Cassandra Tate, “What Do Ombudsmen Do?” Columbia Journalism Review, May/June
1984, vol. 23, issue 1, pp. 37-41: 37.
[Ralph Pulitzer established] a Bureau of Accuracy and
Fair Play at his New York World in
1913. According to a 1916 issue of American
Magazine, Pulitzer had become concerned about the increasing blurriness
between “that which is true and that which is false” in the paper. He had reason
for concern. One of the questionable practices uncovered by the bureau’s first
director, Isaac D. White, was the routine embellishment of stories about
shipwrecks with fictional reports about the rescue of a ship’s cat. After
asking the maritime reporter why a cat had been rescued in each of a half dozen
accounts of shipwrecks, White was told: “One of those wrecked ships carried a
cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat the feature of my story,
while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by
their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck there
was no cat; but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take chances, and
put the cat in. I wrote a true report, leaving out the cat, and then I was
severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us
always put in a cat.”