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.”
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.”
