Tony Snow Fills Role Newspaper Ombudsmen Don’t

New White House Press Secretary Tony Snow has let loose some correctives to MSM selectively slanted news stories.

White House sources said Snow, who started on the job Monday and has yet to give his first public press briefing, is determined to aggressively counter what the administration considers unfair assertions in both news and editorials about Bush. At the same time, he is eager to make the notoriously secretive administration more accessible to the press.

News ombudsmen are supposed to represent the views and critiques of readers to their newspapers in order to secure greater accuracy and completeness. I’ve several times written detailed analyses of leading newspaper ombudsmen, here, here, here, and here, demonstrating this is a sham.

Slate’s press critic, Jack Shafer, just wrote about the most prominent of newspaper ombudsmen, by dint of his post at the New York Times, Byron Calame:

Calame possesses a mandate that would allow him to boil the journalistic ocean if he so desired, but he usually elects to merely warm a teapot for his readers and pour out thimblefuls of weak chamomile….These are public editor columns? They’re not strong enough to run on the Washington Post’s “KidsPost” page.

Shafer concludes by pulling away from the conclusion that others have drawn, that newspaper ombudsmen are a waste of ink.

I tend to agree, with about the same conviction as Shafer, that a drop of water to a thirsty man is better than nothing.

However, Shafer does not admit that a drop of water will hardly sustain a thirsty man, nor a thirsty public whose needs and demands for complete and accurate news are not being sustained.

The decline in newspaper readership continues.

Maybe Tony Snow can spark some of the reform, or should I say return to basic journalism standards, that would reverse this slide into partisan inconsequentialness.