Herald Ombudsman continues defense of censorship

My colleague Robert from Babalu Blog has the story.

Odds and Ends

McClatchy stock could be worthless.

It's pretty close already. This stock traded in the mid $70s three years ago.

Herald Execs hold retreat at the Biltmore.

This guy should be really, really pissed.

Herald Ombudsman considers censorship (for Cuban-American journalists only).

New to the blog roll

I've added Miami Monthly to the blog roll under South Florida Media. A recent column by its editor Elena Carpenter is worth quoting here:

As 207 mayors from across the nation congregated downtown for the U.S. Conference of Mayors summit, the Sunday paper rolled off the presses with an article by the talented Edward Schumacher- Matos, the Miami Herald's ombudsman – a kind of internal watchdog that investigates reader complaints and analyzes their feedback in his weekly column. The article addressed staff cutbacks at the Herald and posed the question: "What to do with the Miami Herald?"

Well, firstly, perhaps an attitude adjustment would help....

Mind you – this doesn't mean that we should hide any of our problems, as many were openly discussed during the conference in order to benefit from the mayoral think tank.

I'm talking about rubbing unnecessary stuff in their faces...

The front page of the Metro section, with a headline of "Disparate voices converge," forced one to read eight paragraphs about protesters in the rain, then jump to the continuation page in the back, before the article offered any information about what the mayors were discussing during their many pertinent sessions...

On Monday, a story about two mothers' grief over the unsolved, 40-year-old kidnapping of two young girls, was large, front page and center, a timeless article if I've ever seen one.

The ability of the Miami Herald to find ways of not covering good news about Miami dumbfounds me....

So, to Mr. Schumacker-Matos [sic] and his question about what to do with the Miami Herald, I say: keep reporting the news, carry on with your quality investigative reporting, but please do not ignore the positive happenings in Miami. Minimally, you'll lose fewer subscribers and advertisers.

Ombudsman gets pwned by Salguero

You gotta love Armando Salguero. The Herald's Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos took him to task for using strike through in a blog post to imply that Jason Taylor lied told the truth when he said he'd be happy to be a Dolphin again in 2008. But Armando shrugged off the criticism and had this to say in a subsequent blog post:

Philadelphia's Lito Sheppard, Marques Colston in New Orleans, Jeremy Shockey with the Giants, Osi Umenyiora with the Giants. All are crying (look ombudsman, I'm doing it again) unhappy about their contracts or work situations. All have missed at least portions of this offseason's team activities.

Classic.

Where the cuts are coming from

I was looking for any fallout from the Herald Ombudsman's reaction to a blog post by sports reporter/columnist Armando Salguero and ran into this column from several days ago in which Schumacher-Matos details the layoffs at 1 Herald Plaza.

The relevant excerpts:

The 347 current newsroom staff will be reduced by about 40 people, [Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal] said. Most of the cuts will be in management, supervisors, copy editors, photographers and the like. Only about 6 of the 125 reporters will be let go, he said.

The Web, Neighbors, Broward County and investigative staffs remain largely intact, reflecting what the publisher and editor consider important for The Miami Herald's future. Latin American coverage will continue to be seen as part of the paper's ''franchise,'' too, with roughly the same staffing and space, Gyllenhaal said.

Staffing at El Nuevo Herald, which has seen its circulation go up while the English paper's has gone down, will be reduced by 9 employees from a staff of 70, though the two editions will share photographers now. The sharing of some content between the two newspapers will continue to grow, Gyllenhaal said.

Eleven jobs will be outsourced. Archiving, calendar listings and the International Edition will be done now in India, for example, while the six staffers who currently do The Miami Herald's programming on WLRN Radio will be transferred to a new, third-party company.

State coverage in Tallahassee and outside the paper's core distribution area of Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties will be reduced by two positions, a trend across the country. Two other positions, classical music and at-large cultural critics may also go. Cultural criticism is arguably important to the community's economic growth. ''We don't yet know how this will end up, but it's a good example of an area of coverage that is very important, and must be in the paper one way or another,'' Gyllenhaal said.

