Exit the Ombudsman

The Washington Post, wrote Ben Bagdikian in a 1967 Columbia Journalism Review article, was then "within a lunge of greatness." Bagdikian, an unrelenting liberal and one of the country's most thoughtful press critics, believed that the Post, among other faults, too often let its own liberal view color its news coverage.

Impressed, Post Publisher Katharine Graham wrote him a fan letter. Later the paper offered him a senior job. He rushed through a media-research program he had been doing in California and came back east in 1970, first as the paper's assistant managing editor for national affairs and then, for the past year, as its "ombudsman." The latter assignment gave him a mandate to criticize--in print--the Post's performance. Last week Bagdikian, 52, abruptly resigned. Post management, he concluded, could not take the medicine it had asked him to administer.

The first serious incident occurred last March, when Post executives gritted their teeth and published a long piece by Bagdikian sympathizing with charges by black staffers that the Post discriminated against them (TIME, April 10). The next month Bagdikian took part in a symposium in which he defended the Post against accusations of racist coverage. But he also suggested that economic boycotts were the most effective way of influencing newspapers. Post Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee interpreted this as disloyalty, demanded Bagdikian's resignation, then tore it up after regaining his calm.

As Bagdikian saw it, things were never the same afterward. Some of his critical articles were spiked. This month, however, the Post published his story scalding the paper for running a picture that seemed to support charges that the U.S. was bombing dikes in North Viet Nam. The photo was five years old, a fact that the Post conceded a day later in a correction. Bagdikian felt less welcome than ever after that.

When asked why Bagdikian was leaving, Bradlee replied, "Ask him. I don't honestly know. It sounds crazy." The parting seemed both sad and ironic. The Post is more willing than most publications to confess its sins, and Bradlee is seeking another ombudsman. Bagdikian concedes the Post's relative virtue, but told TIME: "There's a feeling here that I should be loyal to the management. When they first put me in this job, they assured me that my first loyalty would be to the readers." By returning to free-lance criticism, he will now have the full freedom that he craves. Doubtless he will write about the Post in the future; he still thinks it "not yet a great paper." Only three are great in Bagdikian's book, each in its own way: the New York Times, the Berkshire Eagle and Le Monde.

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