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Focusing on the Iraq war and California's budget crisis, the Bay Area's three largest newspapers achieved top scores during the first half of 2003 on seven basic yardsticks of sound journalism, researchers based in the Department of Communication have found. But even such compelling issues couldn't lift local television stations from mediocrity, they said. From January to July, Grade the News, a watchdog group affiliated with the Graduate Program in Journalism, matched more than 2,200 stories in newscasts and newspapers to core news standards derived from the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics. Based on those criteria, the group rated the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times in the same category as the Washington Post, which was used as a standard of excellence. All four papers rated an overall grade of "A." By contrast, the team rated KTVU Channel 2, KRON Channel 4, KPIX Channel 5, KGO Channel 11 and KNTV Channel 11 from "C+" to "D+." The study did not address fundamentally important but difficult-to-quantify measures of news quality, said John McManus, director of Grade the News. "We didn't rate the intelligence of writing or reporting, whether specific important stories, such as a robust debate on U.S. policy relative to Iraq, were underplayed or ignored, or the quality of photos or videography. "We looked at the basic structure of news, such as the importance of the topics chosen, the level of context, the potential of a story for wide impact on local residents and fairness," McManus said. "We aren't saying local papers match the overall excellence of the Post, but that they did as well on those basics of journalism amenable to counting." Compared to Grade the News' last analysis, in 2000, the new study found newspapers improving but television stagnating. "The gap between the newspapers and television stations increased significantly from our last survey," McManus said. "Three years ago Channel 2 in Oakland competed with the best local newspapers. But not this time." The researchers examined only the stories most likely to be read or seen -- those on the front and local news front pages of newspapers, and on the first 30 minutes of evening newscasts -- in order to minimize print's advantage in volume over television, said Michael Stoll, associate director of the project. "We also capped the number of sources we counted at levels compatible with the shorter length of newscast stories." Grade the News was launched in 2000 in an effort to help consumers of news evaluate the quality of the information they watch and read each day, doing for journalism what Consumer Reports does for cars and computers. It is funded by the Ford Foundation and the James L. and John S. Knight Foundation. The full report can be viewed online at www.gradethenews.org.
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Stanford Report, October 1, 2003