Implementing a universal copy-editing desk and standardizing design templates for inside pages will create internal efficiency that readers may not notice, though I fear that the cuts in copy editors and supervisors treads dangerously on maintaining quality control. Editors keep reporters, especially young ones, in check.

This answers the question of what was happening at the Herald's red-headed step child, El Nuevo Herald.

Ombudsman takes Sports columnist to task - UPDATED

The Herald's Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, has finally penned a column in which he actually takes a side. Unfortunately for him it's about an inconsequential subject and he is wrong. Now don't get me wrong, I like sports and I think the sports page is probably the most viable section of the Herald these days but having the ombudsman pontificate about what a sports columnist wrote on his blog strikes me as being Neroesque at this point in time.

The blog post in question is about Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor and was written by Armando Salguero. Even in his set-up Schumacher-Matos shows his lack of knowledge of the sports world:

Coming off a successful stint on Dancing with the Stars, the handsome and well-spoken Taylor says he wants to play pro football for only one more year before going into the movies...

Through his agent, he told the Dolphins in January that he wanted to be traded so that he might have a chance in his last declared year of playing football to join a team with a better championship shot.

This is the real issue with Jason Taylor in a nutshell. Taylor is under contract to play for the Dolphins. Though players often ask for trades, they NEVER make their intentions to retire public when they do so. If the Dolphins are to get something of value in return for Taylor, the team he is traded to would want more than a 1-year rent-a-player. By stating that he only wants to play one more year Taylor has virtually guaranteed that he will not, in fact, be traded. He undermined his trade value.

But the problem with Schumacher-Matos' analysis is how he comes down on Salguero for using strike-through to imply that Jason Taylor lied when he said he'd be happy to be a Dolphin during the 2008 season. Strike-through is a technique that is often used by bloggers to indicate what's really going on while paying lip service to the official line from the subject of the post. For example:

Herald to lay off hundreds of workers down-size.

Bloggers of all stripes use this technique. It's a device that works as a wink to the audience. It means "you and I know what's really going on here."

The problem is that Schumacher-Matos wants Salguero to live by the rules of the newspaper even when he's blogging. And that brings us to the fundamental questions that I have been asking for a couple of years: what's the purpose of the Herald's blogs? What are the guidelines that the Herald's bloggers must live by? Schumacher says:

I agree with at least one blog participant who called the ''lies'' technique a cheap shot. Striking it out but leaving the word all but accuses Taylor of lying, and clearly insinuates that Salguero thinks he is.

Yeah. That's the whole point. Schumacher-Matos goes on to talk about Salguero's sources and whether they are solid or not. To me that's besides the point. It's Salguero's opinion that Taylor is lying when he says he'd happily play for the Dolphins this year. Salguero, unlike Schumacher-Matos, has been on the Dolphins beat for many years and has I'm sure had many conversations with Jason Taylor. He knows him. He doesn't need to have a source to form an opinion about Taylor's thought process.

After all of this, I can't get my mind around the fact that the Ombudsman would waste his time on this. I'd rather have him take a look at how the Herald's columnists like Ana Menendez, Carl Hiaasen and dating back to Jack Kofoed have consistently put forward an anti-Cuban exile position with the paper publishing very little to balance those opinions.

UPDATE: In response to a commenter at his blog, Salguero had this to say about the Ombudsman and his opinions:

My sports editor read the ombudsman column to me and after he did, I asked, "Did he spell my name correctly?" That is as much thought as I have given his opinion. I have thick skin and a deep conviction that my coverage on JT has been fair, balanced and accurate. That is the reason I continue to speak with BOTH sides about the issue and they continue to speak with me.

Herald Ombudsman takes professorship at Harvard

From Editor & Publisher:

Edward Schumacher-Matos, The Miami Herald's ombudsman, has been named Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor for Latin American Studies at the Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies...

A native of Colombia, Schumacher-Matos, will teach a graduate seminar on Hispanics and illegal immigration as the RFK visiting professor. He is also writing a book on the subject.

The article does not state if Schumacher-Matos will continue on at the Herald.

Responses to Ombudsman Column

A few responses to Herald Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos' column about hateful reader comments posted to articles at Herald.com have been published in the paper.

