herald showing Prince Charles holding a condom and saying, ``I don't leave home without it, actually.'' Ombudsman Stott agreed with readers that it was ``tacky'' and ``tasteless,'' even if it did follow news stories on the prince admitting infidelity. MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net. by CNB