JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

We still have five more days of “Trump time,” making it too early to start celebrating Joe Biden’s inauguration. And, besides, who knows what the hell might happen between now and the inauguration?

So while we’re waiting for what we hope will be a “peaceful transfer of power,” let’s dial down and enjoy three memorable oldies.

For this installment, I’ve selected songs that sprang from three teams of powerhouse musical figures — The Lettermen and composer Jerome Kern; Paul Anka and conductor and record producer Don Costa; and Percy Faith and arranger and conductor Hugo Winterhalter.

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First up is The Lettermen’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” an achingly beautiful song released in 1961.

No wonder this song has endured: The music was written by the great Jerome Kern, whom Wikipedia calls “one of the most important American theater composers of the early 20th century.” Kern wrote more than 700 songs, which were used in more than 100 stage works.

He wrote “The Way You Look Tonight” for the 1936 movie Swing Time, which starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the movie, Astaire sang the song to Rogers while she was washing her hair in an adjacent room. Astaire’s recording reached the top of the pop music charts in 1936, and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song that year.

The lyrics were written by Dorothy Fields, who said: “The first time Jerry played that melody for me, I went out and started to cry. The release absolutely killed me. I couldn’t stop, it was so beautiful.”

The Lettermen’s version was released in 1961 and went to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was The Lettermen’s second biggest hit, after “When I Fall in Love,” which made it to the top, also in 1961.

Here it is, a song that never gets old…

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“Put Your Head on My Shoulder” — Paul Anka

Anka, a Canadian by birth, wrote the words and music to this song and released it in 1959. It rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, behind only Bobby Darrin’s “Mack the Knife.”

The lyrics go a long way toward making this song irresistible…

Put your lips next to mine, dear
Won’t you kiss me once, baby?
Just a kiss goodnight, maybe
You and I will fall in love

…but it’s the arrangement, with lilting guitar chords interspersed throughout, that makes it soar.

The arranger was Don Costa, who, when Anka came along, was working for ABC-Paramount Records. Their first song together was “Diana,” which Anka recorded when he was just 15. “Diana,” released in 1957, went to No. 2.

Costa went on to work with such stars as Frank Sinatra, Sara Vaughan and Tony Bennett.

Costa died of a heart attack in 1983 at age 57. Anka, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1990, is still living. He would be 80 in July.

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“Theme from A Summer Place” — Percy Faith and his Orchestra

This song was written by Max Steiner, with lyrics by Mack Discant, for the for the 1959 film A Summer Place, starring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. (When I saw that movie at age 13, I thought it was the greatest movie ever made and Troy Donahue was the best actor who ever lived.)

Released as a single before the film came out, the song was not an immediate hit. It didn’t break into the Billboard Hot 100 until mid-January 1960. Six weeks later, it went to No. 1 and stayed there for nine consecutive weeks — a record at the time.

The song earned Faith a Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1961. It was the first movie theme and the first instrumental to win that award.

Like Anka with “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” “Theme from a Summer Place” benefited from the touch of a great arranger and conductor, Hugo Winterhalter.

After graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music, Winterhalter taught school for several years before turning professional during the mid-1930s, serving as a sideman and arranger for Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey and other band leaders.

Some of the singers he arranged songs for included Dinah Shore, Billy Eckstine, Perry Como and Harry Belafonte.

Winterhalter died from cancer in Greenwich, CT, on Sept. 17, 1973. He was 64. He had a son, Hugo Francis Winterhalter, who was killed in Vietnam on December 29, 1966.

Faith died in 1976 at age 67.

On this snowy winter’s day in early 2021, here’s “Theme from a Summer Place,” in memory of Percy Faith and Hugo Winterhalter, two musicians who made the world a better place.

P.S. Minutes after I posted this, our 32-year-old son Charlie, an amateur musician and Oldies aficionado, told me The Lettermen did a cover version of “Theme From a Summer Place.” I listened to it, but…it isn’t in the same league with Percy Faith’s original. I won’t link to it, but you can check it out on YouTube if you’re inclined.     

For the first time in more than 20 years, today’s Kansas City Star did not contain the image and slogan of its founder.

Since a 1998 redesign, William Rockhill Nelson’s imperious mugshot and condescending slogan — “A Paper for the People” — had appeared on The Star’s masthead. (The masthead is the copy block at the bottom of the Opinion page, which lists the paper’s top executives.)

But after an expansive examination of its coverage of Black people and institutions over the decades — shortcomings laid bare in a remarkable series of stories last month — Star editor and president Mike Fannin decided it was time for the paper to formally distance itself from Nelson.

