Word: ombudsmen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...government's unique system of Inspectors General - an elite but underappreciated slice of the federal civil service - is arguably the best-spent taxpayer money in Washington. At their best, these quasi-independent ombudsmen save the country billions, many multiples of what it costs to employ close to 12,000 staff in 64 IG offices, while doing their best to ensure the efficient and impartial functioning of their respective agencies...
...TIME he had hoped to bring quiet change. "I worked for a year and a half inside the system to rectify" the bias issue, he says. Yet his moves--hiring a G.O.P. activist to monitor the political balance of the news show Now with Bill Moyers, bringing in CPB ombudsmen to police bias, shepherding the conservative Journal Editorial Report onto air--rankled some within and outside public broadcasting. John Lawson, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, says the problem is not the CPB's bringing in conservative voices, since "balance is in their mandate." But, he says, "what...
Democrats too have questioned the propriety of those actions: the Now researcher was paid more than $14,000, and Tomlinson worked with a White House official to design the ombudsmen posts. But Tomlinson denies that he is advancing Republican interests. "Every time Bill Moyers goes on the air," he says, "it helps [the G.O.P.] in the red states...
...libel cases be headed off? They often can, argued Gilbert Cranberg, Gallup professor of journalism at Iowa, summarizing the Iowa study at a convention of the Organization of News Ombudsmen in Minneapolis. The ombudsman, clumsy title and all, is usually an older editorial hand delegated to hear out and judge reader complaints. This can be a touchy assignment. Since he was not involved in the original story and does not feel defensive about it, he may be readier to recommend a correction or even an apology. Though there are about 1,800 daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, there...
...there's another benefit to incumbency. In recent years, the role of federal M.P.s has been evolving, especially in marginal seats. They've become akin to ombudsmen - guiding constituents through the bureaucratic maze, solving problems, listening to voters' concerns, urging them to take action. The by-product of this intimacy is that the sitting M.P. is able to catalog these concerns into a precise demographic and issues database; for instance, any decent M.P. in a marginal seat should be able to list the top five issues for 40-ish working mothers or know what self-funded retirees want. This data...