Wednesday, December 26th

In his Dec. 16 column, Looking for ways to tame poisonous words on Web, ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos writes about the difficulty in keeping ugly comments to a minimum on The Miami Herald's website.

When I write a letter or e-mail to the editor, it won't be published if I don't include a legitimate name, address and a daytime phone number. Yet the paper allows anyone to post anonymously to its website. Not only do I have to give up personal information to get published, someone looks through the letters and e-mails to decide if they are worth publishing. On the web, however, one can write anything, and it automatically gets posted.

Why all the hand-wringing when the answer is to impose the same requirements that anyone who sends a letter to the editor has to abide by?

KEVIN HATCHER, Miami Beach

On Sunday December 30th the Herald posted a series of reader responses, most of which backed the idea of registration for commenters.

Thank you for your column about what I have come to call the virtual lynch mob -- the haters given both a forum and a sanctuary by America's newspaper publishers. I thought your suggestions were excellent -- especially since they're the same ones I made on my organization's blog in mid-November, and others, I'm sure, have made before that. . . .

The blog, and the website, www.nccpr.org deal with one of the topics you singled out as most likely to bring out the haters: child abuse.

e-mailed by Richard Wexler executive director, National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, Alexandria, Va.

A few ''idiots'' ruin it for everyone else; therefore, The Miami Herald should implement required registration, including confirmation of the reader's e-mail address.

-- Posted by: VILJ

Why not start your transparency movement by posting which of your editorial board writers write the Herald opinions and who was for and against the opinion? The Herald has been hiding behind anonymity for a very long time.

-- Posted by: Anonymous

The perfect storm gathers on reader comments at Herald.com

On October 29th I sent the following email to the Herald's new Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos.

Dear Mr. Schumacher-Matos,

I was wondering why the Herald continues to tolerate hateful comments on the herald.com web site. Take a look at the following:

http://pod01.prospero.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-miamitm&action=message&msg=16057

Is it journalistically wrong for the Herald to moderate comments using some minimum standard?

Perhaps removing the anonymity of the commenters will raise the level of civility and the quality of the discussion.

It's a shame that the comments section on important news stories has become a repository for insults and something to be avoided rather than read.

What are your thoughts?

Henry Louis Gomez

The comments I referenced were attached to an article about a prominent Miami attorney, Joe Zumpano, who located and helped facilitate the rescue of a group of Cuban refugees. Many of the comments were blatantly anti-Cuban and simply there to inflame rather than impart any sort of perspective to the situation.

On November 4th I posted about a Herald piece that reported complaints lodged by the NAACP about racist reader comments. At the time, the paper's executive editor, Anders Gyllenhaal, was quoted as saying the following:

Gyllenhaal said the newspaper takes a number of steps to monitor and shape the tone of comments while still allowing ''the kind of wide-open debate'' that online postings enable.

Here at Herald Watch, I challenged that assertion:

Gyllenhaal's statement is a lie. Racist and tasteless comments are the norm at Herald.com.

[...]

I think the real issue has to do with money. You need to pay someone to sit there and moderate comments. You also need to have a policy that's clear as to what's acceptable and what's not. The Herald has shown an incredible unwillingness to commit to a coherent online strategy...

During the early hours of Monday November 26th, pro football player Sean Taylor was shot in his Miami-area home and subsequently died. The Herald articles written in the aftermath of the murder were magnets to precisely the kind of comments I challenged the Ombudsman about a month before.

About that time, someone began posting comments to the Herald's articles using my name, Henry Gomez. Needless to say I didn't like the idea that someone might be confused and think I actually was the author of those comments. I was asked by an acquaintance and my own mother if the comments were mine. Naturally I followed the protocol to have the comments removed after the fact and also lodged a complaint to Rick Hirsch, managing editor for multimedia and new projects at the Herald. We reached an agreement that would prevent people from impersonating me, but that didn't solve the overall problem.

In a column today, Schumacher-Matos finally takes on the issue of anonymous and inflammatory reader comments and quotes me.

There are several things to note. For one it seems that Schumacher-Matos is finally taking a side in an argument, coming down in favor of some sort of controls to the comments section.

