Ombudsmen at The Post and elsewhere act, for the most part, in the public interest as best they perceive it. Their triumphs are modest, not revolutionary. It is proper to ask whether ombudsmen, as independent or semi-independent operators, accomplish anything worth accomplishing. These are the sorts of questions reporters and editors obsessively ask themselves. We comfort ourselves, sometimes, by saying that while we may not tell people what to think, we are often successful in telling them what to think about.
Ombudsmen do that with editors.
We make them think about their audiences, their standards and the quality of their journalism. That is all an ombudsman should expect. Dick Harwood would report that he was no angel. But he watched over a lot of people in his day and did a lot of good. News Jobs AP Shopping Archives Entertain.