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The relationship between the Ombudsman and the media (23.11.2009)

Address by Emily O'Reilly, Ombudsman at International Symposium of Namur

Thank you for that introduction and for the honour of being invited to give the opening address at this conference today. I would like to begin by acknowledging that my professional background as a journalist is not very common within the world of Ombudsmen.  Many of my European colleagues come from the world of law, or public administration or in some cases politics, areas of expertise which some might say would have a much more direct relationship to the work of the Ombudsman to that of journalism.  Yet, any good journalist will have some sort of working knowledge of some if not all of those disciplines, and can also bring to the role of the Ombudsman, the mindset of the outsider, someone who stands in a neutral space and assesses dispassionately the cases  that come before him or her. It is also my belief, that much more than the professional background of any Ombudsman, what is really important is their character, whether their own humanity, intelligence and empathy can fill a role which demands fine judgements that all sides, while not necessarily being happy with, will at least find fair and rational and no one profession has a monopoly on any of those qualities.

The subject matter of this conference is the relationship between the Ombudsman and the media;  how the work of the Ombudsman can be enhanced or at times impaired by the manner in which the press deals with our work, either by praising it, damning it, or arguably worse, simply ignoring it. We all issue annual reports, we all, I assume, have websites, we issue press statements, make speeches and do all manner of things in order to communicate our work to that distracted, busy world outside of our offices.  But if the press chooses to ignore what we do, very few people will get to hear of our work. Like the tree that falls in the forest without anybody hearing it, can we actually fully exist if the media isn't involved in bringing our work to the public?

In one sense, we do have a distinct advantage over certain other bodies concerned with public administration when it comes to getting our voices heard.  One my Irish colleagues calls it the ""Isn't it awful?"" effect. Throughout the year, we can provide the media with a steady stream of stories with the capacity to shock and horrify. We tell of older people being mistreated in nursing homes; vulnerable children not being adequately cared for;  clinical misjudgments in hospitals with tragic ends; prisoners existing in sub-human conditions; immigrants forced to live in sub-standard housing - all of which is meat and drink to the media who like nothing better than a hard luck story that directly implicates a Government or other public body.

But even the effect of that can wear off,  not just because in a society which is emerging out of secrecy and into openness and transparency, the media today is much more capable of unearthing its own ""Isn't it awful"" story, without the help of the ombudsman but because many countries have witnessed a huge increase in the number of Ombudsman offices and similar institutions, alongside regulatory bodies which do their own ""Isn't it awful?"" stuff as well.

My Office is 25 years old this year, and for many, many years, we had a monopoly on the ""Isn't it awful"" market.  Since then, and in a very short space of time,  seven more sectoral Ombudsman offices have come on stream, The Ombudsman for Children,  The Police or Garda Ombudsman Commission, The Pensions Ombudsman, The Financial Services Ombudsman, The Ombudsman for the Defence Forces, The Office of the Press Ombudsman, and the Ombudsman or Commissioner, for the Irish Language. That's a lot of shock and horror for a small country like Ireland and each one of us is constantly battling to get the attention of an increasingly overloaded and even sated press.

The media reaction that I get to my Annual Report, is still reasonably good as you can see from these few slides, but I would regard it as growing a little more perfunctory as the years pass with the media rarely going beyond the press release bullet points and into the meat of the report.  As you can see here, most of them ran with the first line of the release which on the one hand is good, because I wanted to show the particular relevance of the Office in a down turn, but on the other hand is a bit worrying, because the interest shown is a little on the superficial side.

Interest in our special reports, which are released selectively and sporadically, continues to be high.  This report, seen here on a grab from our website, concerned the care and treatment of a very elderly and very ill woman in a care centre.  The details were quite harrowing particularly the pain and sadness of the woman's daughter who had strived so hard to look after her frail mother, and the media naturally ran with the story in quite a big way.  The importance of the coverage, was not just the telling of this particular incident, but it was also the alerting of a wider community to the fact that the Ombudsman deals with care and treatment issues not just in hospitals but also in hospital style settings. Generally, reports like this cue an increase of similar complaints which proves that the publicity exercise has worked.

