Newspapers are often touted as being the ‘watchdogs’ of society, but sometimes those watchdogs need watching.

That’s where Daniel Okrent comes in. He is the public editor, or ombudsmen, of The New York Times.

‘While The Times watches everybody else, he watches The Times,’ said Steve Davis, chairman of the newspaper department.

Okrent spoke to a full Studio A in Newhouse II Tuesday night about his experience as the public editor.

‘He had a lot of good things to say,’ said Sharon Clott, a sophomore magazine and speech communications major. ‘I think what he said reinforces things that were already being taught. It reminds you to be more careful.’

Okrent began at The Times 16 months ago, and his time there will end in less than two months. While his tenure at The Times will end, the position will not. Tomorrow The Times will name his successor.

Prior to his Times stint, he worked at Time Inc. for several years, at Life magazine and had written four books. Okrent is also the founder of Rotisserie, or fantasy, Baseball.

Okrent’s position was created at The Times as a reaction to several events that had taken place, most notably the Jayson Blair scandal.

‘It was the trigger,’ Okrent said. Blair was a journalist for The Times who was found to have fabricated stories.

Okrent described himself as an ‘independent contractor,’ charged with representing the public in The Times. No one, except his copy editor, sees his columns before they appear in the paper. There are 40 daily newspapers that have ombudsmen.

‘At a large daily, I’ve come to believe it is an essential part of building trust,’ Okrent added.

When Okrent first arrived at The Times, he faced a great deal of animosity and fear, but some editors have been very supportive of him, he said.

‘I think it’s been a fair fight,’ Okrent said. ‘I think I’m well armed. … I also knew it was going to be very hard. You know when you go into a root canal it’s going to hurt, but it doesn’t stop it from hurting.’

Okrent said to combat this, in addition to a shrinking sleep schedule, he had to stop reading e-mails past 10 p.m. – to block out ‘vitriolic’ voices. Okrent said he receives 10,000 e-mails per week that are substantive, fewer phone calls and still fewer actual letters.

‘When the election was over the job got much more livable,’ Okrent said.

The two issues Okrent said were the most pressing to him during his tenure were bias and unnamed sources. Many people were concerned that the opinions on the editorial page were carrying over onto the news page, but Okrent said he cannot find one case of this.

‘I have not seen an instance,’ Okrent said. ‘I truly believe there is no influence.’

Okrent added that while recent complaints in the Los Angeles Times have called for more women on the editorial page at that paper, Okrent believes it is more ‘intellectual diversity’ that The New York Times needs on its editorial page.

The issue of unnamed sources has not been so clear-cut.

Okrent has found that the public often thinks the reporter has made up the information when they read things such as ‘a highly placed source,’ in a story. This is an issue Okrent continues to wrestle with, but he personally believes in only using unnamed sources in an emergency; or if it is the only way that the story can be printed. The three areas which Okrent finds the practice acceptable under these circumstances are national security, criminal justice and diplomacy.

News organizations were widely criticized after it was discovered that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and for not going after the story exhaustively before the war began. Okrent said he has seen a turnaround in the way similar stories are now being reported, most notably those on Iran and North Korea.

Okrent commended The Times for their coverage of the arts, and said that while they have made mistakes, they are the only ones who take the coverage seriously.

He said the other issues he is confronted with are news driven. He said social security, Israel and Palestine and – in the last two weeks – the Schiavo case, have brought in a large amount of mail.

Okrent added that people often complain when, for example, the entire conflict between Palestine and Israel is not listed in every news article written about the area. In defense of the paper, he said, once you start to go back too far, you end up back in 1948.

‘People expect unreasonably much from an individual article,’ Okrent said. ‘I think there is a way the press can avoid this. … They are serious people, trying to do good work, caught in the headlights of America.’

But he added: ‘Life should be hard for journalists. They need to be held to the highest standards possible.’

Published on April 5, 2005 at 12:00 pm