Stinging the Bee
For example, some readers feel Bites might have gone a little too far last week in suggesting that Gov. Gray Davis has been bought by monied interests.
That complaint prompted an extensive investigation here in the Capital Bites wing of the SN&R, where the strictest of protocols and the highest standard of scrutiny are observed. The investigation concluded that not only was the column justified, but also that Davis is a hapless wienie and Bites should have chomped down even harder on him.
So, there you go. Who could argue with conclusions like that? After all, they are in print. Bites is just glad to be able to ensure your confidence by thoroughly investigating all complaints, a policy that mirrors one in place at the Sacramento Bee.
Over the weekend, the Bee revealed the results of an investigation that put to rest (at least according to them) the high-profile conflict the paper has had recently with the University of California at Davis.
These two institutions have been publicly sniping at each other since the Bee’s two-part series on the reporting of rape statistics late last month. The nut of the stories was this: UC Davis deliberately under-reports campus rape statistics to make the schools seem safer than they are so would-be students aren’t scared away.
Of course, the stories tried not to use the legally loaded word “deliberately,” just as Bites hasn’t actually ever said Davis is a closet Republican. But just as Bites tries hard to leave certain impressions with readers, so did the Bee articles, including outlining the motives for deliberate action and placing quotes in an order that led readers to that conclusion.
That was just one of the many complaints UC Davis administrators raised in a nine-page letter demanding a retraction, also hitting the paper hard for misrepresenting the university’s approach to sexual assault by using out-of-context quotes, withholding key information and repeatedly using the phrase “largely invisible epidemic"—taken from a campus grant application—as some kind of admission that the school was dummying the books.
As usual with its investigations, the Bee’s stories and their self-important follow-ups were overhyped and overplayed in an obvious quest for awards, with every release of information by UC Davis attributed to the Bee’s crusading efforts.
Or, at least that was the impression Bites had until being set straight by executive editor Rick Rodriguez’s special weekend column on the matter, “Bee series on UC rape statistics stands up to scrutiny.” So, the paper scrutinized its own stories and surprisingly concluded they were right. So there.
Yet beneath the “we’re right, they’re wrong” approach in the piece, buried in the last column, were some key admissions by Rodriguez. He admitted “we may have incorrectly paraphrased” a pivotal quote by the campus’ top violence prevention official that the article used to make the deliberate action case. He also admitted that “it’s clear” campus officials believed they were complying with reporting laws and that the paper “did not do enough to let the public know how extensive a violence prevention program, particularly involving sexual assault, UC Davis has.”
These three admissions essentially add up to a much bigger admission: that the Bee was wrong to imply that UC Davis doesn’t take sexual assaults seriously and tries to hide the threat from public view.
And while it is still a print-worthy story that the university’s reporting of sexual assault stats doesn’t meet the letter of the law, was that story worth hundreds of column inches and such prominent displays in both the paper and its Web site?
But then again, the Bee-UC Davis pissing match has now taken up this entire premium space—when it could have been devoted to slapping around C.C. Myers or saying aloha to Chuck Quackenbush—so who’s Bites to talk?