Nonetheless, I would tend to be conservative in relation to my communications policy and my relationship with the press.  This is partly because of my journalistic background - the knowledge that the media can easily grow weary of someone who's constantly out there on show - but also because I do not want to run an Office that has to overly rely on the media in order to shame public bodies into doing what I want them to do. I want to run a dignified, rational, Office where results are obtained because of the quality of our decision making and not because the tabloids are running shaming headlines.

This is a challenge all of us face; what is the correct balance to be struck, knowing as we do that the political system very often only reacts to shaming tabloid headlines.  The temptation to by pass reasoned argument and go straight for the tabloid jugular can be strong, but we all need to stand back and look at the long term implications of our engagement with the media. Above all, we need to remember that the press is not our friend; it uses us just as we use it, but the press can often have the upper hand if for no other reason that it can have the last word.  It might be lionising us today; tomorrow, whimsically, it might be reaching out to attack.

Like many of us, I take an interest in the communication strategies of colleagues, and the different ways in which they interact with the press.  There can be no one, set, successful formula, as all of us operate within the cultural and other rules of the game of our particular country and its political and media set up. I tend to take a conservative, restrained approach, which generally serves me well,  but I have been fascinated in recent years by the approach used by Mr Andre Marin, the Ombudsman for Ontario, in Canada - an approach light years away from the approach of most European Ombudsman Offices I would suggest but which so far appears to have served him very well indeed.

As Mr Marin tells it, his Office was virtually moribund and in danger of being closed down when he took after 10 years as Military Ombudsman, in 2005.  Marin effectively re-invented the manner in which the Office went about its work, most notably through the creation of the so called SORT teams, a team of investigators that examine systemic issues in a very controlled yet efficient way and then publish their findings.  Marin appears to have had great success in achieving real improvements for the citizens of Ontario, and notably in healthcare.  He is very highly regarded and I noticed recently an on-line petition to have his five year term extended for a further 5 years.

A number of things fascinate me about his approach. First of all, and from the perspective of a former journalist, I note that Mr Marin uses the language of populist media in the presentation of his special reports.  By that I mean, the language is direct and sensationalist; he editorialises about his findings; he tells the story of the systemic abuse he is dealing with exactly a newspaper reporter might. He is not content to let the facts speak for themselves, he insists on telling the reader not just how the facts should be interpreted but what emotions we should feel when we read them. And naturally, as a result, the outrage factor is significantly higher.

This is an interesting example of what I mean. This is the cover of a report that Mr Marin did in relation to the Ministry of Health''s decision-making concerning the funding of a drug called Avastin taken by patients with colorectal cancer.  Now even before you turn the page, a lot can be gleaned from the graphic nature of that cover. It has something of the crime thriller, or horror movie about it, an unseen hand choking off the supply of a presumably  life saving drug being administered to a dangerously ill patient. Before you read a word, you have effectively been softened up to take a very specific view of this case.

Those two other covers follow a similar pattern; the emotion is prompted long before there is intellectual engagement with the issues. I should note however, that outside of what I would call the packaging of the report, the telling of the story itself in the body of the report is sober, forensic and methodical.

Mr Marin has admitted that he does choose those systemic issues which are likely to resonate with the public and from which he can secure an easier win.  The tactic does seem to work in many cases and Mr Marin is very alive to the amount of publicity he can secure from these provocatively presented reports. He has also, even before Barack Obama, started doing it, been quick to use social media sites and phenomenon such as Twitter to communicate with the people of Ontario.

This is from his annual report. On media coverage he says, ""More than 1,100 news stories were published about the Ombudsman between April 1, 2008 and March 31, 2009 reaching an aggregate audience of nearly 78 million people. The estimated advertising value of these articles was $1.9 million.  There were also 775 news stories about the Ombudsman broadcast on radio and television.""

