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Defender of public’s right to know closes his case

WASHINGTON — In the current competition for credibility between mainstream media and social media, the first discipline suffered a severe blow Friday in the death of former Washington Post and PBS ombudsman Michael Getler at 82. So did all readers and viewers who value serious and informed pushback against the scourge of fake news invading our national dialogue.

Getler, a gentle and studious man who earned his journalistic spurs in the trenches of dirty-fingernail newspaper reporting and editing, was a Post military affairs specialist during the Vietnam War who later covered the Cold War from Bonn, Germany, and later was executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

At the Post in Washington, he was assistant managing editor for foreign news, and in 2000 he was made the Post’s internal critic of its staff, which he pursued with accuracy, substance and fairness.

There he offered readers sharp and earnest opinion of clarity and unvarnished truth-telling, in a tradition now challenged by social-media mechanisms like Facebook and Twitter, and by strongly and openly conservative news and analysis outlets like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard.

Before the era of “fake news” — a term coined by President Donald Trump, its most persistent peddler and outrageous practitioner — Getler for many years stood at the gates of straightforward news-gathering and later criticism and analysis of his own lifetime craft, most notably for five years as the Post’s ombudsman and then a dozen more at PBS.

The task of critiquing the work of colleagues was not always an easy or welcomed chore among thin-skinned reporters, but Getler’s diplomatic and informed manner served him and them well in the newsroom. In 1993, he led an internal Post examination of minority hiring. That landed him the new No. 3 job as deputy managing editor for recruitment, training and career development, which in turn led to a spike in diversity in the newsroom.

As a reporter’s editor, Mike was known as one who cast a tough but appreciative eye in the pursuit of hard-to-get stories and a dedication to honest and unbiased presentation of them.

When Getler’s contract ended at the Post in 2005, he took up a similar ombudsman’s job at PBS, and the Post position was passed on to other distinguished newspaper journalists. None had quite the keen eye and perceptive judgment of Mike, a fierce defender of the public’s right to know, and of mainstream journalism’s obligation to serve it up without favor and with the bark off.

In 2013, the Post management unwisely abandoned the independent ombudsman post. It was replaced by a much less aggressive and influential “reader representative,” a Post staff member assigned to field customers’ questions, complaints and other observations.

The losers were not only would-be new Mike Getler think-alikes on the staff who might have been promoted as ombudsmen. Many other journalists who looked to the Post example of facing up to staff flaws remain committed to standing up against Donald Trump’s fake news, and to other destructive inventors and salesmen of such poison of our information stream.

The best tribute the Washington Post could make to the passing of its most qualified ombudsman would to be to reconsider and reinstall the ombudsman. Its readers and the country need more skilled, dedicated and dependable editors made in Getler’s mold and heart, if our democracy is to be preserved by a truly informed electorate.

Jules Witcover can be contacted at juleswitcover@comcast.net.

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