by CKR
I thought that the old-fashioned low-tech suggestion box might have gone the way of floppy disks and vinyl recordings, but a quick Google Image search tells me that it’s still very much alive: over ten thousand hits!
Many of those hits, of course, show the good old wooden box, a slit in the top, locked or marked confidential. We all know it’s been updated electronically, too, and there are graphics for that as well. There are even suggestion boxes in multiple languages.
There are sites that sell suggestion boxes (won’t link to those; we don’t do ads on WhirledView) and cynical cartoons on suggestion boxes, although not as many as I expected.
There must be reasons for such staying power. Many of the graphics feature lit-up light bulbs to symbolize bright ideas. You can buy posters making this point as well. Many of the headings are exclamation-pointed! There is this theory that good ideas come through suggestion boxes, and we hear stories to reinforce it.
Another theory is that suggestion boxes provide management with feedback. This becomes the subject of parody and cynicism when management continues its counterproductive activities and ignores the suggestions. I thought I’d see more cartoons about suggestion boxes with no bottom situated over a wastebasket, but there weren’t many, suggesting perhaps that hope springs eternal.
There are variants on the suggestion box, one of which is the ombudsman. This is a real live person who is supposed to take complaints and search out the truth or come up with a solution. Upon finding that whatever they had been doing earlier had not protected them from reporters who made stories up out of whole cloth or turned out to be peddling propaganda for a dishonest administration, our newspapers of record, the New York Times and the Washington Post, created ombudsman posts.
They have quickly moved from the bright shiny new idea mode to the “why did we decide to cause ourselves this kind of trouble” mode to the “ignore it and it’ll go away” mode, represented in the suggestion-box graphics by toilets that my blogpartners would probably not approve of my posting.
Back in December, the New York Times and its associated International Herald Tribune published a story by Dan Bilefsky on the developing port at Sillamäe, Estonia. I could see a number of inaccuracies immediately that I wrote about. I also sent an e-mail to the NYT ombudsman and whatever address I could find for the IHT, which doesn’t seem to have indulged in that bit of feedback fiction yet. No answer.
Then I went to Estonia in May and spent a week in Ida-Virumaa County, in the vicinity of Sillamäe. I visited the port and talked to knowledgeable people. I did some additional research after I got back. I found out that there were more errors in that December story than I had immediately recognized. I wrote that up and sent off e-mails to those addresses. No answer.
Byron Calame is the NYT’s “public editor.” The latest entry on his web journal is August 3 and his latest article August 13. Perhaps he's on vacation. We are assured
Everything readers send to our mailbox will be read by me or my associate, Joseph Plambeck. If a reply is appropriate, you will hear from us shortly.So I guess no reply is appropriate to an assertion that nearly everything in a NYT story was inaccurate, starting from the reporter’s inability to read a map. (Or, I’m being kind here, to distinguish between Narva and Narva-Jõesuu.)
Over this past weekend, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe websites all carried a seriously erroneous story from AP, which I also wrote up. The NYT pulled the story in a few hours in favor of one written by its own staff, slightly less erroneous. The WaPo featured the AP story at the top of its home page most of the day. In that same issue, the WaPo ombudsman bravely took on the issue of massage parlor ads in its sports section and decided that a great newspaper should not accept such ads.
I sent her an e-mail and got back an automated response:
ombudsman on vacation.That’s it, the whole message. Nobody reading her e-mail, no laptop with her, no addresses for “appropriate desks.” And no caps and a period in the heading.
I will be out of the office starting 08/26/2006 and will not return until
09/11/2006.If you have a complaint, please send to the appropriate desk. I will see
your messages on my return Sept. 11.
This tells us exactly how important the ombudsman function is to the Washington Post. (I think I really do need one of those toilet graphics.)
Worse, these incidents tell us how important facts are to these “newspapers of record.”
Okay, Estonia is a trivial little country and Sillamäe is a trivial little port. Anyone with a connection to Estonia has heard that before. But then why publish such an article? For the same reason as articles on the image of the Virgin Mary found on a piece of moldy cheese?
And I suppose you can argue that Iran’s doing something nuclear and the heavy water plant is part of it and the US government doesn’t like it one little bit. But it matters in terms of how soon Iran might have a bomb, and it matters in terms of factual accuracy, which I thought reporters, editors, and the ombudsman were supposed to prize.
It irritates me that science is given short shrift in issues that could lead to war while the latest doings of movie stars are carefully watched, not to mention the Jon Benet thing. Or we get overblown coverage of science that doesn’t matter, except to the ego needs of reporters. Or no investigation of what those liquid explosives that are causing so much upset might be.
And the ombudsman is on vacation.
Update (08/29/06): Both Chris Wallace, on Fox's Sunday Morning talk show, and Margaret Warner, on Monday night's News Hour, referred to the plant Iran opened this weekend as "Iran's reactor--ah--heavy water plant." Seems like professional newstalkers shouldn't make a mistake like that.
Update (08/31/06): The New York Times has issued a correction on its story on the Iranian heavy water plant (not reactor):
Because of an editing error, an article and headline on Sunday about Iran’s nuclear program referred incorrectly in some copies to a facility that the Iranian president inaugurated. It was a heavy-water plant, not a reactor.Unfortunately, they don't say anything about the errors in the body of the story.
via Managing the Atom.