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"Media Angle" (02.04.2005)

Address by Emily O'Reilly (Ombudsman and Information Commissioner) at University of Copenhagen Symposium

I note that this is the very last session on the very last day of this four day conference. If I were still a journalist, I could spin that fact in any one of three ways. I could say, in an anodyne fashion, "Media issues discussed at major Ombudsman conference." I could say, "Ombudsmen save the best till last as media insights revealed", or I could put the boot in and say, "Media snubbed by Ombudsmen - debate relegated to conference end."

Of those three headlines, the only verifiably true one is the first, the other two are a result of media perception/bias, one being a positive bias, the other negative. And until we read the headlines none of us, either as media consumers or media fodder can ever really know how our words and actions will be mediated through the press and broadcast organisations.

Neither can we be sure of the basis of the bias. Perhaps an editor sticks his finger in the wind to see which way it's blowing over the land of Ombudsmen, perhaps the sub-editor has a hangover, perhaps the reporter's cousin had a complaint rejected by an Ombudsman, perhaps the editor's cousin had a complaint upheld by an Ombudsman, perhaps a rival news organisation has taken one view of the Ombudsman and another news organisation decides on that basis to take a different view. Sometimes there is a reason, sometimes editorial decisions on how to angle or spin a story are purely capricious or appear so.

I want however to stress that word MEDIATE in order to emphasise the fact that to an enormous degree, what the public think of you and your work is virtually exclusively based on what the media think of you and your work, or more precisely, what they say they think about you and your work. Most people, after all, never interact with an Ombudsman, the sole basis very often for their opinion of the institution is the media opinion of the institution.

All of you will have views on the media and how the media affects the work and perception of your office. Some of you may pride yourselves on your hands off approach to the media, some of you may have it as an absolute principle that you never speak to journalists, or give press conferences or go on TV, or whatever, but let me say that if you think that you are therefore exercising masterful control of the media by so doing, you are misguided.

Equally, let me say, that if you run a media open door policy, shovel out press releases on a daily basis, take every media call personally, put your mobile phone number on your website, do not think that this approach will be any more successful than the former. There is an art to media handling, a psychology, but above all there are limits to the degree to which the media can be handled.

The one sure thing you CAN say about the media, is that not alone will they have the last word, but they can also have it printed before you can draw breath. They will use your office no differently to how they use any other potential provider of news, or even scandal. If, as a by product, your office is elevated to sainthood, or derided as a useless, bloated bureaucratic quango, remember that the media doesn't care.

Unlike you, it does not necessarily have the best interests either of your office, or the public at heart. Individual reporters may have, individual editors may also take the view that yours is an office to be supported for the public good, but corporately, the media's overriding concern is, and has to be, survival in a highly competitive market place. And it is this imperative that can lead to what can be seen as bias or distortion is relation to many issues including the work of the Ombudsman. So, even on the same day, the media may come on as silkily as a new lover, or as offensively as a sewer rat, and either way you have to deal with it.

And let me re-state an earlier point; none of this is to suggest that individual journalists and editors are not motivated by the same values that you might consider you yourselves are guided by. Many of them are, many of them take enormous personal and professional risks to expose corporate, governmental and political scandals. In my own country I consider that we are very well served by both the print and the broadcast media, many members of which continue to resist the increasing tendency to dumb down and trivialise. My own Office has been treated very fairly by the Irish press with space and time allocated to our work even when the story at issue may not be particularly sexy in media terms.

What I am talking about here is my sense of the global media, the broad middle ground mindset of the average journalist or the average newspaper or media outlet, people and companies intent simply on producing informative and entertaining copy for the people they depend on to keep them in business. And if what you do doesn't rank as either informative or entertaining in the widest sense then you run the risk of being ignored.

Another truth about the media is you can't avoid it. You cannot simply put your head in the sand, and pretend that either you or they aren't there. Just because your head is hidden, doesn't mean that the media isn't feasting on the protruding part of your anatomy.

Let me quote, a former senior White House staffer, who said, "I've learned to see the media like the weather. It can be harmful, like Hurricane Mitch. But it also can be very helpful, like crop-nourishing rains. In any event, it's a fact of life. So it does no good to be like King Lear, standing at the precipice in a storm, shaking his fist and railing at the heavens. I just remember that reporters are like alligators. You don't have to love them. You don't even have to like them. But you do have to feed them."

Let me now give you a very general overview of how, by and large, the media views the Office of the Ombudsman. In my own country, as I'm sure in many of yours, a newsdesk assignment to cover the launch of an Ombudsman's annual report is not considered by the designated reporter to be quite on a par with an all expenses paid trip to Washington, to cover a US presidential campaign. In fact I've no doubt that there are reporters who would rather hitch a lift to Central Baghdad than to suffer what they view as, remarkably, the tedium of wading through the report of this very worthy office in the hope of finding a newsline.

Nonetheless they do turn up, and they turn up, not just out of a duty to support this brave defender of the public interest, but because they consider that the Ombudsman inhabits much the same space as they themselves do. Their role is to hunt down stories which reveal the Government and public bodies generally in a less than favourable light, and since, by definition, the Ombudsman is also on the trail of the maladministrators there is a co - incidence of interests. And this is why, by and large, the Ombudsman generally gets good press. It is viewed, inaccurately, but strongly nonetheless, as being in opposition to the Government, to the establishment. Opposition equals clash, clash equals story, story equals win win situation for Ombudsman and media alike.

Yet I am still astonished at the number of times I hear people calling for the media to report good stories, nice stories. Let me quote you the following, "Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately for then there is not an instant to be lost."

Now that quote is actually attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, but it makes my point beautifully about the press. The press is not interested in the fact that the Department of Health has introduced a state of the art complaints handling procedure, or indeed that the Ombudsman's new on-line information server is helping to create closer relationships with her stakeholders, no, the media is interested in the fact that the Department of Health has perpetuated some administrative atrocity on a 90 year old widow, or that the Government is cutting up mean with your office over your continued finger wagging in relation to some administrative malfunction. Again, this is not to say that the former issues aren't covered by at least some sections of the media, it's simply to point out that coverage of the latter is likely to be more extensive and to attract bigger headlines.

And it is at this precise juncture that the need for careful handing of the media comes in. The art lies in knowing where to strike the balance between exposure of misbehaving public bodies and maintaining the trust of those public bodies, who might see the glory headlines that your Office garners either as blatant attention seeking, or as proof of a vindictiveness in relation to your dealings with them. And while it is human nature not to like bad publicity, we must always be mindful that we will be dealing with these bodies again.

Hawaiian Ombudsman Doi, made two pertinent points in this regard. He said, "Publicity is the ultimate weapon in the Ombudsman's arsenal to effect a change. Continual use of a weapon (however) soon renders it ineffective." And, "Overuse also creates an adversarial system, rather than an environment in which logical analysis of a problem by reasoning together is the accepted mode of operation."

In other words, use the weapon that you have sparingly. An Ombudsman who uses publicity too much runs the risk of over-exposure and consequent creeping indifference towards his or her office. Also, public bodies who fear that the Ombudsman is joined at the hip to the local newsdesk may be inhibited in their dealings with that Ombudsman.

An annual report is seen as fair game, a place where the Ombudsman is expected to highlight cases of maladministration that are of note for whatever reason. In between times, judicious use must be made of the media, cases that you wish to spotlight should be spotlit only when there is a reason to do so that is justifiable even to the public body at fault.

But I also realise that many of you have a different set of problems, many of you would love to be beating the media away from your door because if the media were taking such an interest it would at least be proof that you existed, and that indeed that you mattered.

Many Ombudsmen offices have to compete for media attention. We've come a long way from the 1960s where, when the institution was created in Canada, CBS ran a TV series called The Ombudsman, which by all accounts was very popular, but unlikely nowadays to give Big Brother a run for its money.

In many countries Ombudsmen offices were the first to cast their eye on Government actions and inactions in the open, public manner that our offices do. Naturally, there was huge novelty in that. Stories of administrative ineptitude were handed to the media on a plate and they ran with them with great gusto. Over time, naturally, the novelty has worn off, and the marketplace has become increasingly crowded with both public and private sector Ombudsmen, Commissioners for this and that, regulators and so on. In other words, the Office of the Ombudsman is no longer the prime resource it once was for the media, tales of the unearthing of private and public wrongdoing are much more commonplace, and therefore, by definition, less newsworthy. The media themselves, and certainly in Ireland,are doing a much better job of rooting out such stories and are no longer as dependent on the "watchdogs" to come up with the goods.