The new masthead is bare, but much, much better.

News of Fannin’s decision was reported in a Sunday story at the top of Page A4. In the story, development reporter Kevin Hardy wrote about the connection between Nelson and Kansas City’s most infamous racist, real estate developer J.C. Nichols.

Nelson was 40 years older than Nichols and schooled him in real estate development.

As Hardy said, both men were visionaries but also avowed segregationists. Besides leading The Star, Nelson built homes, many for Star employees, on land north of Brush Creek and south of the site of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. (It wouldn’t surprise me if the museum board was the next institution to review its linkage to Nelson.)

The residential developments of both men came with racially restrictive covenants — the only difference being that Nelson’s covenants expired after a period of years, while those of Nichols did not.

(As a side note, I live in a Nichols-developed neighborhood, Romanelli West, near Meyer Circle. A few years ago when I was president of our homes association, I found once, to my horror, that language prohibiting Blacks and Jews from owning homes in the neighborhood remained in deed restrictions on our website. Years earlier, the Missouri General Assembly had passed a bill banning the restrictions and language, but somehow it had not been excised from our records. I had the deed restrictions pulled immediately.)

In his story, Hardy quoted Fannin, Star editor, as saying Nelson’s slogan was “lofty but ultimately dishonest.”

“The Star was not ‘A Paper for the People’ through much of its history,” Fannin said. “It was a paper for only some people, namely white people. Those values don’t square at all with The Star newsroom of today.”

**

After 140 years of celebrating W.R. Nelson, The Star is now consigning him to his proper place in history.

He may be turning over in his grave, but who cares?

Here’s a question a lot of people have these days: How did the U.S. of A. come to have the most fertile ground for cultivating irrationality?

We’ve always had the best soil for agriculture, which helped make us a great nation, but the cultivation needle has begun tilting more toward irrationality the last decade or so.

How did that happen? I wish I could give you the answer, and I’d like to hear your thoughts. I guess technology is a big factor, with crazy people being able to disseminate crazy notions to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people almost instantly. But that can’t be all of it.

I don’t know…What I do know is that Wednesday’s sacking of the U.S. Capitol was the most disturbing evidence yet that, as a country, we are whipping out a way disproportionate amount of inanity.

Let’s take three specific examples.

First, there’s this guy, whom I call Viking Man.

Jacob A. Chansley, a.k.a. Jake Angeli, was arrested this morning (Saturday) in Phoenix and is charged with three federal crimes — knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

My first thought is I could understand dressing up like that if it was for Halloween or a Visigoth-themed party, but why in the world would you don such an outfit for a political demonstration?

Before being arrested, Chansley gave an interview to NBC News and gloated about how the mob infiltrated the Capitol, forcing lawmakers to flee. He said: “The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win.”

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Next in our line-up demented thinkers is former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

In an interview Wednesday evening with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, Palin suggested that Antifa, the far-left organization, was behind the raid on the Capitol. With her usual circuitous reasoning and grammatical stumbles, she said…

“But Martha, keep in mind, we don’t know who all were the instigators in this, these horrible things that happened today. I think a lot of it is the Antifa folks. I’ve been sent pictures of the same characters, whom were captured on images today storming the Capitol, as had been in protests on the other side of politics earlier in the summer. So I don’t know, there’s a lot of questions out there, and I wish that we could trust the media to do its job to do the research and report who all these people are.”

If the police were looking for people to arrest, by her reasoning, I guess it should have been the known leaders of Antifa, whoever and wherever they are, and the members of the media who were covering the riot.

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That brings us to one of the unluckiest and most mixed-up people in the mob: Ashli Babbitt.

Babbitt, of course, was the 35-year-old Air Force veteran whom Capitol Police fatally shot as she attempted to leap through a broken window of a door leading to the House Majority Leader’s lobby.

It is a terrible thing that she died, but she was not a martyr, as those who sympathize with Wednesday’s insurrection contend. Rather, she was a misguided hothead.

To see that she was a hothead, all you have to do is look at the one minute, 38 second Twitter rant she posted two years ago. (Today’s Washington Post story about Babbitt linked to it.)

One of the most amazing things about that rant is she recorded it while driving! God forbid what might have happened if someone had cut in front of her while she was recording.

Proof of her distorted thought processes is in a sign on the door of a pool supply company she operated with her husband in a San Diego suburb. (The Post’s story, linked above, includes a photo of the sign.)

The sign describes the pool company as a “Mask Free Autonomous Zone Better Known as America.”

The last words on the sign are…

“Tyranny, lawlessness, disrespect and hate for your fellow man will not be tolerated.”

