John H. McManus

I would like to contribute to a civic revival. I fear the American democratic experiment is in more trouble than sobriety at a frat party. My background and expertise lies in news, so that has been the focus of my research and writing.

I started my professional life as a journalist. With a bias for social justice, I reported for several newspapers in the South writing about race, class and all the wonderful people who inhabit that culturally rich quadrant of America. Much of my reporting was superficial, so I pursued a Ph.D. hoping to write less often, but with more depth. Upon graduation, I taught journalism and media sociology at various California universities and researched how market forces were fundamentally undermining the public service mission of American journalism.

I became a professor just in time to see the pedagogical paradigm shift, just as journalism had, toward a market-orientation. My students became customers to please rather than learners to teach. I couldn't go along and was fired.

So I became a media researcher at the Berkeley Media Studies Group and in 2000 launched GradeTheNews.org, a Web site that did for news in the San Francisco Bay Area what Consumer Reports magazine does for toaster ovens — rate the most popular newscasts and newspapers head-to-head. With funding from the Knight, Ford and Gerbode foundations, the project moved from my bedroom to Stanford and later San Jose State. The project ran for seven years before running out of funds. My work on news and information literacy is based on what I learned directing Grade the News.

My research has appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Reports and Quill as well as academic journals such as Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Communication Theory, Communication Research, Political Communication, Mass Comm Review, Journalism, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, and the Newspaper Research Journal. My first book, Market-Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware? won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Research Award in 1994. My second book, Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web won the same award in 2009. The book has been adopted in courses at more than 20 American universities. My most recent books are a second edition of Detecting Bull, and Don't Be Fooled: A Citizen's Guide to News and Information in the Digital Age. Both were published in 2012.

I earned my BA at Holy Cross College, an MA at the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. at Stanford University.