And he states, ""Always looking for new ways to engage Ontarians, Mr Marin has launched the Ombudsman's Office into the sphere of social media.  Mr Marin himself is on Twitter."" And indeed on Youtube.

By any standards, that is a remarkable feat of media management and a massive amount of media attention. It does, at one level, challenge the more sober of us, to look at how we go about our business, but I would continue to caution that it can be dangerous to transplant a foreign plant - such as Mr Marin's media strategy - on to home-grown soil.  The reaction to an Ombudsman's Twitterings, or Tweets,  could just as easily be ridicule as praise, while continued screeching from the rooftops about injustice, might not have quite the same impact on your citizenry or your Governments as it would appear to do in Canada. Everyone of us needs to cut our own cloth to suit our own measure.

Closer to home, I have also followed media coverage of a major report done some years ago, by my UK colleague, Ann Abraham into a massive loss of money by over one million people who had invested their money in Equitable Life - a life insurance company.  At the heart of the case, was poor regulation and the Ombudsman recommended that the Government pay compensation to the victims.

The report received a great deal of coverage as it raised major issues about accountability in the area of financial regulation, the appropriate response of a Government to an Ombudsman's recommendations, but also the requirement on taxpayers in effect to take on the burden of the mistakes made by the regulators.

There has as yet been no clear resolution to the case and Ann Abraham has issued another report in relation to the Government's response to her recommendations.  Again the media has followed all of this, and the balance of support does lie with the Ombudsman.

Just a few weeks ago, Ms Abraham again appeared before a parliamentary committee and again was critical of the Government's handling of the case.  The case has significantly raised the profile of her Office, and allowed the public to see that the Office of the Ombudsman doesn't just deal with obscure complaints from individuals but that its work goes to the heart of parliamentary democracy and has a vital role to play.  Coverage such as this - in a country like the United Kingdowm - I think gives profile and adds value to the work of all the European Ombudsman.

Another Ombudsman closer to our home is our friend and colleague Mr Nikiforos Diamondouros,  the Ombudsman for the EU Institutions.  Arguably, his media strategy is a very challenging one, given the breadth of his remit and its geographical range. How do you engage with such a disparate audience, how do you get a particular message across, how do you engage with media across so many different borders?

Inevitably, it will be the quirky, sexy stories that will grab the headlines as witnessed here. This was a relatively minor matter about the acceptance by two EU Commission officials, of VIP tickets to the Rugby World Cup in Paris, from a sportswear supplier. As you can see, the Ombudsman played the matter down when he reported it on his website, but the British media were quick to notice that the two officials worked for Peter Mandelson, now a Minister in Gordon Browns UK cabinet, but at the time the European Commissioner for trade. So they were quick to take the so called sexy stuff out of an otherwise sober ruling by the EU Ombudsman.

Another decision which also got a lot of attention, again because of his relatively quirky nature, involved Austria's ban on wild animals from circuses. Opponents had claimed that this breached the free movement of services rule and Nikiforos got involved at that stage.'

So, from that selection of media coverage of our colleagues and others that you yourselves are aware of,  you can see the different outcomes that can emerge; full on support that helps an Ombudsman get a recommendation over the line; standard unengaged reporting which doesn't advance anything significantly; full on support but which some question marks which can allow the respective Government some wriggle room, and what younger people might refer to as ""random"coverage,  a reporter catching something quirky in a report which he or she might otherwise have completely ignored.

Another point worth making is that the coverage you get very much depends on public and media image of the Office in general.  If your Office has developed a reputation for good work, your reports and investigations will be looked at through a positive prism from the start.  If you have slipped up along the way, your media engagement will be challenged and challenging from the start.  I was lucky to inherit an Office that was well regarded by the public and the administration and that gave me a head start in my work.  But I constantly remind my staff, that one poor piece of work, one failure to deal with a significant issue, one false move and you are reduced to zero from hero in the blink of an eye. And re-building your reputation will be exceedingly difficult.