…Like I said up top, how in the world did we become the most fertile ground for irrationality?

To quote the best lyricist of all time, Oscar Hammerstein II: “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ”

That’s how I felt after waking up, turning on the radio and hearing that the Rev. Ralph Warnock had won and Jon Ossoff was on the way to winning in Georgia.

Shortly after getting that great news, I began assembling election-related quotes that I picked up from a variety of places, including MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Here are some of the best I came up with…

Michael Steele

Michael Steele, former Republican Party chairman and a senior advisor on the Lincoln Project: “Today will be the day, in my view, if this goes forward as planned, where Republican senators — I don’t care if it’s 13 or just one — stands up and objects to the duly confirmed election of Joe Biden, it will be sealing the Republican Party inside the tomb that Donald Trump has created for them. And that’s, at the end of the day, their truth.”

Astead W. Herndon, The New York Times: “…Mr. Warnock’s journey from Black pastor to Black senator is an exercise…of faith: It’s a belief that American politics can change from the inside, that the Democratic Party’s most loyal voters can see themselves represented in Congress. That there is room to push the country forward within its institutions, rather than diagnosing its problems from outside.”

Karen Tumulty

Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post: “To Trump, the party of Lincoln was a rental vehicle, one that he took for a joyride and is getting ready to turn back in, with trash jammed under the seats and stains covering the upholstery. Also, the tank is empty, and there’s a crack in the windshield.”

U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, Georgia state Democratic Party chairwoman, who was sworn into Congress this week: “This election was not about Donald Trump. This was about people on the ground realizing that if they show up en masse they can overcome the voter suppression and we can win Georgia.”

Lisa Lerer and Richard Fausset, The New York Times: “The victory on Wednesday morning by the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who becomes the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate from the South, confirmed that Georgia’s metamorphosis from conservative bastion to battleground state was complete. The changing demographics are likely to reshape the political dynamics of this Deep South state for a generation.”

Timothy Bella and Tim Elfrink, The Washington Post: “Black voters…delivered in a big way on Tuesday, both in urban and rural districts. In Fulton County, the state’s most populous county and where a substantial share of voters are Black, more in-person voters showed up on Tuesday than on Election Day in November.”

Josh Billinson

Josh Billinson, Twitter habitue: “Jon Ossoff winning a Senate seat at 33 would set an impossible standard for nice Jewish boys everywhere and the mothers who ask what they’re going to do with their lives.”

Jon Ossoff: “Georgia, thank you so much for the confidence that you’ve placed in me. I am honored, honored, by your support, by your confidence, by your trust…and I will look forward to serving you in the United States Senate with integrity, with humility, with honor and getting things done for the people of Georgia. Thank you so much.”

U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York: “It feels like a brand new day.”

One of the most thrilling things for those of us in, or who have been in, the news business is seeing a major scoop or a big takeout on a subject of keen interest.

Just four days into 2021, we’ve seen one of each — one on the national level and one locally.

Let’s go national first.

:: You know a story is big when The New York Times strips it across the top of the front page. The story I’m talking about, of course, was The Washington Post’s great scoop of President Trump’s attempt to browbeat Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his attorney into magically turning around enough votes from the Nov. 3 election to give Trump the win over President-elect Joe Biden in Georgia.

The hour-long call between Trump and Raffensperger is full of jaw-dropping quotes from Trump, such as: “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

“Give me a break”??? It would be unbelievable, except that it’s Trump talking.

The reporter responsible for bringing the call to public attention, who got an audio recording of the complete call, was Amy Gardner, a WaPo reporter whose name I’d never heard before yesterday.

Amy Gardner

Gardner joined The Post in 2005. She first reported on the Virginia suburbs, before moving up to national reporting. Among other things, she covered the 2010 midterm elections and the 2012 battle for the Republican presidential nomination. Then she became an editor and spent five years doing that. In 2018 she returned to national political reporting.

I’ll be eager to read about how Gardner got that scoop, when the story behind the story comes out. All I can deduce at this point is that she must have at least one very good source in Georgia.

What we know is that Trump initiated the call to Raffensperger about 2:40 p.m. Saturday. Officials in the secretary of state’s office recorded it, but Raffensperger told his advisers he didn’t want to release a transcript or a recording unless the president attacked state officials or misrepresented what had been discussed. On Sunday morning, Trump unleashed a Twitter attack on Raffensperger, and Raffensperger quickly counter punched by giving the green light to release the recording.

Somehow, Gardner got the nod to be the first to get the recording.

