Our Man at the Tribune
“As one of last weekend’s editors put it: ‘I didn’t even know this was anything important.’”
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“Do me a favor,” said Kneeland. “Don’t invent some role and criticize me for not fulfilling that role. This has not been the Dick Harwood job, where he sort of is separate from everything and sharpshoots. I don’t think I would be as effective if I were doing just that. We’re trying to invent something that’s somewhat different from what others are trying to do . . . something to fit me.”
The Tribune calls Kneeland its “public editor,” in part because of the baggage “ombudsman” carries. “Typically,” editor Jack Fuller explained, “when news organizations have appointed someone they call an ombudsman, they have looked on that person as being in some sense outside of the management of the newspaper. The theory was, I guess, that anyone on the inside is, in some way, incapable of making honest judgments about mistakes and so forth, because they’re implicated. And therefore we have to take someone and separate him or her from the management of the paper . . .
“It’s Mr. Kneeland’s job to be conciliatory and accommodating and politic, and I think he does his job very well,” Anderson told us. This is praise, if not the highest.
On coverage of minorities: “What I’d like you to know is that we spend a lot more time worrying about fairness to all segments of the community than may ever be apparent . . . ”
We asked Kneeland how he’d proceed if he wanted to bring the same sort of case against the Tribune that Richard Harwood last May made so thumpingly and publicly against the Washington Post. Kneeland would do two things, he thinks: he’d raise the subject at the Wednesday meeting of the editors, and he’d write a column.
