With the waning days of 2011 comes my last post before 2012—an open forum. Regular participants know the rules: civility. The forum keeps getting ever more interesting, at least for me. We also share your comments with the newsroom.

Part of why I like this job is its unpredictability—who knows what will come up in 2012? But here are some projects we're working on and for which you may have insights. One study is an analysis of regional bias, and what cities and states NPR covers most. Another is an analysis of racial and ethnic staffing, audience and coverage. Coming soon is a look back at an investigation of Native American foster care in South Dakota. Then there is a "thumbsucker" on the growing conflict between ethics and free speech among journalists.

I think we all enjoy each other's comments. Thank you for your thoughts and support. See you next year.

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Workers build cars on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Co.'s Michigan Assembly Plant Dec. 14, 2011.

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Workers build cars on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Co.'s Michigan Assembly Plant Dec. 14, 2011.

Last week's post on how NPR should frame the future of electric cars— positively or negatively—drew some 100 comments and emails. Some contributed new information to the debate. Leading among these was an email from Brian Wynne, president of the Electric Drive Transportation Association, an organization that promotes electric vehicles. Here it is, with a reference and a link to a UK study on the obstacle of "range anxiety":

On behalf of the Electric Drive Transportation Association (EDTA), I wanted to provide our input on how to more effectively tell the electric car story. The NPR series was negatively framed and beyond tone, it could have benefited with a more complete look at the facts. As the industry trade association representing the companies developing the vehicles and infrastructure and working with the stakeholders on deployment, a group like EDTA could have helped the writer provide a clearer view of the industry's progress and the work being done to educate consumers about electric drive options and their benefits.

For example, in evaluating vehicle sales numbers to date, it is important to put them in context. Despite the limited-market roll out that began this year, all the electric vehicles produced to date will be sold and models such as the Nissan the Leaf are expected to meet their 2011 sales goal. Wider availability in 2012 will also include diverse options for consumers. There will be more than 20 electric vehicles for consumers to choose from next year, at various price points and electric ranges.

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Pope Benedict XVI during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Dec. 14, 2011.

Andreas Solaro/Getty Images

Pope Benedict XVI during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Dec. 14, 2011.

When the Catholic Church changed its liturgy in late November, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Morning Edition, and Tell Me More, covered the story. For some listeners that was way too much.

"When anything is mentioned on NPR concerning religion, it seems that the only religion mentioned is the Catholic religion," wrote Jim Mundy of Green Cove Springs, FL.

The reports led Ann Shropshire from Glenwood Springs, CO, to turn off the radio. "You keep running stories about how the Catholic Church has changed the mass. I do not believe that your listeners are a majority of Catholics," she wrote.

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A Predator B unmanned aircraft returns to the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is expanding its use of drones to patrol U.S. borders.

Eric Gay/AP

A Predator B unmanned aircraft returns to the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is expanding its use of drones to patrol U.S. borders.

Just because you don't like the subject of a story doesn't mean that the story was wrong.

Salon published a scathing reaction to Brian Naylor's recent All Things Considered report on the nascent use of drones domestically. The article, written by Glenn Greenwald, called Naylor's five-minute segment a "commercial for the drone industry," saying the report overlooked privacy and safety concerns. Some listeners wrote with similar criticism.

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A worker installs components into a Leaf electric vehicle at the company's plant in Kanagawa, Japan.

Kazuhiro Nogi/Getty Images

A worker installs components into a Leaf electric vehicle at the company's plant in Kanagawa, Japan.

Is the glass half empty or half full for the future of more fuel-efficient cars? How NPR and the news media answer this question in framing stories affects public attitudes and a national willingness to support the conservation effort.

The Obama Administration and automakers recently agreed to make all new cars in America have an average fuel economy by 2025 of 55 miles per gallon – roughly double the current average. The mandate prompted a Morning Edition series on how cars will get there.

"Reaching that goal [55 mpg] will takes feats of engineering and it will require Americans to change how they think about their cars and how they drive them," host Linda Wertheimer said in the introduction to the first part, on electric cars.

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Israelis and Palestinians protest after two cemeteries, one Muslim and the other Christian, were vandalized by graffiti in the Arab city of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, in October.

Hmad Gharabli/Getty Images

Israelis and Palestinians protest after two cemeteries, one Muslim and the other Christian, were vandalized by graffiti in the Arab city of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, in October.

