“Never engage in a war of words with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

San Jose Mercury News Publisher Jay T. Harris set aside journalistic objectivity and fair play a week ago to demonstrate the proverb to a group of new Americans. It was the $300 million-plus-a-year Mercury News vs. the people who get up hours before dawn to deliver the paper--mostly Vietnamese immigrants paid $1,080 a month for their labor.

It’s always difficult to report on yourself, but the Mercury abandoned its own principles, rules of reporting at which it normally excels. A Grade the News analysis of the strike week’s coverage shows violations the Mercury would never countenance in reporting on outside parties.

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The weekly “Saturday Homes” section of the Contra Costa Times is laid out to look like news.

The Times runs its logo on top above a banner that reads: “Your Best Guide In the East Bay.” It’s not an insert, but a regular lettered section of the newspaper. Like news pages, it’s presented with headlines and columns of text separated from advertisements. There are datelines on each story telling where it was reported as well as bylines indicating the author.

"Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two."

--The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics

The primary tip that this is not news comes in the smallest typeface on the page. It's an unfamiliar story byline such as “Wheeler”, “Gold Mountain”, “Standard Pacific”, or “Pulte Home Corporation.”

As you read down the page you may also notice that the typeface differs slightly. But unless you line it up next to a real news section, you will probably miss the distinction.  

“It’s either intentionally or unintentionally deceptive to leave open the question as to whether this is refereed, critically examined news copy or fluffy, biased advertising copy."

- News ethicist Keith Woods of the Poynter Institute.

Despite its reputation as America’s most liberal big city, despite the presence of minority members in newsrooms, Tom Fleming contends that San Francisco newspapers and television stations largely ignore the issues and interests important to black, Asian and Latino communities.

“Today, though we live in a world that is increasingly multicultural, much of conventional journalism remains fixated on the lives of the white and wealthy.” Media Studies Journal, Summer, 1994

Fleming has been a journalist in the Bay Area for more than half a century. He remembers being the first black working journalist in the San Francisco Press Club, back in the 1950s.

Asians, Latinos and blacks now constitute the majority in California, but “we still feel that we are not covered adequately,” Fleming says. “Whites just don’t want it.”

He faults white owners of newspapers, who are “indifferent to the issues [in black neighborhoods]...don’t come out of their offices and their communities...don’t see these issues.” Fleming acknowledges that today’s coverage of black issues “is better than it was, but it started from zero.”

Over the past half century, Fleming’s columns and editorials have hit similar themes.  Following World War II, the Oakland transit system refused to hire blacks and Fleming told them: “If blacks can drive army rigs, they can drive buses in Oakland.”

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A long-time San Francisco journalist responds

By William German

Tom Fleming's views on how mainstream San Francisco (media included) has treated blacks and other minorities are worthy of close attention. Fleming speaks, as you put it, "from a unique position." I agree with his criticism of things past and his feeling that while some things have improved, there is still room for progress.

How Reliable are Political Polls?

When Bill Fazio read his morning Chronicle late last October, he had every reason to feel good.

The newspaper’s poll of likely voters showed him leading Terrence Hallinan in the San Francisco district attorney’s race by 10 percentage points just 10 days before the election. With a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points, the poll showed him ahead even if all the error favored his opponent.

But on election day, Hallinan edged Fazio, setting up a run-off election.

Not to worry. Ten days before the run-off, a second Chronicle poll showed Fazio had increased his lead to 18 percentage points. The margin of error was again +/- 4 points. If the poll was correct, on December 4 Fazio was comfortably ahead¾at least by 14 points and perhaps by as many as 22.

But on December 14, Hallinan won again.

Either the poll was much further off than its margin of error, or there was a substantial and late surge for Hallinan. The Chronicle’s pollster, Cheryl Katz, director of Baldassare Associates, argues that in both elections there was a late shift toward Hallinan that took place after her interviews were complete.

An Examiner/Channel Two poll completed three days closer to the run-off election showed Fazio ahead by 7 points. That could support Katz’ theory of a last-minute trend toward Hallinan. Or because the difference between the results of the two polls is more than their margins of error, it could be another indicator that polls aren’t as precise as they seem.

The D.A. race wasn’t the only example of surveys taken close to the election missing the final vote by far more than their margins of error. An Examiner/KTVU poll with a margin of error of +/- 4 points showed Prop. 25, the campaign finance reform measure, ahead by 5 points a week before the election. It lost by 29.