More often than not, The New York Times beats The Post on big stories about Trump, primarily through the reporting skills of White House reporter Maggie Haberman, but this time The Post got the jump. (In a Nov. 8 profile of Haberman, NYT media columnist Ben Smith wrote that Haberman “lives rent-free in Donald Trump’s head, all over the front page of The New York Times.”)

An October 2020 story about Gardner on the George Washington University website quoted her as saying: “You have to be hungry and have an appetite for news. I find myself driven by this hunger to get a story, to beat the competitors, to signal to the sources that I’m the one who’s on it and who knows it best.”

On Sunday, she was definitely “on it,” and reporters everywhere (except maybe Maggie Haberman) are cheering from the grandstand.

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Two local reporters had a hell of a story in the Sunday Kansas City Star. KCUR reporter and editor Dan Margolies — who I’m proud to say is a friend as well as a former colleague — and investigative Star reporter Steve Vockrodt collaborated on a disgusting but devastating story about a down-and-dirty former KCK police detective named Roger Golubski.

Dan Margolies

Steve Vockrodt

Golubski was a disgrace to law enforcement for more than 35 years. From Margolies’ and Vockrodt’s story, it appears Golubski spent much more time raping women and pressuring others into having sex in return for going easy on their relatives than he did at investigating cases. He’s also the person mostly responsible for sending Lamont McIntyre to prison for 23 years for two murders he did not commit.

The most amazing part of this story to me was that, from all appearances, at least three former police chiefs — Ron Miller, Rick Armstrong and Terry Ziegler — knew what Golubski was doing but didn’t have the guts to call him out. They simply averted their gaze.

One of those chiefs, Ziegler, who retired in September 2019, was a former partner of Golubski. On one occasion when Golubski went inside a house and allegedly raped a woman, Ziegler waited outside in their police car.

Another chief, Armstrong, was asked in a 2012 deposition if Golubski had fathered children by women who were involved in drugs or prostitution. He gave this halting answer: “I did not have any knowledge that he was involved in illegal activity with — regard his personal relationships.”

In a Sunday commentary, KC Star editorial writer Melinda Henneberger said the department presented Golubski with “a platinum-plated gift” when he retired in 2010: silence about his corrupt career.

Margolies and Vockrodt spent months combing through records and interviewing people, and they were rewarded with a front-page story that publicly shamed a terrible cop who worked for a department that has never looked very good and now looks much worse.

If 2020 was bad from the standpoint of driving many of us to stay put in our homes for much of the year, it was worse on the streets of many American cities, including Kansas City.

Much worse.

Back in March, after people started realizing how bad Covid-19 was promising to be, I thought one positive byproduct of it would be that, with more people staying home, there would be less crime overall and fewer murders in particular.

On March 23, I sent Sgt. Jake Becchina, a KCPD public affairs officer, an email asking if crime had decreased in the previous few weeks. He wrote back saying: “We have some analysts looking at some data as it corresponds to crime being up or down associated with the coronavirus conditions….In the meantime, I would say that I think it’s too early to tell for sure if there has been an appreciable difference. My sense, in what I’ve seen, (is) there has been little difference.”

He said homicides were up (but not by a lot at that point), as were non-fatal shootings.

A month later, on May 25, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by Officer Derek Chauvin, and after that the homicide rate surged here and elsewhere.

When it all came to a smoking, blazing end on Dec. 31, Kansas City had a record 180 homicides for 2020. That it was a record wasn’t even close. The previous high was 155 in 2017.

But KC had plenty of company in the record-homicide category. Take, for example, my hometown of Louisville, KY. Before last year, the most homicides it had experienced in a given year was 117 in 2016. When 2020 came to a close, it had recorded 173 homicides…and it is a smaller urban area than Kansas City.

I guess we can take solace in the fact that Kansas City is not Memphis…That city, with a population of about 651,000 people (compared to slightly less than 500,000 in KC), had a whopping 332 homicides. That was more than 100 higher than the previous record of 228 in 2016.

In some other big cities where the homicide rates had been falling in recent years, the needle jumped back up. Chicago, for example, was down to 495 homicides in 2019, but the number jumped to 769 in 2020. Another very big city, Houston, went from 280 homicides in 2019 to slightly more than 400 last year.

So, what has caused these big spikes in homicides? Theories abound.

Michael-Sean Spence, director of community safety initiatives for the national nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that Covid-19 was a factor in that it disrupted critical services and programs that traditionally connect people in low-income communities with what they need. He also cited a huge increase in firearms sales during the pandemic…The theory being, I suppose, that if more people are buying guns, more guns are getting stolen and finding their way to the streets.

