The newsworthiness of death
Why did the Mercury News and Associated Press give Israeli deaths greater prominence than Palestinian in the Middle East conflict?

Analysis by John McManus      

A Grade the News study of six months of the San Jose Mercury News' coverage during the height of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from April 1 to Sept. 30, 2002, shows that an Israeli death was 11 times more likely to make a front-page headline in San Jose than a Palestinian fatality.

The priority given to Israeli suffering in front-page headlines was reinforced throughout the stories by the order in which casualties were described, and compelling first-person accounts of Israeli deaths contrasted with second-hand and approximate estimates of Palestinian fatalities. Armed Palestinians were almost always referred to as "gunmen" and "militants" -- terms Americans associate with criminals and radicals -- rather than neutral identifiers. Read more.

When a poll isn't really a poll
Experts agree voluntary Internet surveys are flawed, even when demographically adjusted. Yet KGO Channel 7 insists its surveys are "scientific."

By Michael Stoll

For more than a year, KGO Channel 7 in San Francisco has been reporting what it calls "scientific" and "statistically valid" polls of Bay Area residents on such weighty topics as the economy, gay rights, war in Iraq and the popularity of candidates for governor.

But the station's polls are neither scientific nor statistically valid, polling experts say. In fact, they fail to meet the standards of the network to which KGO belongs. ABC News advises against even reporting on such informal "convenience" surveys.

Read more

New: KGO responds Posted Dec. 16, 2003

You make the call:
Should a Chronicle reporter and photographer have pretended to be homeless to observe conditions in a San Francisco shelter with a reputation for violence, theft and drug use?

Consider yourself the executive editor.

The problem of homelessness has progressively worsened in San Francisco for at least a generation, and two candidates for mayor are trading charges of being insensitive or ineffectual on the issue.

The Chronicle wants to show, among other things, a clear and compelling view of the inside of the homeless shelter with the worst reputation, Multi-Service Center South, believed by homeless people themselves to be "the toughest of San Francisco's emergency shelters, a filthy, violent drug den where everything not tied down is stolen."

If the paper approaches the city with a request to observe the shelter, the managers might clean up the place and put extra attendants on duty, making sure no one fights, smokes crack or experiences a psychotic breakdown in public view.

You want to expose the problems you've heard about, but going in undercover is inherently deceptive.
What do you do?

The debate debacle
A San Francisco mayoral forum unravels, as does one TV station's civic contribution

By Michael Stoll

In a two-man race for mayor, a debate missing one of the candidates is akin to the sound of one hand clapping.

But that's just what KGO Channel 7 is planning after a tussle with candidate Matt Gonzalez who boycotted the "debate" when the station rebuffed his insistence on having more than 60 seconds to answer reporters' questions.

On Monday KGO taped what will be a half-hour infomercial for candidate Gavin Newsom. Mr. Newsom, for all his talents, is incapable of debating himself. Read more

It wasn't just entertainers Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey who lavished attention on Arnold Schwarzenegger in his bid to replace Gray Davis as governor of California.

Four major Bay Area newspapers gave Mr. Schwarzenegger far more headlines on their front pages than any other replacement candidate in the recall race, a Grade the News analysis shows. Read more

Percent of photo space and headlines allocated to top recall candidates

The most important stories of the day?

Here are the stories editors of major Bay Area and U.S. newspapers thought were most important for you to know on Friday, Nov. 21, 2003:

Above the fold in Bay Area newspapers, the story of pop celebrity Michael Jackson dominated, but editors elsewhere found other news more consequential. See more comparisons

Challenge guidelines/rules:

1. Pick the least critical month for ratings. Your choice.

2. Do not lead any newscast with episodic crime story. (For bonus points: no episodic crime stories in first block.)

3. Do not group crime stories together. (The first crime story may have some merit; the following ones are routine police blotter types.) Read more

Millions of dollars of news-gathering equipment and scores of reporters, producers and technicians filled a dusty lot across from the Stanislaus County Courthouse last Wednesday.

Day one of the preliminary hearing to determine whether a 31-year-old former fertilizer salesman would face trial for murdering his pregnant wife and unborn son was underway. It was a proceeding even the journalists covering it called interesting, but inconsequential.

The allocation of such massive resources to a single episode of alleged domestic violence in a nation where an average of three women a day are murdered by intimate partners raises a basic question about journalism's purpose. Is news really about entertainment -- however macabre and tragic -- or is its purpose to help citizens understand those issues and events most likely to shape their lives? Read more

Chronicle sidesteps ethical concerns in
San Francisco prosecutor endorsement

Commentary by David Weir

From a journalistic perspective, it's fair to say that the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle has been improving in quality lately, but it took one giant step backwards on Sunday, Oct. 19.

In an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for district attorney, the newspaper launched a brutally inaccurate broadside against the incumbent DA, Terence Hallinan, focusing on what the paper claims are his general incompetence and his low conviction rates.