I want to comment now on some of the topics that are due to be raised in other sessions over the next few days.  One topic suggests that mediation may not be "sexy"enough for the media.  I don't know whether this has been prompted by certain Ombudsmen who may have difficulty in getting coverage for their work, but if it has been, then let me make some observations on that.

Ombudsmen engage, or should engage, with the real life problems of the ordinary people of their respective countries and do so in a way that creates sympathy, interest, and even anger against those bodies responsible.  I have nonetheless seen from time to time investigation reports that use language that is so dry, so bureaucratic and so stale that not even the authors themselves could possibly bear to read them more than once.  And while some of us might find the notion that we have to sell ourselves somewhat distasteful, that is in fact what we have to do.  We cannot force anyone to pay the slightest bit of attention to our work,  but we have an obligation ensure that as many people as possible are aware of what we do so that they know they can turn to us if necessary.  So we need to make our language accessible, make the reporting of our investigations engaging and make it easy for the media to access and engage with our work. The arcane language of the law and of bureaucracy has little place in the communicating of our work to the public; we may have to argue dry, legal points with bodies in our jurisdiction, but we do not have to inflict that on the ordinary citizen.

I know that there are cases that I deal with that are important to the person involved, but wouldn't raise a flicker of interest in the minds of the public, let alone the media. Equally there are cases that once out there will fly all by themselves and so if I feel the Office has been starved of publicity , those are the ones I put out.  That's not the only reason I publish, but it can be an important one. The media is interested in what the media is interested in. So, while you might say that the media doesn't find the subject of mediation sexy per se, it would certainly find a damning investigation into a poorly run nursing home for the elderly "sexy".  Only you can decided of course, just how much you want to sex up your reports.  Andre Marin may well get away with the language of the racy, tabloid press, but it might undermine the status of your Office if the culture in which you operate is slightly less populist than the one that exists in Ontario. This is not a criticism of Mr Marin, simply an observation that the nuances of culture need to be understood in their own context.

Anything point for consideration in all of this, concerns the image you want yourself of your Office.  Whenever my Office is engaged with a stand off with a public body - and my Office knowing of course that it's in the right - I tell my officials that we must always engage as the ""adults"" in the Office, that we should conduct ourselves with dignity, with patience, so the very manner in which we conduct ourselves lends respect and authority to our analysis and recommendations. And for that reason also, while I want to convey my work in an easy, modern, accessible way, I want it at all times to mirror the tone that I want to set for the Office.

Another workshop will concern itself with ""The sensitisation of the politician", which means I suppose the application of pressure on to the politician. Again, this has to be judiciously used. The success or otherwise of an Ombudsman's Office depends not just on having the trust of the complainant but also of the system itself. While we make recommendations critical of the administration, that does not mean that we do so in a hostile way, or make enemies of them because then we lose that balancing trust.  In my view, unless a politician, or public servant or public body has behaved very badly indeed, I would be loath to run to the media with premature criticism of them.  No one will trust an Ombudsman if they fear they are going to run to the media in order to pile the pressure on before things have run their full course. Again, it is a question of judgment. You may well win a particular battle but ultimately lose the war.

The final workshop will deal with ""When the press plays the Ombudsman"" - a fascinating topic and again one which needs a great deal of judgment to deal with effectively.  Some time ago, in my own Office, the press was used to play the Ombudsman in a particular case. I well remember having to sit through 20 minutes of radio one morning, hearing a blatantly one sided account of an issue being put out by a journalist who had heard just one side of the story. Because of confidentiality imperatives, and because the case was still ongoing, I had had to decline to make any comment. Nonetheless, after listening to my Office being rubbished, I was very tempted to set the record straight. But instead I said nothing, maintained a dignified silence, refused to play the game and that was the end of it.  Had there been significant follow on, I may have to set the record straight at some point, but by starving it of oxygen at the time, it died down. Once again, playing the adult role while everyone else gets excitable, proved to be a good strategy.

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