...as The Miami Herald feels its way forward, it can't shirk its responsibility to impose rules that benefit the overwhelming number of us as readers and as citizens.

But Schumacher-Matos mistakenly characterizes this as a battle between comment moderation and increased online readership.

The number of visitors to MiamiHerald.com in November was up 66 percent from the year before, according to Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, and registration might slow or even temporarily reverse such strong growth.

There's a fallacious cause and effect argument here that somehow attributes the Herald's increased web traffic to unmoderated and anonymous comments. I suspect it has more to do with changing preferences of consumers who would rather receive their news for free and electronically rather than pay for a clumsy fishwrap. The most widely read blog I write for, Babalu, moderates comments and our readership has grown dramatically in spite of that. That's because people come to read what the contributors write not necessarily what the readers write. It's my belief that most Herald.com readers are not even aware of the reader comments and that many who are have stopped looking at them because their hateful and offensive nature. Basically, the Herald has abdicated control of part of its web site to a small band of bigots and liars.

In any case it seems that the situation, which the Herald should have foreseen and should have reacted to earlier has finally become unbearable:

The Miami Herald and its parent company, McClatchy, are working on requiring simple registration before readers can comment in the site. Features editor Shelley Acoca has just been reassigned to a new position as ''reader exchange editor,'' and one of her first assignments, says Hirsch, will be to study how better to monitor and encourage reader comments.

These are two basic steps that should have been taken some time ago. What a revolutionary idea: make sure that people are who they say they are and set a clearly defined standard for what is acceptable in the form of online reader comments similar to those used in publishing letters to the editor. How can the Herald accept all the increased web traffic, and the corresponding ad revenue without taking on the financial responsibility to control the quality of what readers will be exposed to?

Schumacher-Matos gets it right when he says:

What all this means is that The Miami Herald should do what The New York Times has recently done: Bite the budget bullet to hire editors to review comments before they are posted, especially for stories most likely to attract offenders.

Bite the bullet indeed. As the dead-tree version of the Herald shrivels and dies, Herald.com is going to have to be more forward-thinking because the online world is far more competitive. Whatever happens, I'll be watching.

Ombudsman is working on a "rent to own" basis

After asking about the whereabouts of the Herald's Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, I received the following from the Herald's Executive Editor:

Henry,

We are building an ombudsman relationship with Edward. His work has been ad hoc up until know to provide an outside view on mostly journalistic issues. My hope is that this will grow into a full ombudsman role for the paper. As it is, we're soliciting response to individual pieces as this builds.

By the way, as you get in touch, or talk to Ed, or whatever you do on topics involving The Herald, you probably want to identify yourself either as an interested reader, or a critic of the paper who's going to use responses in various ways.

Anders

I don't know what it means to "solicit response to individual pieces" but certainly the few columns Mr. Schumacher-Matos has written have elicited some response. But it seems to me that the Herald has a lot of issues it needs to tackle if it wants to be honest with itself. I'm not talking about ancient history, but there has to be some exploartion of how certain attitudes date back in time and have been institutionalized within the paper. There's plenty of material to work with, certainly enough to have a full time Ombudsman.

As for identifying myself as the editor of Herald Watch in communications with the Ombudsman, I have done so in both letters I've sent him to date, one of which was printed in the Herald's letters section. Neither letter was addressed by Schumacher-Matos in the paper or in the form of a private response. One letter was in reference to the seeming double standard in reporting unsavory details about the arrest of a prominent member of the business community while the arrest of a Herald journalist for soliciting a teen-aged prostitute garnered barely a mention. The other letter was regarding the comments left on electronic versions of the Herald's articles, many of which are racist, hateful, or otherwise troubling. There is no moderation in the comments and anyone can leave a comment using someone else's name. The Herald did assist me in this matter when I complained of others using my name to make such remarks, but the overall problem remains.

Ombudsman Kaput?

Have the Heralds already ended their ombudsman experiment? Edward Schumacher-Matos name does not appear on the Herald's contact list, or on its list of contributors. I'm pretty sure I had seen it there before.

I've sent a note to Anders Gyllenhaal to inquire. We'll see what, if anything, he says.

