Pandora's box or cyber-revolution? Inspections get media makeover

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 23, 1998 by Alan Liddle, Carolyn Walkup

Once upon a time, the worst thing that could happen to an operator was to suffer an uncharacteristically bad health inspection and then have the results published in the hometown paper or made the subject of a local television expose.

Today, however, anxious operators nationwide are facing what is potentially a much worse scenario. In recent months a number of newspapers, television stations and radio operations have availed themselves of government data, much of which is being made more accessible over the Internet, to craft stories questioning food-safety practices at restaurants and other foodservice facilities.

Giving those stories a much longer shelf life, some news organizations are repackaging their work for the Internet, where the original article is augmented with such things as searchable databases and downloadable lists of restaurants' health inspection scores.

With such provocative titles as "Dirty Dining" and "Rating the Restaurants: Can They Make the Grade?" some of the special reports and series point to acknowledged shortcomings in state or regional inspection processes. Nevertheless, the reports have been branded as "sensational" by operators and trade-group representatives who feel that some of the information has been presented out of context.

"The media try to sensationalize everything," Bob King, president of the Georgia Hospitality & Travel Association, complained. He characterized on-line databases of restaurant-inspection scores as potentially "misleading" because restaurants are inspected relatively infrequently in some jurisdictions, and that means food-handling practices, good or bad, might have changed since the last inspection reported. At the same time, he indicated, an operator might be put at a competitive disadvantage through the broad dissemination of inspection scores if his or her restaurant was visited by a sanitarian who grades on a tougher curve than sanitarians visiting other establishments.

The keys to improving food safety, King suggested, are worker education and hiring more sanitarians, not the broadcasting, publishing or Internet posting of inspection scores that, if misunderstood or taken out of context, could threaten the livelihood of restaurateurs.

Food-safety problems "won't be fixed with threats," said chef Keith Keogh, president of the San Francisco-based California Culinary Academy. "There are not enough inspectors to inspect all the restaurants in the world, so if things are to change, it will have to be through education and positive reinforcement," added Keogh, who disputed his school's less-than-flattering health inspection grade, recently posted on a media Internet site.

Sensational, misleading or inaccurate, media-shaped databases on Internet sites appear to be a growing trend and not a passing fad, given the First Amendment protections afforded the media, their perceived mission to help protect the public and the competitive pressures felt by contemporary news organizations.

With the rise of the Internet, newspapers, television and radio stations simultaneously must battle traditional rivals and strive to maintain relevancy in the face of a computer-literate public's growing thirst for continually updated information on demand.

Doubling the impact of recent stories about the restaurant-inspection process have been strategic alliances among newspaper and television organizations.

In Atlanta the daily Journal-constitution newspaper and ABC network affiliate WSB-TV, both of which are owned by the Cox news conglomerate, teamed up in October to research and cross-promote an inspection-oriented series, "Not on the menu -- food safety in Atlanta restaurants." The Hearst Corp.'s daily San Francisco Examiner in January joined forces with Cox-owned, Fox-affiliated KTVU Channel 2 television in Oakland, Calif., to compile "Behind the swinging doors," a report on restaurant inspections in San Francisco.

The Journal-Constitution and WSB-TV have made available to the web-cruising public a searchable database with the results of thousands of restaurant inspections in several counties in and around Atlanta.

What's more, the Journal-Constitution's restaurant reviewer recently indicated that he would peruse a restaurant's most recent health inspection report and skip over any businesses that "scored poorly."

At KTVU's web site, the station has posted a list of more than 150 San Francisco area restaurants cited for healthcode violations or fading to pay permit fees.

Among the other newspapers and television stations that have crafted Internet-accessible databases of restaurant-inspection scores are The Morning Star of Wilmington, N.C.; ABC network affiliate WRAL-TV of Raleigh, N.C.; and WHO-TV in Des Moines, Iowa.

Along with updates about KCBS-TV's much-promoted and highly rated "Behind the Kitchen Door" series, a hidden-camera expose on deficiencies in Los Angeles County's restaurant inspection system, the station has made available at its web site a searchable database of thousands of the "best" and "worst' scoring restaurants in four Southern California counties.