Stars and dunces

STARS

To reporter Patrick May and the San Jose Mercury News for a must read if you want to understand the California budget crisis and indeed where tax money goes. "Proposition 13: Tax Revolt Turns 25", a set of stories published on Sunday May 11 explains how one neighbor living in a smaller house on a smaller lot can pay 8 times more tax than another a few doors down. More importantly it explains how Californians gave up majority rule on tax use and surrendered local control to the state legislature.

To reporters Barbara Feder Ostrov and Julie Sevrens Lyons, photographer Joanne Hoyoung Lee, editor April Lynch and the San Jose Mercury News for a four-part series on a long-undercovered topic "Crisis in Health Care." The series began February 23, 2003 and shows how major shifts in health care and insurance are affecting Bay Area residents, health care providers and businesses. A sea change is underway. Read all about it at: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/5244732.htm. Mercury News articles are only available free of charge for 7 days after publication.

 

 

Dunces

To the San Francisco Chronicle for a misleading headline on Friday, April 18. The headline read: "Minority Admissions Bouncing Back at UC." The story aroused suspicion because 16 of its 17 paragraphs told a different--more pessimistic--story about California's flagship universities.

While the Chronicle headline is technically correct, notice how differently University of California President Richard C. Atkinson characterized the same data, in an op-ed in the Washington Post just two days later:

This year the absolute number of underrepresented minority [Latino, African-American and Native-American] freshmen at UC campuses exceeds the number enrolled before race and ethnicity were eliminated as admissions considerations. But the story is troubling in at least two respects. First, the proportions of underrepresented minority students at UC's more selective campuses -- particularly UC Berkeley and UCLA -- remain far below their previous levels. Second, the gap between the percentage of underrepresented minority students in the California graduating high school class and the percentage in the UC freshman class has widened appreciably.

Putting the numbers in broader perspective, Atkins also pointed out:

The most recent study found that 30 percent of Asian American students in California and 13 percent of white students met UC eligibility requirements; the figure was a disheartening 4 percent for Latinos and 3 percent for African Americans.

This is a serious concern in a state where Latinos made up 43% of all public school students in 2000, and are projected to become the majority, at 53%, in 2010, according to UC data.

Atkinson's observations were based on a UC report published in March, "Undergraduate Access to the University of California After the Elimination of Race-Conscious Policies." The web address for that report is http://www.ucop.edu/sas/publish/aa_final2.pdf.

To the Chronicle's credit, Reader Representative Dick Rogers has told GTN that the story may merit revisting--with the broader context of UC admissions data taken into account.

 

To the San Jose Mercury News on February 20, 2003 for devoting the most space on its front page to a story plainly stating that there was no news about the disappearance of Modesto housewife Laci Peterson. The story "Modesto Stakeout" consumed twice as much space as the next largest story on the most important page of the newspaper.

Reporters tried to inject life into the non-story with sarcasm: "The big news of the day?" Lori Aratani and Linda Goldston wrote, "Police measured Laci and Scott Peterson's driveway. They declined to explain why."

Neither the reporters nor Managing Editor Susan Goldberg would say why the story deserved such prominent play at a time when the nation is preparing for war, terror warnings are at the orange level of alert, the state is trying to fix a record budget deficit with implications for taxes and social services from education to health care, and Silicon Valley is struggling to climb out of a deep recession.

On the same day, the San Francisco Chronicle somehow missed the driveway measurement story. On page one, it carried these headlines:

• "Airports start car searches"
• "Plane crash kills 302 in Iran"
• "Iraq seen as bolder since protests"
• "Top coach hit with molest charges"
• "Liberal seed sprouts in Persian Gulf" (about Bahrain's experiment moving toward greater democracy)
• "Weather forecasts critical to Iraq war"

The more the Mercury News spends its most precious real estate on journalism that reaches for sensation and comes up empty-handed, the more its editors train us to consider the Merc unessential daily reading in the South Bay.

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Stars and Dunces are editorial judgments of news quality. The director and associate director of Grade the News are solely responsible for them. Although readers may nominate candidates, no story gets a star or dunce unless it is personally reviewed by a director. You are invited to register your own comments by clicking on the megaphone: