Tailwind for trust

In this one hundred and fiftieth column, I turn my gaze inward and reflect upon what this office has been doing over the past nine years, and I, since September 2012. A few years ago, S. Venkataraghavan, one of the finest cricketers who later turned his attention to umpiring, said he loved officiating because there was no better place to watch cricket from. For me, journalism is not just a career but a passion, and there is no better place than the office of the Readers’ Editor (RE) to observe the first draft of history being written.

There are as many similarities between being an umpire and being an RE as there are differences. Both recognise that the main attraction for the general public is not their presence. Ours is a sort of tailwind action that keeps the main act going without any distortion of the rules of the game. In cricket, the players are the stars and crowd-pullers. In journalism, the editorial team led by the Editor attracts readers. One takes up the task of being an umpire or an ombudsman with a clear idea of being a catalyst and not becoming an agent. Both need to be independent, conscientious and well conversant with the rules of the game but refrain from overreach.

Talking about officiating a match in which Sachin Tendulkar played some great shots, Venkataraghavan remarked: “I knew I had to be objective when I was inside the ground, but at the end of the day I love the game. There’s no way you can stop yourself from appreciating the Little Master. My job didn’t allow me to clap, though.” But, the RE has the space to both appreciate good journalism and to pull up journalists who fail to meet the requisite standards.

In this context, it is pertinent to remember that The Hindu did not create the Office of the Readers’ Editor as a response to a crisis of credibility as in the case of The New York Times . Sir Harold Evans, in his review of The New York Times’ first Public Editor, Daniel Okrent’s Public Editor #1 , a collection of columns, provided the context in which the then Executive Editor Bill Keller created the Office of Public Editor and recruited Okrent “as a first step to restoring trust shaken by the fabrications of Jayson Blair and the staff insurrection that led to the forced resignation of Howell Raines in June 2003.” He further pointed out: “After all, the paper’s worst lapse — the inadequate reporting of the weapons of mass delusion — was an ignominy shared by the rest of the news media, which relished the spectacle of The New York Times devouring its own but have hardly exhibited redemptive vigor themselves.”

The Hindu was inspired to institute an RE in 2006 by the exemplary practice and experience of The Guardian , U.K. It was the newspaper’s commitment to uphold its reputation as a newspaper of record and to create a mechanism that ensures accountability to readers and accuracy in news while preserving plurality in views. What is the exact role of a Readers’ Editor in a newspaper? If he has no role in the editorial process, why is he called an editor? What is his contribution to the publication to retain trust and credibility?

To answer these questions, one must first understand the process that produces journalism. David Broder, the Pulitzer prize winner and who many think set the gold standard for political journalism, explained this rather complicated, muddy, deadline-driven process: “[A] partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours – distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow, with a corrected and updated version.’”

The Reader’s Editor is a person mandated to do ‘the corrected and updated version’ in a structured and dispassionate manner. Being located outside the editorial process and the grind of processing more than two hundred thousand words a day for the print and an additional hundred thousand words for the digital platform, an RE’s job is to be a reader, first and foremost. He has the benefit of time and hindsight to make corrections, rectify mistakes, to offer clarifications and to make amends in a transparent manner.

The key aspect here is the distinction between a visible mending process and an invisible mending process. The office of the Readers’ Editor ensures that the mending process is visible to the readers when a correction, and clarification if warranted, is carried out. While the errors in pages that are common for all editions are corrected in the Perspective page, the mistakes that happen in city pages and regional pages are rectified in the respective sections. It is an act of humility that recognises the fact that journalists, like other human beings, are fallible. It is needless to say that the Readers’ Editor too is human and capable of committing mistakes. Some of the entries in the Corrections and Clarifications section bear testimony to my own failings. Is there a better way to build trust and credibility than accepting one’s mistake and making public amends?

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in