Chasing irrelevance

The Herald's Ombudsman will never be described as prolific. And after reading his latest column he runs the risk of being irrelevant too. Mr. Schumacher-Matos offers another long, winding and noncommittal column, this time about the Herald's Iraq war coverage. Again he seems to mindlessly parrot the paper's executive editor, Anders Gyllenhaal.

Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal was correct when he defended the paper's coverage by saying that the recent body count is down, which is good news that The Miami Herald reported in the Page One story last week. News interest, he said, has shifted to other angles on Iraq, but The Miami Herald has kept it in the paper daily, and on Page One roughly once a week since September.

McClatchy, The Miami Herald's parent company, has a bureau in Iraq staffed by an editor and a rotating reporter, plus five Iraqi reporters, Gyllenhaal said, a respectable commitment. World Editor John Yearwood, who has experience reporting from the Middle East, said he looks for stories that go beyond the latest bomb. ''We try to find stories that are indicative of a trend, that give readers a complete sense of what is happening on the ground,'' he said. All that is good. I just don't think it is enough. But this is why I am more sad than critical: I suspect the coverage reflects the interests of most readers as well...

The Miami Herald, like most major regional papers, stresses local, state and regional news as top priorities, which is valuable, too, as a business response to what studies show readers want from their local newspaper. ''We want to offer what people can't get elsewhere,'' said Gyllenhaal. He said there have been few reader complaints.

So here's the Ombudsman worried about a problem nobody else seems to see. Not only that, it seems like he isn't being realistic about the role of local newspapers in the internet age. With accounts of the War from the ground in Iraq just a few keystrokes away for anyone that's interested, why should the Herald and its parent spend their finite resources covering a story that's being covered by the international news services and major papers like WaPo and the NYT?

It seems like the Ombudsman's detachment from South Florida is his big weakness. With the mountain of problems the Heralds have such as the rift between the two newsrooms, the Herald's reputation as anti-Cuban, and TMH's "star reporter" getting arrested and rating nary a mention, isn't there something more pressing that he could be looking at.

New candidate for Ombudsman position

The following letter to the editor appeared on herald.com yesterday:

Re Edward Schumacher-Matos' Oct. 28 column, Contribution to Clinton campaign weighed: The Miami Herald approved a reporter covering a political fundraising event, even though access required a contribution to the candidate. The newspaper provided the money. The event featured Bill Clinton, whose only purpose was to draw money into his wife's campaign.

What was the news story that justified buying into a Democratic Party device to allow candidates to raise campaign funds in Florida, but not speak on issues here? What's to keep the candidate's campaign from touting The Miami Herald as a contributor? What are readers to think should the newspaper recommend the candidate to whom it contributed?

The Miami Herald's published rationale smacked of sophistry, leading readers to believe that a serious news-making event was taking place inside a common political fundraiser.

One is reminded of the days when reporters were lauded and rewarded for their creativity and ingenuity in doing tough assignments; when a reporter would have created a nasty scene at being denied access to a newsworthy event in a public place; when the thrill of gathering news was the challenge; when great newspapers would not take ''no'' for an answer, and when reporters would rather stand outside on principle than pay to sit on the line of impropriety.

GEORGE F. KNOX, Miami

It seems like reader George F. Knox has at least one favorable attribute that Edward Schumacher-Matos does not, a strong rationally-formed opinion. If I were Schumacher-Matos I'd be looking over my shoulder.

Herald makes contribution to Clinton campaign...

Ombudsman wrestles with consequences.

Herald Watch somehow missed the latest column by the Herald's ombudsman in his capacity as ombudsman.

Apparently the Herald found itself on the outside of an event for Hillary Clinton and had no way to get in except to buy its way in for $50. This is the subject much wrenching of hair and gnashing of teeth on the part of Schumacher-Matos, who consulted with an expert in journalistic ethics:

So, I called Robert M. Steele, a journalism professor and ethics expert at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. ''I'm very uncomfortable with the thought of news organizations buying their way into campaign events,'' he said. ``Disclosing it doesn't make it go away. It's still a campaign contribution.''

