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| washingtonpost.com - Deborah Howell - Ombudsman
Public service is the hallmark of good journalism, and The Post and its journalists ought to be as accessible to the public as possible; its standards and ethics policies also ought to be easy to find.
Democrat Barack Obama has had about a 3 to 1 advantage over Republican John McCain in Post Page 1 stories since Obama became his party's presumptive nominee June 4. Obama has generated a lot of news by being the first African American nominee, and he is less well known than McCain -- and therefore there's more to report on. But the disparity is so wide that it doesn't look good.
An anonymous secondhand quotation from Sen. Barack Obama at a closed House Democratic caucus meeting on July 29 caused an uproar among partisans; it is an excellent example of how the pernicious use of unnamed sources, so pervasive in Washington, can backfire on journalists and sources.
Barack Obama may be only eight points ahead of John McCain in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, but he's creaming McCain in the number of pictures and stories published in The Post in the past two months.
The Chandra Levy series, on Page 1 for 13 days, has provoked these kinds of comments: Lurid! Appalling! A waste of time! And these: Fascinating! Totally hooked! Riveting!
The Post needs to tell us more than we know about John McCain and Barack Obama: what they stand for, what voters are thinking about them and what each is likely to do if elected.
Returning from vacation, I found many complaints from readers -- more than 1,700 comments online -- who saw unfairness and negativity in a July 2 story on Page A3 by national reporter Joe Stephens on a discounted mortgage rate for Sen. Barack Obama's home.
To err is human, and boy, did the humans err at The Post last week.
The propriety of David Broder and Bob Woodward taking fees or having expenses paid for speeches to special-interest groups was raised recently by Ken Silverstein, Washington editor of Harper's magazine, in his Washington Babylon blog. Silverstein found the fees unseemly and asked whether editors had approved them.
It is often what is not in The Post -- or what is just barely there -- that upsets readers. Even in a time of shrinking Post resources, readers expect what they believe is important to appear in the newspaper.
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