At the same time, the editorial dismissed as insignificant Harris' blatant violations of the campaign finance rules (she exceeded the legal spending limits she had pledged to respect, in the process drawing one of the largest fines ever in San Francisco politics -- $34,000). The Chronicle said this was not a sufficient reason to question her suitability to become the top prosecutor for San Francisco. Read about it

The Chronicle responds

As Scott Peterson's preliminary hearing nears

How to Distinguish Between Socially Responsible and Junk Journalism
Commentary by John McManus

“You are what you eat,” the nutritionists say. A diet of salty, fatty, or empty calories may taste delicious, but harm your health.

Similarly, a self-governing society’s health depends on its news diet. When the majority of a society knows the name of Laci Peterson’s unborn son, but not who their elected leaders at the city, county or state government are, that society’s health is at risk.

Just as junk food is widely appealing and cheap to produce, junk journalism is entertaining to read or watch and inexpensive to report. Junk sells in an uninformed marketplace. But eventually it makes a body — or body politic — sick. Here’s a guide to discerning between socially responsible and junk journalism.

Just short of midnight on June 30, a man from Los Angeles and a woman from a small Colorado town had a brief sexual encounter at a secluded lodge in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. She called it rape. He called it consensual.

Last Friday their dispute landed 1,000 miles away on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News.

There are more than 200,000 charges of men raping women in a given year in the United States. Why was this one so important that it displaced news in the same reporting cycle about an Iraqi suicide bomber killing 10, a possible admissions scandal at the University of California, a windfall of $450 million in unexpected state tax revenue or alternate stories other Bay Area newspapers chose for their front pages? Read about it

You make the call: Should Bay Area papers have picked up the late-night Los Angeles Times story on sexual assault allegations against Arnold Schwarzenegger for the next day’s paper? Photo credit: Stephan Savoia, Associated Press

Consider yourself the executive editor.

It’s 9:30 at night on Oct. 2, 2003, just five days before the recall election for California’s governor. Another edition of the newspaper is being put to bed. Suddenly, an advisory comes across the Los Angeles Times news wire: Six women, four of them anonymous, accuse gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger of having groped or otherwise sexually harassed them between 1975 and 2000. The full story will come later that night.

Your job is to empower citizens to make a wise choice in the California recall election. But…
• Do you trust a story with such explosive claims that your staff had no hand in gathering?
• If so, do you publish a reputation-hammering story based mostly on anonymous sources, none of whom reported these incidents to police?
• Do charges of sexual harassment necessarily affect a candidate’s fitness for office?

We’ve assembled two opposing arguments on the issue. Read them both, then think about how you’d make the call. When you’ve decided, click on our online poll, and find out how others voted. Then check out how the major papers in the Bay Area and beyond handled the story. Ready?

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. But even such compelling issues couldn’t lift the five most watched local television stations from mediocrity.

From January to July, five researchers at Grade the News, a watchdog group affiliated with Stanford’s 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. Read about it

Core quality ratings of the Bay Area’s most popular news media

News organization	News- worth iness*	Context	Explan- ation	Local rele- vance	Civic contrib- ution	Enter- prise	Fairness	Overall
	B+	A	A	A	A	A	A	A
	C+	C	C+	A	C+	D	D	C+
	B+	A	A	A	A	A	B	A
	C	C	C	A	C+	D	D	C
	D+	D	C+	A	C	D+	C+	C
	B+	A	B+	A	A	A	A	A
	D+	D	D+	A	C	D	B+	C
	D+	F	D	B	C	D	D	D+

By Michael Stoll

The three-minute "cover story" on the Jan. 15 news looked like a powerful local investigative report, just what you'd expect from a trusted news source like NBC. But little about the story was as it appeared. NBC 11's consumer exposé purported to reveal a "secret" credit bureau that "may be collecting your information and selling it without your knowledge." And that information, anchor Brad Hicks warned, was so suspect that viewers were urged to contact the bureau to be sure it hadn't ruined their credit rating. Ominous as that sounds, each claim was misleading. The company, Innovis, isn't secret. It doesn't report to those who might approve your car or house loan. And according to the story's own sources, it's received far fewer complaints than its competitors -- only two nationally in three years.

KNTV-NBC 11, might have discovered that, if it had done any of its own reporting. But that night, Mr. Hicks was more actor than reporter. He appears to have merely reshuffled a script produced by a low-profile content provider in suburban Atlanta that distributes canned video "news."

For decades, television stations have quietly outsourced portions of their local news program. But in the last five years, scores of broadcasters around the country have discovered a resource that helps them serve up pre-packaged stories, leaving viewers with the mistaken impression that journalists in their communities did much of the research, writing and on-camera interviewing. Read about it

New: The company that created the story responds Read about it