Empty Promise

Keelin McDonell in TNR Online on the public editor as ombudsman at The New York Times

Among the strangest misapprehensions of the public editor is the belief that quoting from reader mail in a column is a superior form of responsiveness to printing the correspondence in the letters page. There is probably some small thrill in reading Okrent or Calame concur with your disappointment, or satisfied indignation in reading one of them refute you. But, more often than not, the experience is followed by nothing more than the public editor's tame and sonorous expression of hope that the Times might at some point in the future improve.