He is right, and The Miami Herald's own written guidelines prohibit staffers from working or contributing to political campaigns. But guidelines are just that: guidelines. There comes a time for editorial judgment, and that is what was called for in this unusual situation.

The issue now is what to do going forward. Bill Richardson will come soon for a ''fundraiser.'' The reporters and editors I talked to are not totally clear on what the policy will be, which indicates a need for a written directive. For Gyllenhaal, it's simple. ''We'll be going to anything that looks like a rally,'' he said, and The Miami Herald will pay if it has to. He later qualified that by saying the paper would take into account the importance of the candidate and the event, and if the paper appeared to be paying inordinately for any one candidate.

I think this approach best serves the reader. We will all now monitor how the paper lives up to its word.

Again the ombudsman seems noncommittal. Why so wishy washy, doesn't this man have an opinion of his own?

Something else in the column was curious:

Benn [the reporter that paid his way in] was asked if he was comfortable with the assignment. ''I would have had a problem if I had been asked to sneak in, representing myself as a member of the catering staff,'' he said.

Why should a reporter be so uncomfortable with sneaking into a political event? I thought these were supposed to be truth seekers. Journalists around the world risk their lives daily to get stories out. What could have possibly happened to him had he been caught doing his job? I guess the thought of a uniformed security guard escorting him out was too stressful.

Another thing I don't get is why the Ombudsman is so concerned about the money paid to attend and therefore report on the event. Isn't the fact that the paper actually ENDORSES candidates a bigger conflict of interest?

It strikes me that these folks make up the rules as they go along.

Ombudsman talking Turkey

The Herald's Ombudsman has penned a new column for the Herald. Except he didn't pen it in his capacity as ombudsman. Instead, he's written a column about Turkey. Not the Turkey we'll all be enjoying for Thanksgiving in a few weeks, but Turkey the country. I guess the Herald, in its cheap way, has decided that there isn't enough material for Schumacher-Matos to write about regarding the Heralds and reader concerns and therefore are asking him to multi-task. Honestly, if an ombudsman falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Ombuds Light. 2/3 less ombudsy than a regular ombudsman.

Herald Watch in the Herald. UPDATED

So they did publish my letter in the Herald (at least online, I'm going to have to check the printed version). They published it among a group of letters in response to the Ombudsman's first two columns about illegal immigration. This is a bit odd since my letter had nothing to do with illegal immigration but was merely a suggestion to the Ombudsman about a subject I'd like to see him tackle.

First of all I'm surprised that they published it. Though my site meter reveals that I have several readers at 1 Herald Plaza, I'm quite sure that they are not part of an admiration society. Also, I'm surprised they would print it because their modus operandi is to close the book on their scandals and move on. But still the issue I raised remains.

Will the Ombudsman look into the Corral arrest and why the reporting was so minimal? Will he come out and say the obvious, that the Herald would have covered the arrest of one Corral's subjects in the exile community much differently than it did Corral's case.

Secondly, I should note that the editing of my letter was much more benign than it has been in the past as I have shown with another letter I wrote over a year ago (before I started this blog) and a letter recently written by Paul Crespo. They even failed to note fact that I had omitted an important word ("not") in the second to last sentence. Click image to enlarge.


UPDATE: I've been monitoring my site meter all day and I wasn't noticing any hits coming from the letters section of Herald.com. Well, it turns out that they omitted a period in the URL for this blog. Instead of http://HeraldWatch.Blogspot.com they published http://HeraldWatchblogspot.com. Interesting.

Herald Watch in the Herald?

I have been contacted by the Miami Herald about the letter I sent to the new Ombudsman. They usually contact the authors of letters when they intend to print them to verify that the writer is a real person and lives in South Florida. I was told that my letter would run tomorrow (Sunday) if they decide to go with it. I am unsure if it will be accompanied by a response from the Ombudsman or not. It sounded as if it simply was simply going to appear in the letters section. In any case, since the Herald doesn't have a very good track record on letters to the editor, I have decided to post my unedited letter here. Please note the typo I made in my original email which I have corrected by adding the word "not" in brackets below.