The founder of a Louisville nonprofit that tracks gun violence and supports victims, Christopher 2X, offered another theory on how the pandemic has increased, rather than reduced, the homicide rate.

Christopher 2X

2X told the Courier-Journal that young people involved in shootings had told him that with people staying closer to home, assailants had more opportunities to find their targets to seek revenge and settle disputes. “Sadly so, but that’s what the young ones are talking about,” 2X said. “Not being in community centers, not being in schools means it’s easier for someone to find who they’re looking for.”

Besides Covid-19, the other major factor that undoubtedly contributed to the murderous upswing in many cities were the protests and social unrest that came on the heels of George Floyd’s murder.

In a September commentary in The Washington Post, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said that violent crime tends to increase during periods of social unrest, especially over police brutality.

“We saw this during the urban unrest of the 1960s and again five years ago amid the protests against police violence in Ferguson, Mo., Chicago, New York and elsewhere,” Rosenfeld said. “When tensions flare between the police and the communities they serve — especially disadvantaged communities of color — ‘police legitimacy’ suffers. And if trust and confidence in the police fall far enough, street justice replaces law enforcement, and rates of violence increase.”

Richard Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld said bringing violent crime under would be a two-step process. The first, he said, is “subduing the pandemic.” The second is bringing about police reform, which, Rosenfeld said, “would help restore confidence in the legitimacy of law enforcement agencies nationwide.”

He concluded with this…

“The Black Lives Matter movement has shined a bright light on police violence. The urgent task now is to convert protest ideals into workable public policy. That effort in turn will require more effective mechanisms, both inside and outside police departments, to hold officers accountable for violations of their training, agency policy and criminal law.”

Let’s hope that in 2021 we can at least accomplish step No. 1, subdue the pandemic.

Well, stop the presses!

Mayor Quinton Lucas has finally said he favors local control of the Police Department.

In a Dec. 22 interview with members of The Star’s editorial board, Lucas said that either the city or some plaintiffs acting on behalf of the city should file a federal lawsuit alleging that state control of KCPD violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

I couldn’t follow his reasoning on why state control violates the Equal Protection Clause — and I think such a lawsuit would probably fail — but at least he’s finally talking openly about local control.

Even though his criticism of state control was relatively tepid, he at least acknowledged that state control had outlived its usefulness, saying “It is not working.”

Until now, he has bobbed and weaved on the issue, mainly, I think, because he doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the police union. But it sounds like he’s become so frustrated by the four other members of the Board of Police Commissioners ignoring his overtures for modest reforms that he is now getting serious about local control.

I’ve said all along that local control — which almost surely would require a statewide initiative petition followed by a statewide vote — will not come about without strong leadership from the mayor. To get traction and the public’s attention, Lucas would have to break out the megaphone and raise hell about this issue almost every day for a long time.

Even then the Republican-dominated General Assembly — which conceivably could vote to give up state control but probably won’t — would very likely ignore him. If he was able to get the public riled up, though, it would be a good start toward getting out of the wheel-spinning state we’ve been in since the Pendergast era.

The wheel-spinning state suits the Police Department (and the chief, the union president and the police board) just fine, of course, because it (and they) can continue rolling along without being directly accountable to the public or any local elected officials. (The governor appoints four of the five board members, and the mayor is automatically a voting member.)

Here’s the essence of state control: Chief Rick Smith can continue thumbing his nose at the mayor and City Council while spending tens of millions of dollars in city money; Union President Brad Lemon can continue negotiating outrageous protection from accountability for sworn officers; and the police board can continue bowing and scraping to the chief while remaining virtually anonymous.

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It is maddening to me how disconnected the police board is from the public. Once again, here are the names of the four members appointed by recent governors: Don Wagner, Nathan Garrett, Cathy Dean and Mark Tolbert.

Unless you’ve been reading my posts regularly, chances are you’ve never heard of any of them. As far as I know, they’re all Republicans. Garrett was a state trooper before becoming a lawyer; Cathy Dean is a retired lawyer; and Tolbert is a minister. Tolbert, who is Black, is the only minority among the four.

As for Wagner, president of the board, he is more familiar with the pages of The Independent, the local society newspaper, than with the pages of The Star. The main reasons he gets his picture in The Independent are 1) he married a daughter of the late Bill Deramus, former president of Kansas City Southern Railway, and 2) he made a fortune in the steel tank business.

Don and Jean Wagner, as seen in the July 12, 2014, issue of The Independent

In 2019, Wagner and 11 other wealthy area residents donated $100,000 to a Tom Watson charity to play a round of golf with Watson, Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus and David Feherty. And where did they play? Why, at the Kansas City Country Club, the most exclusive country club in the KC area.