It's almost a classic man-bites-dog story. Instead of a story about Palestinians attacking Israelis, NPR freelancer Sheera Frenkel reported on what is believed to be militant Jews vandalizing Arab sites inside Israel. But as with many stories involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, heated objections followed.

This time the objections were led by CAMERA, a media-monitoring organization that advocates for Israel from a strongly conservative viewpoint. It posted:

Sheera Frenkel's Nov. 18 NPR news report charges Israel with a purported agenda 'to have a purely Jewish state and to get rid of all Palestinians, the ones in the West Bank and in Israel,' as one of her main interviewees puts it. Frenkel bases her alarmist story on three cases of vandalism and the distortion of terminology, among other misrepresentations.

Many listeners sent emails with similar complaints, picking up on the details outlined by CAMERA.

The charges are serious, and so I went back to investigate. What I found is that Frenkel's story was tendentious in one part and lacked context, but it is not the anti-Israeli diatribe CAMERA portrays it to be. It's a legitimate story about actual developments—a series of acts of vandalism to Arab sites in Israel by alleged militant Jews.

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You're invited to use this space to discuss media, policy and NPR's journalism. We'll follow the conversation and share it with the newsroom.

Please stay within the community discussion rules, among them:

• If you can't be polite, don't say it: ...please try to disagree without being disagreeable. Focus your remarks on positions, not personalities.

• ...This is not a place for advertising, promotion, recruiting, campaigning, lobbying, soliciting or proselytizing. We understand that there can be a fine line between discussing and campaigning; please use your best judgment — and we will use ours.

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This post was written with LORI GRISHAM.

A recurring theme on our Open Forum posts is how NPR handles corrections. Lynn S., a regular participant on the blog, wrote: "Why are some errors corrected but not others? Why are some corrections noted but not others?"

She pointed to a correction posted above the Morning Edition segment, "GOP Says Obama Supporter Pushed for Solyndra Loan." The correction reads: "A previous headline on this story incorrectly said that a Solyndra supporter pushed the White House for loans. In fact, House Republicans contend that an Obama supporter pushed the White House for Solyndra loans." The NPR correction page has the same note.

But Lynn S.'s concern has to do with another story that had a similar error, but did not receive the same note. She wrote:

Now consider the following: NPR's story about the Mississippi personhood initiative was initially titled "Miss. Set To Vote On Measure Making Fetus A Person," even though the measure proposed that fertilized human eggs would be declared persons and the fetal stage starts months later. It took many hours and emails, comments, and phone calls from many people before it was replaced with a less informative—but no longer erroneous—title, "Miss. Set To Vote On Measure Defining A Person."

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I appeared today on WOSU's local call-in show All Sides with Ann Fisher out of Columbus, OH. Following a brief interview with NPR's new CEO Gary Knell, Fisher and listeners asked me questions about the challenges – and joys – of being NPR's ombudsman. Following are some excerpts of what I said. Take a listen to the full audio segment online and share your reactions on the blog.

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istockphoto.com

You're invited to use this space to discuss media, policy and NPR's journalism. We'll follow the conversation and share it with the newsroom.

Please stay within the community discussion rules, among them:

• If you can't be polite, don't say it: ...please try to disagree without being disagreeable. Focus your remarks on positions, not personalities.

• ...This is not a place for advertising, promotion, recruiting, campaigning, lobbying, soliciting or proselytizing. We understand that there can be a fine line between discussing and campaigning; please use your best judgment — and we will use ours.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (C) walks on the tarmac upon her arrival in Myanmar on Wednesday. Clinton arrived on the first top-level US visit for half a century.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (C) walks on the tarmac upon her arrival in Myanmar on Wednesday. Clinton arrived on the first top-level US visit for half a century.

The country many of us knew as Burma, a forgotten backwater for most Americans, is suddenly in play. Long a Chinese acolyte, the military-dominated government last month canceled a huge Chinese-financed dam project, deepened competing military collaboration with India and held a truncated election. This week, it hosted Hillary Rodham Clinton in what was the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state in more than 50 years.

Important news, but here's the rub: What do you call the country?

The U.S. government and many opposition leaders there say it's Burma. A military dictatorship changed the name 23 years ago to Myanmar, which many other nations accept. And the news media has been stuck with marbles in its mouth, divided over equally tongue-tying options: Myanmar "formerly" or "also" known as Burma.

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When I wrote last week on the language used in describing the sexual assault of children, little did I realize that scientists just published a study on this very issue.