Where once my own Office had that space to itself, this year alone it will compete with the Ombudsman for Children, the Irish Language Commissioner, the soon to be announced Financial Services Ombudsman, and a plethora of other private and public regulators. Increasingly there is public bewilderment about our exact role or indeed about the exact role of the other Ombudsmen, Commissioners and Regulators, all of which poses a challenge in terms of getting our messages across and in maintaining our profile.

So how do we compete? Every Ombudsman's Office begins with a number of inbuilt advantages. The primary one is the halo effect; any Office that has as its core function, the rooting out of maladminstration and the defence from that maladminstration of some of our most vulnerable is bound to strike a popular chord with the public, and by extension with the media who see themselves in that space as well, as I've already outlined.

It is imperative that that perception is assiduously nurtured and maintained. Any action or inaction by the Ombudsman which shows him or her to be less than independent, fair, or zealous when dealing with a complaint, can lead to a catastrophic fall from grace. If that happens the media will be very quick to, as we say, take you on that short journey from hero to zero. In an instant, the story becomes, not the great work the Ombudsman does, but what an incompetent the Ombudsman is. And it doesn't take very much to do that; the media thrive on novelty, if the novelty becomes the story of the incompetent Ombudsman, then that is what the media will run with.

It is also important to set the correct tone. My Office doesn't have a designated press officer, issues very few press releases outside of Annual Report time, but extends a friendly, helpful hand to any journalist who does approach the Office looking for information. If there is a such a thing as aloof informality, or indeed, formal approachability, then that is what my Office practices. If we are confident as an Office in what we do and how we do it then we should have nothing to fear. If stories are spun subsequently in a manner than doesn't accord with what we have done or said, then we tend to quite sanguine about it, unless the misrepresentation is extremely serious. The media doesn't appreciate over-sensitivity on the part of people who are being paid well to perform a public service.

Neither does the media appreciate an Office that is too concerned about its image, and too hung up on media strategy. That smacks not just of mild desperation, but also of an office that needs to use the tricks of public relations in order, as the media might see it, to hoodwink them about what it's really like or what's really going on behind the scenes. When I was a journalist, I was immediately suspicious if a call to a particular individual in a commercial company, or public body, was met with a return call from a public relations consultant, or even at times a press officer. Public relations consultants do many fine things, but one of their primary functions is to protect the image of the company. When a journalist therefore is re-routed from a primary source to a consultant, alarm bells start to ring.

Obviously very big offices have need of dedicated press officers, but let me tell you that there is nothing more disarming than being put through to the person who is actually dealing with the issue you want to talk about, and not a press officer, who, with the best will in the world, is a mediator rather a primary source and may indulge in a bit of dangerous second guessing. Arguably, the excellent PR enjoyed by two of Europe's most successful businessmen, Michael O'Leary of Ryanair, and Richard Branson of Virgin, is partly due to their "nothing to hide" media accessibility. It at least gives the impression that indeed they do have nothing to hide.

But, as I said, earlier, getting too close to the media can be as damaging as keeping them at continuous arms length. It's ok to turn down a press interview, as long as the media knows that there are times when you will come out and talk. It's down to you of course, to choose the most appropriate forum, if you have a choice, and to have some pre interview consensus on what the broad outline is about.

This doesn't always work. Last year, I gave a speech at a conference - unconnected with my Ombudsman role - which generated a lot of media attention even making its way into the New York Times by way of an article about the increasing wealth and materialism of Irish society. At one stage, I was concerned that the reaction to the speech was focusing attention away from the Office and I turned down every single interview request about it, even the one from the New York Times. Then just before Christmas, I was asked to do an interview about my first year in Office by one newspaper. The reporter e-mailed me details of a about a dozen issues he wished to discuss with me, including, although way down the list, my now famous speech.