Dear Mr. Schumacher Matos,

One of the things that has concerned me in the past is how the Herald covers itself and its own scandals. As you probably know, one year ago an investigative piece was published by the Herald that many including Clark Hoyt, your predecessor of sorts, found lacking in terms of accuracy and balance. The piece questioned the journalistic integrity of several journalists of Cuban origin. Three of them were employed by El Nuevo Herald.

But when that article's author, Oscar Corral, was recently arrested for soliciting a prostitute, the Herald buried a short, unsigned, police blotter item in the paper several days after the fact. Similarly the Herald came to the defense of Ana Veciana Suarez, a Miami Herald columnist, when she lied during jury selection in federal court, by omitting several facts pertinent to her case. It seems that the Miami Herald had no compunction about throwing its El Nuevo Herald colleagues to the wolves while going out its way to protect its own.

But forgetting the double standard, Oscar Corral had become quite the public figure in his own right as a result of his many articles which rightly or wrongly were perceived by many as hatchet jobs against the anti-Castro exile community. Did his arrest not merit more substantial coverage? One can only imagine the type of coverage the Herald would have dedicated had it been a leader of that exile community and [not] Corral who was busted.

It seems to me the Herald's coverage of itself should be at the top of the list of topics for its new ombudsman.

Most sincerely,

Henry Louis Gomez
Editor: http://HeraldWatch.blogspot.com

Where is the Ombudsman?

The Herald's new ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, promised that his column would be of an occasional nature. He has stayed true his word as he has only penned one item since his byline first appeared on the pages of the Herald two weeks ago. And that column was on the same subject as the first, the Herald's coverage of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile in roughly the same time frame Clark Hoyt, the New York Times' Ombudsman (they call him a public editor) and Schumacher-Matos predecessor of sorts, has penned 3 columns on three different topics.

Perhaps Mr. Schumacher-Matos will pick up the pace at some point and find some new subject matter. God knows there's a lot to examine at 1 Herald Plaza. Maybe the Herald can create a blog for him like the Times did for Hoyt. But then again based upon the Herald's track record with blogs, that may be a bad idea.

Ombudsman says very little with many words

In a follow up to his first column, MHMC's new ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, reflects today on the correct phrase to use when discussing illegal immigrants.

He calls out CNN's Lou Dobbs and "much of Fox News" as being at "one end of the media spectrum" that use the phrase "illegal alient" but does not clue us in to who he sees as being at the other end of the media spectrum. This of course is nothing new as conservatives are often described by the media as conservatives while liberals are rarely described as liberals.

Schumacher-Matos closes his 977-word column with this:

The Herald cannot ride roughshod over local feelings and usage. I don't agree with journalists who think that ethics require working in a vacuum. That is self-righteous arrogance. The Spanish newspapers I published in Texas used "indocumentado." But a second community of readers find themselves marginalized in The Herald, a paper they see as having a pro-immigrant tilt. The use of "undocumented" is part of that. For the sake of all its readers and for accuracy, I would like to see The Herald go back and forth between the two phrases, as some papers do elsewhere. Solomonic? Perhaps. But the truth is, there is no truth. Or at least no single right answer.

I'm not so much interested in Schumacher-Matos' views on illegal immigration as I am on his views about journalistic ethics. If ever there were a perfect phrase to describe the Miami Herald it would be "self-righteous arrogance." If the Herald had been more nuanced and less dogmatic about journalistic "ethics in a vacuum" the entire Marti Moonlighters scandal would have been avoided. Besides, in the end, he doesn't even commit to an answer despite the fact that the headline states "The choice of how to describe immigrants is vital."

Interestingly I have not received even an acknowledgment of receipt of an email I sent the new ombudsman regarding the Herald's minimalistic coverage of the arrest of its one-time star reporter Oscar Corral for soliciting a teen-aged prostitute. I think a frank analysis of how the Herald covers itself when it becomes embroiled in scandal is a better use of 1000 words than semantics about illegal aliens/immigrants undocumented workers, etc., etc.