Interested readers might turn to Case by Case: News Coverage of Child Sexual Abuse, 2007-2009, which was published this summer by the Berkeley Media Studies Group, a California non-profit dedicated to researching media coverage of health issues. In a nicely presented, highly readable study of a random sample of 348 newspaper stories reporting on sexual abuse of children from 2007 through 2009, the authors found that the normally hardened news media is squeamish when it comes to this subject. Reporters and editors avoid it, except when a case hits the justice system. They also tip-toe by using ambiguous words such as molesting, abuse, sexually assaulted, lewd and lascivious acts, sexual acts and inappropriate sexual behavior—all with a child. Rarely do they say rape.

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Gerald "Jerry" Sandusky, center, is placed in a police car in Bellefonte, Pa. on Saturday, Nov. 5.

AP Photo/Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, Commonwealth Media Services

Gerald "Jerry" Sandusky, center, is placed in a police car in Bellefonte, Pa. on Saturday, Nov. 5.

Like many parents, John De Voy of Redwood, CA, encourages his son to listen to the news. But he didn't appreciate how NPR journalists reported on the Penn State scandal involving former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Mr. De Voy wrote:

I've been very disappointed about the number of times I've heard that Penn State coach Sandusky 'raped a boy in the showers.' That's a terrible thing, but it does not have to be stated explicitly over and over again to report the story. My own 10 year old son is learning to watch/read/listen to the news, and that's a good thing. But he does not have to hear about another boy his age being raped. Isn't it more than enough to state that the coach has been accused of 'molesting' boys?

My work often parallels that of other ombudsmen, so I was not surprised that Arthur Brisbane, The New York Times' public editor, was confronted by the same issue. However, in his recent column, "Confusing Sex and Rape," he cited Times readers who had a totally different take from De Voy. They felt that the language in the Times' stories was not explicit enough. They objected to vague phrases like "sexual assault" and "sexual abuse" because they felt it softened the crime and undermined what should be the public's moral outrage. Brisbane agreed that rape should be called rape, which the Times began to do four days into the story.

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Downed trees and power lines in Montgomery Township, New Jersey.

After a freak snow storm last month knocked out the power on her New Jersey street, Tracy Ross took it upon herself to try to move a tree that had fallen on a power line. She even enlisted her daughter to help, she told an Associated Press reporter.

"I took an extension ladder and made her hold it while I climbed up the tree and tried to saw it," she said on air. Pulling together that field report and other clips for his hourly newscast, NPR's Craig Windham in Washington called it a "risky move."

This report disturbed a power company official. Kate Leese Burgers, public safety director for Consumers Energy, a Michigan-based utility that sent workers to New Jersey to help in the emergency, wrote to me:

In the past day or two, we have heard NPR coverage about a mother having her oldest son move a downed power line and a woman getting on a ladder to saw off tree limbs that were touching a power line. These were reported as ways people are coping with the storm's aftermath. These people were lucky or NPR would have been reporting on serious injuries or deaths.

Instead of airing information that would encourage others to take the same deadly risks, NPR should be reminding its listeners to stay away from power lines. The three safety rules are simple:

• All downed and sagging power lines should be considered dangerous
• People should stay at least 25 feet away from them
• Never touch anything that a power line may be touching

She has an obvious point that most people, myself included, would probably agree with. And so I asked Robert Garcia, the executive producer of newscasts, why such advice wasn't part of the NPR report. He responded:

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Kirk Palmer from San Francisco, CA, believes NPR is sounding more and more like a George Orwell novel:

I am a regular listener to NPR, and it seems to me that the network has systematically started saying "climate change" instead of "global warming." ....If I am wrong in this observation, I am sorry. If I am right, then I wish to complain that this is perilously close to Orwellian newspeak.

The earth is about 5 billion years old. Its climate has been changing continuously for that length of time. However, only for the last 100 years has it been getting dramatically warmer because of human actions. "Climate change" is a given; and not necessarily something we can—or morally ought to—worry about. "Global warming" on the other hand is a man-made disaster that needs to be aggressively mitigated.

Please re-consider the words you use to describe this crisis. The public in the US is, alas, not very well informed about science. So, the media needs to be extra thoughtful in reporting science-related issues to ensure clarity of meaning.

In the past 12 months, NPR's programming used "global warming" in 131 reports, which was indeed less than the 175 reports that referred to "climate change." Ten years ago, the order was reversed. "Global warming" made 172 reports then, more than twice the 80 on "climate change." The numbers prove both terms are still in use, but Palmer's onto something: "climate change" is increasingly prevalent.