Wagner has served on various civic and community boards, but he is out of his element in the government and political arena and has no experience battling for the interests of middle- and lower-income people.

Not only is he out of his element, but he is presiding, in name at least, over a department that is swamped by a record number of homicides. As far as I can tell, the board has not pushed Smith to come up with a significant plan to counter the homicide rate. And, really, how could we expect a very privileged, extremely wealthy white man to make important policy decisions that affect almost 500,000 mostly average citizens?

The answer is we can’t. So I say, God help us.

But you, Mayor Lucas, you can relate, and you’ve got the bully pulpit to demand change.

It’s time for you to start shouting from on high…from way up there on the 29th floor of City Hall. Let the average people hear you; it’s they who elected you.

Well, Santa Claus is a little late arriving at blog HQ, but he finally got here. (I’m not complaining, mind you, because it’s always Kids First!)

He has brought, and authorized me to dispense, candy canes for three examples of good writing and reporting. But he also left one big chunk of coal for New York Times national reporter John Eligon, who is based in Kansas City.

Since it’s Christmas, though, let’s start with the positives…

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Baker

All year long, The Times’ Peter Baker has been calling out Donald Trump and analyzing, without taint of meanness or anger, the man’s small-mindedness and pathetic psyche. Often when I’ve been frustrated and worried about some of Trump’s actions, Baker has, to some degree, put frightening developments into somewhat soothing perspective.

He did it again today in a front-page piece on Trump’s sweeping and mind-bending pardons. In a “news analysis,” Baker summed up the situation by using a quote from Andrew Weissmann, a top lieutenant to Robert Mueller.

On Twitter, Weissmann wrote, “The pardons from this President are what you would expect to get if you gave the pardon power to a mob boss.”

That’s the maddening part. The soothing dimension — from Baker’s pen — is that if Trump really thought he wasn’t leaving office, he wouldn’t be dishing out pardons left and right now.

“(I)t also represents a final, angry exertion of power by a president who is losing his ability to shape events with each passing day, a statement of relevance even as Mr. Trump confronts the end of his dominance over the nation’s capital.”

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Here’s another gem from NYT reporter Glenn Thrush, in a Dec. 23 story about Trump threatening to veto the $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill.

Like a coin flip that never lands, America’s double-headed presidency is queasily suspended in midair as President Trump threatens to veto a bipartisan, Biden-blessed bill intended to speed relief to families, businesses and governments in time for the holidays. Why is Mr. Trump doing this now? One reason: A no has always been more attractive than a yes for the disruptive Mr. Trump, whose 2016 presidential run was impelled by his dislike of President Barack Obama but turbocharged by his contempt for the Republican Party establishment.

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The next one is from a Dec. 23, NYT sports section story that bore the headline “The Fall of the House of Belichick.” Reporter Mike Tanier displayed some felicitous phrasing in these two sentences:

Defeats at the hands of former Super Bowl conquests like the Seattle Seahawks and the Los Angeles Rams and against long-subjugated fiefs like the Buffalo Bills and the Houston Texans took on apocalyptic symbolism. Belichick began appearing before the news media in hoodies that were even more tattered than usual: the emperor now a penitent in sackcloth, muttering about past accomplishments and making uncharacteristic excuses.

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Now, on to that chunk of coal.

Eligon

In a Dec. 21 story about The Kansas City Star’s apology for “Racism in Decades of Reporting,” John Eligon made a flawed comparison regarding minority employment in The Star’s newsroom. He wrote…

While the ambition of Sunday’s series of articles has earned The Star praise, it also has placed new scrutiny on the newsroom’s demographics: About 17 percent of the reporters are Black in a city where Black residents make up about 28 percent of the population. Until it hired…Trey Williams this year to oversee race and equity coverage, the paper had been without a Black staff editor for more than a decade.

There are two problems with his statistical comparison. First, I have no idea why Eligon seemingly limited his comparison to “reporters.” A more representative comparison would be based on the total number of editorial staff members, which includes not only reporters but editors, photographers, copy editors and anyone else involved on the word and image side of the paper. Perhaps Eligon was including the other categories, but, in any event, saying “reporters” is puzzling.

Even worse, however, is using just the Kansas City, Missouri, population as the basis of comparison. The Star, of course, is a metro-wide paper, and according to last year’s U.S. Census Bureau figures Blacks accounted for just 12 percent of the area’s population of more than 2 million.

By that measure, The Star is exceeding the mark.

