How not to report on an audit
Yesterday, we gave the Chronicle's evolving coverage of the SAFEclear audit a bit of a break, suspecting that the story that appeared in the morning editions of the print version would be significantly different.
Instead, it was mostly the same.
Here is the opening of the story that appeared in today's editions:
The mandatory towing program known as Safe Clear will cost the city $878,000 in the next fiscal year, $278,000 more than Mayor Bill White's estimate, according to an audit released Wednesday.
White said the disparity between his numbers and those presented Wednesday by City Controller Annise Parker resulted from planned cost-saving changes in the program that the audit didn't take into account.
Parker acknowledged that the audit "essentially showed that the mayor's numbers are reasonable for the cost of the program."
"The program has changed significantly several times ... so it was very difficult to decide how to present the data," she said.
The mayor said some police officers performing administrative jobs related to the program would be replaced with civilians and that "cumbersome" procedures would be streamlined, both of which would save money.
Notice anything about the coverage of the controller's audit, especially when compared to this blog post?
Of the first five sentences of the Chronicle story, only ONE refers to any aspect of the audit itself, and that is the $278,000 disparity between the Mayor's estimates and the city controller's estimates. None of the remaining nine sentences in the story refers to any hard numbers from the report. Two sidebars attached to the story do not contain links to the actual report, although some hard numbers are reported in one sidebar. No mention is made in the entire story of the controller's freeze on payments to towing companies. In short, there's not much detailed reporting on the actual audit.
However, in four of the first five sentences of the story, Matt Stiles seems to go out of his way to suggest that even the city controller agrees that Mayor White's numbers are just fine. It's odd journalism to report what the main actors are saying about the numbers with no real discussion of the numbers themselves, or the methodology used to determine them. It's even stranger the way the discrepancy in the numbers is painted by Stiles. In the audit report itself, Controller Parker clearly rejects parts of HPD's methodology for estimating the cost of the program, and makes a number of key assumptions to arrive at her estimates. It may have been "very difficult" to do, but that's what she did -- not that Chronicle readers would know, because Stiles didn't report it or link to the audit.
Furthermore, the difference between the audit's estimate of an $878,000 hit for the city's portion of SAFEclear next year (not including METRO's contribution) versus Mayor White's estimate of $600,000 does not seem as trivial as Stiles' first five sentences would suggest. Parker's estimate of the city's contribution to SAFEclear is 46% higher than the Mayor's estimate, which does not seem like a trivial amount at all. Indeed, we would like to suggest that Mr. Stiles hit our paypal button with 46% of his next paycheck, just to test our hypothesis that a 46% discrepancy is not trivial. We're guessing that's not going to happen.
Call us old-fashioned, but we think that news coverage of an audit ought to spend some time analyzing the contents of said audit, and ought to do so from the beginning. Throw in a few quotes from the main actors (Annise Parker, Mayor White, Shelly Sekula-Gibbs) at the bottom, and maybe some relevant comments from an objective analyst (but please not Bob Stein, whose wife works for the mayor). There's your coverage.
In short, the story should REPORT the news. Instead, this story seemed to slant the news in favor of Mayor White, and neglected key parts of the story.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 06/16/05 09:56 PM | Print |
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