How Does the Media Report on Government Performance?

While we have witnessed much success in the development and use of performance measures,adversarial journalism is one reason government managers do not publicly report their performance. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) argues that communicating both financial and nonfinancial performance results to the public is an integral part of accountability. Our concerns is that most managers assume media coverage will be unfair, inaccurate or incomplete. This assumption colors their decision on whether to share nonfinancial performance results with the media. The result is a restricted flow of information to the citizenry. Specifically, we seek to answer three questions: 1) How often to newspapers publish stories about government performance?, 2) How accurate is the reporting?, and 3) What is the tone of the articles? We conclude our article with suggestions for managers