Polls are essential

The accuracy of polls is rarely assessed. Yet they play a leading role in public life. Survey results are used to determine which taxes, public projects, policy initiatives and candidates might be viable. Results of a single poll can open the wallets of contributors or close them, energize supporters or deflate them. Political strategies and governing policies are based on them.

As the November general elections approach, you can count on seeing lots of political polls. So Grade the News analyzed the predictive power of several recent polls and asked the experts how polling is changing.

Here’s what we found:

• Despite some frustrations, pollsters employed by local newspapers and television stations enjoyed a pretty good record last year predicting winners and losers. We examined six polls conducted by three companies for Bay Area news media during the last year. The side that was ahead in the final survey before the election won in 73 percent of races local media deemed important enough to cover.

If you apply some pollsters’ rule of thumb that the best prediction of the outcome of a ballot proposition is the survey’s estimate of “Yes” voters, then polls forecast winners in 85% of these high-profile races. (In other words, even if a prop is leading, if the final survey doesn’t find at least 50% favor it, the “undecideds” will stick with the status quo and combine with the “No’s” to defeat it.) 

• The bad news is that part, perhaps much, of the success in predicting winners may have been due to how lop-sided most of the races in the spring primary were, rather than to polling precision. In fewer than half of all races analyzed was the survey’s estimate of the actual margin between the winning and losing sides within the predicted range of error. Sometimes it was way off.

•  The margin of sampling error is the only source of error mentioned in most news reports of polls, but it is almost never the only source of error, nor, often, the most important.

• Polling is becoming more difficult across the nation, and particularly in high immigration states like California. The chances of a respondent not speaking the same language(s) as the pollster, of not being at home to take the call or tying up the phone by using the internet, and of refusing to cooperate all are rising, according to experts.

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How Accurate are Bay Area Newspapers?

Joseph Pulitzer once said the three rules of journalism are “Accuracy! Accuracy! Accuracy!

The namesake of journalism’s most prestigious prize would likely approve of major Bay Area newspapers. A Grade the News spot check of 66 sources quoted in three of our largest newspapers finds the sources are overwhelmingly pleased with the accuracy and context of their published quotes. Sources also almost unanimously said reporters got other facts in the story right too.

The results represent good news for an industry worried about its credibility. A recent survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors estimates that 73% of Americans have become more skeptical recently about the accuracy of news. In that survey sources were even more critical of reporting practices than the public at large.

But the sources we spoke to seemed almost surprised at how carefully the three newspapers we analyzed reported their stories.      

Asked to rate the accuracy of direct quotes and paraphrases attributed to them in specific stories that were read back to them, sources gave the Bay Area newspapers almost perfect scores. On a 5-point scale of accuracy, with 5 being “very accurate,” the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News tied at 4.82; the San Francisco Chronicle averaged  4.74. All three papers scored at or above 95% of a perfect score, solid “A” work by any measure.

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How to Read Political Polls Like a Pro

As Campaign 2000 intensifies, political polls will dominate the news. Here’s a guide to interpreting them rationally.

1. Take polls conducted more than six weeks before an election with a sack, not a grain, of salt.  As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1840, Americans “find it a tiresome inconvenience to exercise political rights which distract them from industry. When required to elect representatives, to support authority by personal service, or to discuss public business together, they find they have no time.”

Then, as now, many citizens don’t really make up their minds about how they will vote on any but the most publicized races until shortly before the election. So early polls are prone to volatile top-of-the-head responses. Such polls are like nailing Jello to a wall.

2. Expand the margin of error at least by half, if not double. The results of scientific polls are often presented as “a snapshot” of public opinion at a particular time with an exact percentage of the population favoring something or someone and a precise margin of error.

But polling experts caution that the margin of error only measures one reason why the survey results may differ from true public opinion--sampling error. Further, this error margin rests on a small mountain of assumptions that are never met in the real world. A poll is never a “snapshot.” It’s merely an estimate. Not a photo, but a drawing. And it’s based on probability, not certainty.

When the gap between candidates--or sides of a ballot issue--is equal to or smaller than the margin of error, the poll can't really say who is ahead. In fact, unless the gap is twice as large as the margin of error, there is at least a small chance that the race is too close to call. (That's because each side's estimate has a margin of error around it.)

Because there are so many reasons a poll may be off, if possible, average results of similar polls rather than relying on a single survey, suggests Prof. Steven Chaffee, an experienced academic pollster at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Polls’ Precision is exaggerated

In July the San Jose Mercury News reported that smoking among California youth had dropped by more than a third¾from 10.7 percent using tobacco to 6.9 percent¾in just one year.

