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TOUGH GRADER: John McManus's
website is a "Consumer Reports for
the news."
Linda Cicero |
John Mcmanus has just picked
up the morning papers, and he is not amused. Military
and civilian casualties are mounting in the Middle East,
the California state treasury is running dry, and national
politicians are at each other’s throats. So what
do the San Francisco Chronicle and San
Jose Mercury News choose to spotlight on Page 1?
Another minor development in the Scott Peterson murder
trial. Were it not for journalists, the Stanford researcher
fumes, “this trial would be proceeding quietly
in Modesto. And all of the public cost of relocating
witnesses, investigators and attorneys would have been
avoided.” The whole sorry circus, he says, “makes
me ashamed to be a journalist.”
McManus normally is a cheerful guy who used to write
award-winning stories on race relations, education and
science for various newspapers in the South. But after
he wrote his 1988 Stanford doctoral thesis on the evils
of market-driven journalism, the subject so nagged at
him that he resolved to do something “admittedly
quixotic.” Working out of his bedroom between
academic jobs, McManus cobbled together an experimental
website in 2000 called Grade the News, which attempted
to provide in-depth, Consumer Reports-type
critiques of San Francisco Bay Area news outlets. Faculty
in Stanford’s graduate journalism program, excited
about using the website as a teaching tool, unanimously
invited McManus to set up shop on campus last January.
The site, which currently gets more than 8,000 visitors
a day, recently won a prize from the nonprofit Action
Coalition for Media Education.
Supported by grants from the Ford and Knight foundations,
Grade the News offers a lively mix of features, including
an online Coffeehouse where visitors share their thoughts
on Bay Area news coverage, pages titled “Grade
the News Yourself” and “You Make the [Editorial]
Call,” and a Bouquets and Brickbats column. A
summer decision by KRON Channel 4 to skip Frasier
reruns in favor of prime-time coverage of the Democratic
National Convention merited roses, for example, while
the San Jose Mercury News was criticized for
its hyped front-page coverage of a dog-custody dispute.
The Chronicle was chastised for a Page 1 story
on crop circles in Solano County.
The centerpiece of Grade the News is a report card McManus
compiles annually with the help of journalism student
interns. Using a 16-page coding manual derived from
the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code
of Ethics, evaluators look at thousands of stories from
the three most popular Bay Area newspapers and five
television news broadcasts. The students categorize
the stories into broad topics, determine the number
and expertise of sources, and assign marks for their
relevance to the local community.
Despite their penchant for crime and dog stories, Bay
Area newspapers actually did well in last year’s
survey, earning A averages. By contrast, grades for
KTVU Channel 2, KRON Channel 4, KPIX Channel 5, and
KNTV Channel 11 ranged from C+ to D+. As the site explains,
“Television newsrooms relied heavily on ‘spot’
news generated from listening to scanner radios for
mayhem, fires and collisions.” On average, only
14 percent of their airtime was devoted to issue stories
initiated by the journalists themselves. In contrast,
46 percent of newspaper space was devoted to these “enterprise”
or investigative reports.
The website has attracted the attention of more than
a few Bay Area editors and television news directors.
One sent an angry e-mail to McManus, blurting “See
what you’ve done?!” after a Grade the News
fan was emboldened to criticize the station’s
election coverage. Robert Rosenthal, managing editor
at the Chronicle, points out that Grade the
News reviewers have the academic’s luxury of time,
while editors in a newsroom frequently have to make
snap decisions. Still, he says, “I think it’s
generally fair. No one enjoys criticism, but if it’s
constructive and we can learn from it, I’m fine
with it. Journalists tend to be very aggressive when
criticizing others, so a little poke back is a good
reminder that we must always aspire to the highest standards.”
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KQED radio news director Raul Ramirez, a member of
Grade the News’s advisory board, says he frequently
uses the website in journalism classes that he teaches
at San Francisco State, and adds that the site has created
“useful conversations in a number of Bay Area
newsrooms.” Recently, for example, the Contra
Costa Times agreed to label its weekly Saturday
real-estate section as an advertisement, after Grade
the News pointed out that it was written entirely by
housing developers. It was a small change, to be sure.
But as McManus says, “at least it’s a step
in the right direction.” |
