How do you like the eye?? This is one of an ongoing series of columns by MediaWatch, a local group monitoring and analyzing local media and hopefully irritating the hell out of them. We want to involve you in this effort. Write to us at MediaWatch, P.O.Box 95113, Seattle, WA 98145 or send an e-mail to slr@scn.org.

For the last two weeks several of us have dedicated ourselves to reading the local newspapers, looking for some very specific stories. It's amazing what you discover when you spend some time with a newspaper and take it apart. How much space is devoted to hard news, filler, and ad space? How much copy do local businesses get? Local sports teams? Does anyone notice that those stories and sport stats amount to free advertising for corporations and sports franchises and have little relevance to real news except that some people are making lots of money and others are hoping the latest Boeing safely problem will not affect their jobs??

One obsessive/compulsive MediaWatcher analyzed the front page of the Sunday Times. It happened to be the Easter edition, so we had our requisite number of column inches devoted to some cult that followed the dogma of a guy who believed in a UFO following the trail of the Hale-Bopp comet, no, wait a minute, that's the wrong guy. The other guy was crucified by angry Romans and rose from the dead after three days. They may have known each other in a former life.

Between the Christian Easter cult and the Heaven's Gate cult, 63% of the front page was fluff. Is this important information for a citizen to use to make informed choices about her daily life? Wouldn't we have been better served by a small box directing us to inner pages for these stories and more space for stories like the war in Albania, cutbacks in education funding, or the news that the U.S banks may have taken assets from holocaust victims? And what about the stories on the scandals of the two parties fundraising for election propaganda? These and other local, national and international stories get buried between four-page ads for the Bon--if they get printed at all!

The front page of the March 31st, 1997 Seattle Times broke down like this: Easter 43%, Heaven's Gate cult 14%, title/header 20%, index 8%, other 15%. Not much space for the important stuff. Are newspapers actually newspapers, or advertising and corporate press releases? And this is the public's source of in-depth news; what airs on television is consistently even more biased and trivial.

Future MediaWatch columns will feature comments and analysis on biases we're noticing in current local and national stories as run in print, TV and radio news. We've set up an e-mail list to which anyone is invited and welcome to post their observations; we'll share the best of this dialogue in ETS! To contribute, send your thoughts to mediawatch@u.washington.edu; to subscribe to the list, send a message to majordomo@u.washington.edu: subscribe mediawatch [your name].

THE MICROBOEING WATCH: Does it seem like our local papers devote astounding percentages of their news holes to Boeing and Microsoft press releases? Can there ever be too many of these stories? To check and see whether there actually are limits, each MW column in ETS! will include stats on just how many times our local dailies catch a cold when the corporate behemoths sneeze.

Week of Mon. 3/24 to Sun. 3/30:

page/P-I Boeing stories/P-I Microsoft stories/Times Boeing stories/Times MS stories

Front page 2 0 1 0 Front/local sections 2 1 6 3 Business section 0 5 6 9 Total in paper 2 6 12 13 Week of 3/31-4/6:

Front page 2 0 1 0 Front/local sections 2 0 3 0 Business sections 1 2 10 10 Total in paper 3 2 13 10

For these weeks, for example, while the Times had lots more news section stories on Boeing, note that every P-I Boeing news story got front page placement. Don't you feel better informed already?