The astonishing results were based on a poll conducted by the California Department of Health Services. But the Mercury didn’t say how many were polled, how many of those phoned by pollsters cooperated, or what the poll’s margin of error was. Nor did it say that  interviewers required kids to ask their parents for permission before proceeding, a process that may in itself have depressed admissions of smoking.

The Contra Costa Times, though a much smaller newspaper, included most of this information. It also quoted experts who cast doubt on whether there had been a drop at all, given that youngsters were reporting on themselves, with their parents’ knowledge and talking to representatives of  the health department. The Times also reported that the results¾which reflected very positively on the department sponsoring the survey¾contrasted with national surveys showing smoking rising among teens.

The Mercury reporter did not respond to questions about the smoking survey.

Bay Area newspapers are full of polls. They tell us everything from how many motorists fail to yield to pedestrians on California cross-walks, how many Americans own cats, what Bay Area physical therapists earn, how many kids are solicited for sex on-line, even the funniest film ever. 

So Grade the News examined how the media know all of this. Or some of this. We focused primarily on political polls because of their enormous importance to self-government.

In general, we found that the Bay Area’s two biggest newspapers present poll results with a precision and authority that’s beyond the survey’s ability to deliver. Poll results were reported not as imperfect estimates of public opinion, but as “snapshots” of the public mind. When margins of error were reported, they were presented as the only reason the survey might be off. In reality, there are many reasons.

We also found:

·  Claims made about opinion differences among groups within the sample¾say homeowners vs. renters¾often fail to recognize that sampling error for small groups makes the published comparison meaningless.

·  Ironically, polls the newspapers conducted or sponsored themselves contain the most cautions. Surveys that journalists knew the least about and could not be sure met professional standards, on the other hand, were usually reported with few if any warnings about their accuracy.

·  Polls seem to gain precision the more they are reported. When first published, a poll story might contain a number of yellow flags. Subsequent reports drop margins of error and other caveats about their validity.

Nevertheless, Grade the News commends Bay Area news media for undertaking the cost of discovering public opinion in a systematic way. Good polls are expensive. But they offer a far more accurate view of public opinion than the “person on the street” approach common in American journalism two decades ago.

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by Mike Antonucci, Mercury News Popular Culture Writer

Er, what were these stories, displaced by Harry Potter, that would have so elevated civic discourse and community life? What was this information we so badly needed to know?

What our editors think of our readers (who must include a few people who don't feel dirty to earn their living from marketing ) is that Harry Potter was a repeat front-page story because the public chose it to be. It was all those folks out there who built that story into a phenomenon of provocative financial, social and literary interest.

What I don't think about those readers is that they were a manipulated, advertising-driven herd that wiser editors needed to redirect. That broad, unifying and inspirational passion for Harry is the antithesis of demographically targeted, culturally Balkanizing marketing-think.

What the Merc did is called riding a good story. Each day you check to see if it has any legs left. There are always choices. That hour by hour process is exhilarating, erratic and incredibly spontaneous and benign compared to the calculation and cynicism implicit in that theorem about "buzz."

I'm all for serious news, as long as it's patently relevant, can encompass what's joyful and separates the pretentious from the important. A lot of readers I know see the front pages of newspapers only for as long as it takes to throw them aside and pull out a section that means something to their lives.

Harry Potter wasn't a bigger story than others. It was a better story than others.   

Grade the News invited Mr. Antonucci to respond to Mr. McManus' column and appreciates his willingness to spark debate. The views above are Mr. Antonucci's and not necessarily the Mercury's.

Bias in the Newsroom

A new national survey of journalists shows self-censhorship is a common and growing practice.

The pressures to skip or soften newsworthy stories arise largely from market forces--fear of boring viewers and readers, advertiser pressures, the interests of the news organization or its parent company, or fear of angering a boss.

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Do you find it harder than ever to tell the difference between real news and stories that are really thinly veiled advertisements? (click the apple)

Other Analyses and commentaries on Bay Area News Media

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Were the networks right to limit coverage of the 2000 national political conventions?

Our First Report Card Rating Bay Area News Media

Looking back: Rating local coverage of the 1998 California primary

Did area news media enable a rip-off of Microsoft?

Disney synergy at Channel 7

Bay Area journalists tell what's over-covered and what's undercovered

Are tie-in stories ethical?

Is sports more important than news?

Head-to-head: The Chronicle vs. the Examiner on pedestrian safety

Did the Examiner go easy on Mayor Brown after its publisher offered a deal?

What our newspapers aren't telling us about youth and violence

Revised rules for grading news content.

Take a look at the test we put Bay Area news media through.

Tell us if you think it's fair?