Herald introduces Ombudsman

The Herald has finally created a permanent ombudsman's position. It's been a long time in coming. Other, more high profile papers, have had ombudsmen for some time now. The idea is to give the readers an avenue to have their concerns with the paper addressed. We shall see how willing the Herald is to publish criticisms of itself. If past performance is an indicator of future performance I would not hold my breath.

The new Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, gives a brief biography of himself as part of his first column.

I have more than 30 years' experience as a journalist. This includes being a reporter for The New York Times and an editor for The Wall Street Journal, two supposed extremes on the ideological fever chart. I don't think I'm schizophrenic, but maybe masochistic. I launched my own chain of Spanish-language dailies in Texas four years ago, just as newspaper advertising began to drop. We cut the papers back to weeklies earlier this year, and I have returned to New York. I lost money. So I know the many issues newspapers face -- intimately.

...I am Hispanic, born in Colombia. I also was an illegal alien. My mother was naturalized, but I had failed to declare my own citizenship when I was 14, as the law required. I was 21 when an Army recruiter told me I had to leave the country. I went to court and was allowed to declare late. I joined the Army and went to Vietnam.

No, I am not a Miamian. But I am an in-law. My wife was born in Cuba and her family lives in Miami. I was married at St. Michael's, have a daughter born at Mercy and another baptized at St. Kevin's. Still, I am mostly an outsider, which, frankly, is helpful. South Florida's politics are consuming. Everybody has an opinion about The Miami Herald.

Amazingly, the topic of this former illegal immigrant's first column as the supposedly impartial ombudsman for a paper with a lot of baggage is illegal immigration. Only in Miami, only the Herald, I guess.

The topic at hand is the case of the Gomez brothers, a pair of illegal immigrants who were slated to be deported despite the fact they had made the United States their home for many years. Readers apparently complained that the Herald's coverage seemed biased toward the boys' plight and did not balance their story with views of those who oppose illegal immigration.

Of MHMC's coverage, Schumacher-Matos says:

...I find that both The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald have been too one-sided in their news columns.

The fundamental question is whether children who are culturally American, and educated in U.S. schools to be American, should pay for the sins of their parents. It is a compelling and important issue, with valid arguments on many sides. But of the 25 Miami Herald stories in the paper and online since the first one on July 27, all are written from the point of view of the Gomez boys, their classmates, other undocumented youths and supporting immigrant groups.

Schumacher-Matos then goes on to make what seem to be excuses for the one sided coverage by saying that other articles about the immigration bills that have failed to pass congress covered the opposing viewpoints.

The ombudsman then explains the TMH executive editor's take on his findings (does the new ombudsman need prior approval from the executive editor before he can publish his opinion?):

Executive News Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, upon being presented with my findings on the specific Gomez-related coverage, said, ``I think it is probably fair to say that the stories could have had more context in places.''

One obstacle, he said, has been that major opposition groups and politicians have not spoken out on the Gomez case. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with the case, mostly declined to comment, he said. Still, more insistent reporting could have been done.

That seems like a week argument to me. Whenever the Herald wants to find an opinion that opposes that of another notable immigrant group in Miami, it never has trouble finding it.

ENH doesn't escape the scrutiny of the ombudsman:

El Nuevo Herald was more one-sided. Curiously, it ran fewer stories, and shorter ones, than the English paper. Of the 13 El Nuevo stories, some original and some translated, almost no opposition position was reported after the first day. A photo box on Aug. 2 on page 3 showed Juan's classmates and went so far as to say, in Spanish: ''Congratulations to these loyal friends!''

And he finishes with this curious note:

The Spanish paper is editorially independent of the English one, and it is an open question to what extent its readers disagree with El Nuevo Herald's immigration coverage. This raises separate questions about what in the profession is called ''community journalism,'' a subject for a future column.

You'll remember that the topic advocacy in journalism came up during the Marti Moonlighters scandal. The term was used to minimize the importance of Hispanic journalism as if it were some sort of mutant cousin to "real" journalism. Perhaps it is, and perhaps it's just a more honest approach than pretending that there is such a thing as media objectivity.

I may be wrong, but so far it seems like this new ombudsman is selling soft soap. But you can rest assured that Herald Watch will be, well, watching.

H/T: 26th Parallel