The grades are based on six measures of the basics of journalism. Almost 1,100 top stories were analyzed, randomly selected from last October to this March. The stories were taken from the front page and local news display page of the newspapers, and the first 30 minutes of the premier evening newscasts. These are the stories the public is most likely to see.
The survey includes the region’s four most popular stations and three of the largest daily newspapers. For comparison, it also includes the Washington Post. Each newspaper and TV station is graded on the same news days so that the rush or ooze of current events doesn’t affect scores. The grading system does not penalize television for its smaller news volume.
The average grade across all indices was relatively high: B-.
The award
for Best Overall Source of News in the region goes to the San Francisco
Chronicle. Its stories contain multiple voices, the Bay Area is emphasized,
it’s fair, enterprising, and keeps an eye on what our government is doing for
and to us at various levels. The paper rated an A-.
The Chron falls well short of the nationally prestigious Washington Post, however, in the newsworthiness of its display stories. This is the most important measure—counted twice in computing overall grades. If the top stories aren’t newsworthy, grades for context, fairness, etc. mean little.
Unlike the Post, the Chron tends to confuse its front page for the sports page. Everything you never wanted to know about the new Pac Bell baseball park, or about Tiger Wood’s golf exploits are presented as if they mattered deeply to every Bay Area citizen. But the San Jose Mercury News also covers its front page with pom-poms. And sports is no stranger on the cover of the Contra Costa Times.
Despite being much smaller than its cross Bay rival in San Francisco, and its corporate cousin in San Jose, the Contra Costa Times runs a close second, grading out at a solid B+. The Times scores well across the board. No other news organization, even the Post, is as meticulously fair.
The San Jose Mercury News slips in this analysis, barely achieving a B+. The Merc, however, produced several very strong enterprise series looking deeply into issues like welfare reform.
Channel 2 takes
the award for Best Newscast, earning a B. While its selection of stories
tends to follow the 911 orientation of other television news programs, KTVU
covers these stories with context and fairness, and it also keeps an eye on
how government contributes--or not-- to our quality of life. Watch Channel 2’s
coverage of the identical event reported on Channels 4, 5 or 7, and you’ll often
learn more.
The award for Most
Improved News goes to Channel 4. KRON moved from a D+ in the last grading
period to a C. Given that grades are cumulative, the station made significant
gains. It still falls well short of Channel 2, however, in every category except
the newsworthiness of its story topics, where it earns a tie.
Channel 5 deserves credit for trying harder to get more than one side of controversial stories. KPIX still flunks fairness; it gets the other side’s view less than half the time. But that’s up from being fair less than a third of the time in the first survey.
The Bottom
Feeder Award goes to Channel 5. It edged Channel 7 for the weakest newscast
in the Bay Area. Besides failing on fairness, Channel 5 quotes so few sources
that it flunks the context measure and ignores government enough to earn only
a D+ in civic contribution. Overall grade: barely D+.
The Rubberneck
Award goes to Channel 7. If you desire an ambulance-eye view of the Bay
Area you can’t do better than KGO. The Disney channel earns a D+ in newsworthiness.
Overall grade: a solid D+.
The small print: First, random samples are good estimates of routine coverage but often miss the exceptional--both awesome and awful. Content analyses are also blind to creativity, clarity of writing, the power of visuals, and many other important measures of news quality that are highly subjective. These grades measure just the fundamentals in the most watched parts of the news.
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