By Tali Woodward

The Bay Area's media outlets continue to waste ink and airtime on insignificant matters while neglecting news with potentially wide-reaching ramifications, according to a Feb. 2 report issued by Stanford University-based group Grade the News. And newspapers are quickly sinking to the level of TV newscasts, which have long prized sensationalism.

In a yearlong survey that ended in June 2004, Grade the News looked at how well the top eight mainstream news organizations in the area adhered to professional standards for sourcing, fairness, and story selection, among other things.

Overall, the nine researchers found that Bay Area TV stations are just barely satisfactory. Even the highest-graded newcasts – on KTVU, channel 2; KPIX, channel 5; and KGO, channel 7 – received only a C grade.

The newspapers – the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Contra Costa Times – fared better, with each receiving an overall score of B+. But Grade the News still found a decrease in "newsworthiness" of the main stories in all three papers. That decline alone was enough to pull all papers' overall grades down from the As they received in the last survey.

"Newspapers used to joke about TV stations for their sensationalistic ways," Grade the News director John McManus told the Bay Guardian. "Now they're trying to elbow the TV reporters aside [on the same stories]."

The report, a draft of which was provided to us prior to its release, states that both papers and TV stations "suffered in our grading system by crowding out other important stories with news of the weird, the fluffy, and the gruesome, epitomized by the ever-present face of Scott Peterson and his murdered wife, Laci."

Researchers tallied how much key time and space were devoted to coverage of celebrities, sports, minor accidents, and stories categorized as "human interest." They found that crime stories in particular were overemphasized. And the worst offender was KRON, channel 4, which devoted a full quarter of its news time to crime coverage.

"Our belief is that the news has unfortunately become market-driven," rather than guided by journalistic principles, McManus said. "Our purpose is to increase the market for substantive journalism and reduce it for schlock.... We're trying to do nothing less than make it unprofitable to distract people with pseudo-news."

The entire Grade the News report, plus an animation summarizing the findings, is available at www.gradethenews.org.

E-mail Tali Woodward