I’m all for fairness in proportional employment, but I have to wonder if Eligon allowed his personal agenda to override fair and accurate reporting. While I’m at it, I’m giving another chunk of coal to whoever edited the story; the distortion should have been caught.

(I have tried sending emails of complaint to Eligon and national editor Marc Lacey, but my stabs at their email addresses have been incorrect, and all have bounced back. I wrote a letter to the editor and sent it last night, but I doubt it will get in. I intend to call Lacey on Monday. It’s been my experience that NYT reporters and editors seldom return calls, but you can at least leave a message.)

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That’s all for Christmas Day 2020, readers…I hope you all have a great day and a Happy New Year. Thank you for your readership!

The Kansas City Police Department is essentially run by two people: Chief Rick Smith and police union president Brad Lemon.

The five-member Board of Police Commissioners is nominally in charge, but guess what? With the exception of Mayor Quinton Lucas, they are a rubber stamp for the chief.

I’ve written extensively about how bad Smith has been in his three years as chief. Murders are at an all-time high, and Smith has not come up with a substantive plan to combat the violence; his officers overreacted on several occasions during the recent Black Lives Matter protests in and around the Plaza; and, most important, he has no relationship whatsoever with the Black community. He’s beloved in the near-lily-white Northland and detested on the East Side.

Because he’s the chief, the spotlight shines brightest on Smith. Every bit as bad as Smith, however, is Lemon.

It has come out in recent days that as an officer, the former police chief accused him a few years ago of significant impropriety in a criminal case. (That investigation appears to have withered away under Smith.) And now, in a story published today in The Star, Lemon has been exposed as having used his position to attempt to pressure an individual on a personal matter.

The Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office on Tuesday released an audio recording that captured Lemon threatening the owner of a tow company if he did not release a car belonging to relatives of Lemon.

The audio demonstrates an astounding abuse of power by a police officer in dealing with a citizen. The Prosecutor’s Office did not specify the date of the call, but it apparently was sometime in 2019.

You can listen to the conversation here and you can read about the prosecutor’s investigation into the tow-company owner here (he was cleared), but  I want you to read some of the key excerpts between Lemon and Allen T. Bloodworth, owner of a company called Private Party Impound.

Brad Lemon

Lemon: “Hey this is Brad Lemon out of Kansas City Police Department. I’m president of the police union. I got a phone call from my niece that says you guys towed our family’s car from Two Light and now you’re requiring us to go get a…

Bloodworth: “We’re requiring you to comply with the law to get the car back. Correct. The owner of the vehicle is someone’s grandmother or something?”

Lemon: “Yeah she’s two hundred miles away.”

Bloodworth: “OK. The Kansas City Missouri tow lot wouldn’t release the car the way the circumstances are now, so I don’t know why we would. You have to be the registered owner of the car.”

Lemon: “She’s 91, dude. There’s no way we can do that.”

Bloodworth: “OK. I sent whoever called earlier a notarized power of attorney that will allow them to have her sign and notarize it, and then a third party can pick up the car.”

At that point, there’s an eight-second pause, followed by…

Lemon: “So, didn’t we investigate you at property crimes a couple years ago for felonies for doing stuff like this?”

Bloodworth: “You mean I was exonerated because you guys have a rogue cop that likes to jack with people, and OCC..”

Lemon interrupts: “It’s game on.”

Bloodworth: “…OCC or whatever. What do you mean it’s game on?”

Lemon: “We’ll start the same routine with you then.”

Bloodworth: “What do you mean you’ll start the same routine with me?”

Lemon: “I guarantee I’m going to talk to (unintelligible), this is going to be the last you tow them.”

Bloodworth: “What’s your name, sir?”

Lemon: “Brad Lemon, I’m the president of the police union.”

**

There’s your police union president, Kansas City. One of two people who run a department that has more than 1,300 sworn officers.

What a disgrace to the badge.

When I got up Sunday and checked my email, first up was one from a friend who, with his wife, divides his time between his home in the Kansas City area and one in the Florida panhandle.

It read: “Good morning, Jim. The KC Star theme today is a powerful statement. What do you think of the apology articles?”

I was completely flummoxed…Apology articles? Apology for what? Had there been a massive error in a big story?

I immediately went to The Star’s website and saw plastered across the top of the page the words, “The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.”

Then I knew what it was all about. Nevertheless, it was the most jolting and unexpected series of stories I’ve ever seen in The Star in my 50 years in Kansas City, including 36-plus years as a reporter and editor at The Kansas City Times and The Star.

