MODESTO BEE IS LATEST TO ANALYZE ITS OWN CREDIBILITY

By: Randy Dotinga Support Of Ballot Measure Was At Issue





Is the unexamined newspaper not worth publishing? Plenty of editors seem to
think so, judging by the rash of mea culpas in recent months. Now the trend has
hit central California, where The Modesto Bee has turned a microscope on
itself.



Just five days before Election Day, the Bee ran an unusual 1,000-word
story exploring its coverage of a city ballot proposition. "An undercurrent of the
debate over Modesto's Measure F is whether people can trust the Bee to
report the issue fairly," the story reported.



The Bee, a McClatchy Co. newspaper with a daily circulation of 83,852,
had a highly intimate relationship with Measure F, which called for a hike in the
local hotel tax to help fund the city's performing arts center. The newspaper
pledged to give $500,000 of its own money to the arts center and published
editorials praising the project. Also, the husband of Bee Publisher Lynn
Dickerson volunteered for the campaign in favor of the measure.



For the Bee's self-assessment, two reporters interviewed ethics experts
who expressed varying levels of concern about the Bee's role. One of
them, Peter Sussman, believes that a newspaper's close connection to an issue will
inevitably create problems in a newsroom. "There is always a kind of back-of-the-

mind recognition that certain avenues ought not to be pursued," said Sussman, a
former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle who helped write the ethics
code of the Society of Professional Journalists.



The Bee's executive managing editor, Mark Vasche, told E&P that
the newspaper decided to run the Nov. 2 article after considering "everything
that's gone on in our field regarding concern about credibility."



While the company's role complicated things, he said he had made it clear to his
reporters "that their job is to cover this issue, and our goal is for our coverage to
be fair, balanced, and accurate - and free from any influence of business
interests, whether it's our own or those of major advertisers."



People on both sides of the ballot-measure debate agree that the Bee's
coverage was fair, Vasche said, and the Bee, he added, disclosed its
involvement in stories about the measure. And here's the kicker: Despite the
extraordinary support from the Bee, Measure F failed at the polls on Nov.
7.







Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.