The interview took place, because I judged that it would be good for the Office. The reporter obediently brought me through all the issues he'd noted in his e-mail, including the speech and that was it. When the interview appeared, it dealt exclusively with the speech, not a word about anything else. I didn't blame the reporter, I'd have probably done the same thing, he judged that the novelty was in my speech, not in the issues I'd opined about. I could control the interview only so far, if the rest of what I had to say didn't excite his interest, it was entirely his decision to call it where he saw the interest of his readers lay.

And this brings me to another issue, should the Ombudsman have a personality, or should she or he be as anonymous as it is possible to be in these uber-open days? How much of yourself do you put out there? Does it help your profile and that of the Office if you are seen as a more rounded person than the anonymous creature known as the Ombudsman. Like everything else with the media too much openness can be a double-edged sword.

Warm profiles about your life and your family and your interests and so on can be positive in terms of making a sympathetic connection between potential complainants and the living, breathing human being who's dealing with their problems. On the other hand, if too much is on show, the result can be distracting and may even backfire. Once again, good judgement is everything. I cannot be prescriptive.

But to return to an earlier point, many of you may never have those problems because you may have difficulty in getting the media interested in your annual report let alone your wonder as a person in your own right. Every effort must be made to engage media interest at this point, because it is very important for your Office that the public is given some sense of what you're about and what you have achieved during the year. Very few of them, let's face it, are going to go to their local government publications office and buy a copy off the shelf or indeed simply log on to your website.

And it is at this time of the year that you are allowed to indulge in a little bit of blatant spinning of your own. You are also allowed to put the sensibilities of the public bodies you examine to one side, temporarily, and be forthright about the cases you have handled and the instance of maladministration you have come across.

There are certain things, of course, in the annual report, that the media will have little interest in - strategy statements, certain statistics and so on - so it is important, in your press release, in your press conference comments, and in the lay out of your report that you highlight what you know the media is likely to be interested in. Like it or not, this is the time to talk about the cases that tug the heartstrings or show breathtaking examples of bad behaviour on the part of public official, because if you don't, the chances are that the media is unlikely to take an interest.

You will of course always get an audience in the more analytical, up-market sections of the media and in the broadcast media which has a public service remit, but you have a responsibility to tell your story to every section of the population, and not just to those who read the broadsheets. Coverage in the tabloid media should be regarded even as a coup, because it shows you have engaged the interest of those who might not normally take an interest in administrative issues.

If there are particular points you want to get across, it may be worthwhile to give an advance briefing to certain journalists, those you know who take an interest in the Office on a regular basis. Not alone does this boost the chances of publicity, but it also could allow for more thoughtful, analytical reports to be written about the issues you want to raise.

Free flowing press conferences are also advisable, with plenty of time for questions and an open invitation for one on one interviews after the press conference for those interested. Good manners and hospitality are also a requirement; reporters, as I know well, from my own experience, take note of how they are treated and a decent cup of coffee and some nice food goes down very well.

I well remember covering the last general election as a political correspondent when the quality of the Danish pastries at one party's early morning press conference was a significant talking point among the media throughout the campaign. In fact the party that won the election had media cosseting down to a fine art, deliberating installing very comfortable armchairs in what they called the chill out room after the press conferences, the better to entice the reporters into giving them an easy ride.

Now I'm not suggesting anything as elaborate as that for the sober Office of the Ombudsman, all that I'm saying is that reporters are human beings and expect and deserve to be treated as such. Welcoming them into your office as guests is all that is required.

I know that much of what I have said has been very general, and applies perhaps more to my experience of the Irish and British media than the wider European media. Some of you may have very different experiences of the media, either more positive or more negative, but there are certain elements that are common to all, the need to maintain a strong media profile, the nurturing of the perception, and hopefully the reality, that we are a force for good in society, the acknowledgement that the media's agenda may not always dovetail with our own, the desirability of maintaining some distance from the media balanced with an open approach to media enquiries, and the recognition that while the media is not necessarily our friend, neither should they be considered our enemy.

To conclude I'd like to illustrate some of what I've been talking about today with some newspaper clippings about the working of my own Office over the past few years, both during Kevin's term and my own.

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