It was disturbing, too, partly because it made me ask myself if I, who joined the paper in 1969, may have contributed to the paper’s failure to cover much of anything emanating from east of Troost Avenue or anyone living east of the longtime dividing line between white and Black Kansas City.

(I couldn’t think of anything I did overtly to contribute to the appalling situation, but, like nearly everyone else at the paper, I was definitely focused almost exclusively on the white community and white power structure.)

The Sunday package was a remarkable undertaking and a sincere mea culpa. It consisted of…

• A formal apology from Editor Mike Fannin
• Six separate “news” stories about different areas in which The Star had failed miserably, since its founding in 1880, to cover racial matters adequately
• An editorial vowing that the editorial board would chart a new course on social justice
• A separate story about The Star having formed an advisory group “to ensure fair, inclusive coverage of communities of color”

One of the most admirable aspects of this series is that The Star is not attempting to profit off it, at least directly. I believe the entire package of stories can be accessed without a subscription at http://www.kansascity.com. The Star rarely drops the pay wall, but this was an appropriate time to do so.

Mara Rose Williams

The person who pushed for the series was Mará Rose Williams, an education reporter who has been with The Star for 22 years. Williams followed her late husband, Ceasar Williams, to the paper after he was hired as an assignment editor in the late 1990s. Ceasar Williams died in 2010 at age 61.

The other reporters on the team were longtime employees Eric Adler and Mike Hendricks and relative newcomer Cortlynn Stark. Visuals were produced by Shelly Yang, Tammy Ljungblad and Neil Nakahodo. Chris Ochsner edited the photos and graphics, and Bill Turque and Sharon Hoffmann edited the stories.

**

I will not rehash the stories, but a couple of sources the reporters tapped seemed to capture the crux of The Star’s longtime failure regarding proportional racial coverage.

:: Gerald Jordan, a former editorial writer who has been a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas for many years, said that while he did not believe The Star was guilty of intentional racism, the paper did not assign reporters to cover specific neighborhoods, and that “put us at a disadvantage.” That effectively left minorities and poor people out of the paper because they weren’t running the institutions or setting the policies The Star and Times focused their coverage on.

Chuck Haddix

:: Chuck Haddix, host of KCUR’s “The Fish Fry,” and curator of the Marr Sound Archives at UMKC, said: “They covered the African American community just a little bit. The Kansas City Star always kind of covered classical music and opera and the fine arts, because that was their audience. They also covered country music, too. But they didn’t cover 18th and Vine because of segregation. I think it caused that community to be invisible to white people in Kansas City. You know, people who read The Star didn’t get a sense of what was happening at 18th and Vine or other African American communities.”

**

Because of the startling nature of this package of stories, I sought out reaction from several friends and neighbors.

One neighbor called it a “breakthrough.” Another said simply, “Long time overdue.”

A former Star reporter and friend, a colleague at the paper, said: “The Star has been dumping a lot of criticism on folks such as J.C. Nichols and Andrew Jackson for their racism. And I often have thought, ‘What about the racism that William Rockhill Nelson and other Star execs practiced? Should we take Nelson’s name off the Nelson-Atkins Museum?’ I admire the Star for airing its dirty laundry and acknowledging that it was just as guilty as J.C. Nichols in the promotion of racism in Kansas City.”

Clinton Adams Jr.

Another friend, Clinton Adams Jr., a lawyer and longtime civic activist who was quoted in the Sunday package, said:

“The chatter in the Black community today has been positive. A general refrain has been, ‘What now’? There is skepticism as to how they (The Star) will follow up and fulfill the commitments made.” Adams said he believed the package “could have some impact if other institutions and media outlets will also take an introspective look at their racial history and address their transgressions.”

**

Everything those people said is true.

The only thing I would add is that where Adams’ wonders how The Star will follow up, I wonder how much impact the package will have and how many people will see it or hear about it.

The problem is this: Where The Star once spoke with a bullhorn, its strong voice echoing far and wide, it now speaks with a crackling, dimming microphone.

The Star, like most major metropolitan dailies, has been slaughtered by the internet and the exponential proliferation of platforms and information outlets, many of which spew misinformation, disinformation and just plain junk.

The five-county metro area has about 1.8 million people, only about 90,000 of whom subscribe to the print edition of the Sunday paper. About 50,000 take the print edition of the weekday paper, and, as far as I can tell, a paltry 9,000 people have stand-alone, digital subscriptions.

…The apology package was remarkable. Congratulations to everyone involved, from Mike Fannin on down. I just hope a lot of people heard the cracking and felt the reverberations this redwood made when it fell, and I hope the cracking sound isn’t limited to an echo chamber.