I don’t believe what The Kansas City Star didn’t do…
On Thursday evening, well before The Star’s deadline, the vaunted east-side political organization Freedom Inc. voted unanimously to oppose Jackson County’s proposed half-cent sales tax for “translational medical research.”
With the League of Women Voters and the local NAACP branch already on record as opposing the tax, Freedom loomed as a pivotal bellwether of which direction the tax would go.
And yet, Thursday night — and all day Friday — The Star was nowhere to be found.
All-purpose reporter Mike Hendricks, who has been “covering” the campaign, didn’t show up outside Freedom headquarters, 12th and Brooklyn, to wait and find out what the verdict was. And neither did any other Star reporter.
None of the city’s four TV stations bothered to send a reporter, and none had a story yesterday. But that’s no big surprise; local politics is about the last thing on their agendas.
Slumbering while the house burns down
But The Star? Geez. After Hendricks’ no-show Thursday night, I thought surely he or someone else would call Freedom yesterday morning and at least get a short story on the kansascity.com website.
But, no. Nothing. (See correction in comments section.)
Holy crap, when I covered City Hall from 1985 to 1995, I would wait hours for political organizations to make decisions and come out of their closed-door meetings and announce the results. I’d race back to the paper, crank out a story and hope for good “play” (placement) the next day. (Long ago, an editor once said to me: “Fitzpatrick, you eat those bylines for breakfast, don’t you?)
Of course, things have changed a lot since then. The news cycle for The Star and the local TV stations runs about 16 hours a day (there is some down time between about 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.). Also, partly because of the TV stations’ indifference, The Star is under less pressure to cover political developments.
All in all, there’s a more casual attitude at 18th and Grand about getting news — other than stories involving death and destruction — online or in print in a timely manner.
On Monday, for example, I beat The Star to the punch on the Charlie Wheeler story — that is, Wheeler’s home being sold on the courthouse steps and mortgage banker Jim Nutter Sr. (who foreclosed) taking steps to ensure that Wheeler and his wife Marjorie and son Graham have a smooth landing in a Waldo area duplex.
When the threat of foreclosure first arose several months ago, political reporter Steve Kraske wrote a Page 4 story about it. (Page 4 is now the equivalent of what used to be the Metro section front page…Another sorry story.) But now Kraske has gone off to teach at UMKC — joining four or five other former Star editorial employees at the university — and nobody bothered to cover the Wheeler story the day it happened.
A good friend and The Star’s best reporter, Mark Morris, called me Tuesday morning, in the wake of my post, and asked for Charlie’s phone number. I gave him the number, of course, and Mark’s story ran online that afternoon and in print on Wednesday, although it was buried on Page 13.
On Tuesday, The Star will have a chance to redeem itself, when the Citizens Association, the city’s most influential, nonpartisan political organization, will hear speakers on sides of the issue and perhaps take a position on the tax. (The proposal will be Jackson County Question 1 on the Nov. 5 ballot.)
That meeting starts at 5 p.m. and should be over by 7. Maybe Hendricks can tell his wife Roxie to hold dinner awhile so he can cover the meeting and get a story up.
…By the way, I’ll be one of the opposing speakers at the Citizens Association meeting…But don’t waste your time looking for quotes from me in the paper. I think I’ve earned a lifetime ban. The only time you’re likely to see me in the paper again is after my family pays for my obit.
**
Editor’s note: For much more news about the proposed sales-tax for “translational medical research,” see stopabadcure.org
Also, Mike Hendricks’ wife’s name is Roxie, not Rosie, as I had it originally.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I imagine someone slipped them a $20 under the door to keep quiet. That’s probably the biggest cash infusion they’ve had in the last five years.
It isn’t that bad at The Star, Richie; the paper still makes a lot of money. in fact.
Well, the establishment’s happy hooker, Barb Shelly, has finally spoken and to no one’s surprise is supporting the tax. I think this is a tough time for them down there. With two competing projects for the local swells to steal from it was probably hard for them to prioritize which one to shill for, but the winner is apparently the medical tax.
That conclusion also seems to be reinforced by The Star’s response to anything that disagrees with the official editorial line, it doesn’t exist. The good news is that I finally get to post this link on your blog. Enjoy.
http://www.kcconfidential.com/2013/09/21/sutherland-steve-rose-the-royal-nonesuch-the-jackson-county-medical-research-tax/
Actually, John, I think there’s about a 95 percent likelihood that The Star will come out against the tax. Yael has been hammering it for weeks, and the editorial board traditionally defers to the person who covers a particular area. Yael’s got city and county government.
In 2007, if you’ll recall, Yael was championing the mayoral candidacy of Mark Funkhouser, a mid-level bureaucrat. Several other editorial board members, including editorial page editor Miriam Pepper, had significant doubts. But they deferred to Yael because it was his coverage area. The paper endorsed Funkhouser, and he went on to be a very disappointing, one-term mayor.
How big is the Star sports staff? Editors piled on editors, columnists, all kinds of special editions? You’d think they could expend a little of their staff to cover more important civic issues. And all those sports guys are “homers.”
How about some reporters on the news side to give both sides their due?
Forget local TV news. They just need fodder to put between the commercials.
If they didn’t have police scanners they couldn’t even find “breaking news.”
Ridge was news director at KMBC-TV, Channel 9, for several years in the 70s and early 80s.
If there’s no journalism awards that The Star can win from covering this tax issue, then forget about any kind of coverage.
I heard from Mike Hendricks a little while ago, He says reporter Dave Helling had a short piece about the endorsement on The Star’s website Friday — in a column called BuzzChatter.
I checked The Star’s electronic archives and found the column. The subject was the temporary shutdown of a federal website that contains information about political-advertising records. The column was seven paragraphs. In the last paragraph, Helling digressed from the website topic and dropped in this line:
“By the way — Freedom Inc. has issued a press release opposing the half-cent, 20-year Jackson County sales tax.”
I was wrong, then, about no mention…But could it have been any more of a throwaway the way Helling handled it?
** Also, Mike corrected me on his wife’s name — Roxie, not Rosie. I apologize to Mike and Roxie for that error. I wouldn’t want Patty’s name reported incorrectly in a major blog.
Welcome to the wide world of Kansas City activism, Fitz. Right, or left, if you oppose the establishment this is how you’re treated by The Star. If you’re lucky they’ll bury a single line about an event on page 19, or on line in some nook or cranny, or after they run a series of articles and columns telling the universe what a schmuck you, your ideas and your ancestors are, you may get a 200 word letter to the editor.
And you may be right about being banned. You could…(example removed at editor’s discretion; not suitable for a family blog)…but interfering with one of the establishment’s money making scams will definitely put you on the outs with the powers that be.
Sorry , John. I think everybody understands your point, however.
No, no, good edit, I was trying to point out the extent one could be critical save for critiques of the establishment when they decide they want something and used a poor example.
Incidentally, I don’t think the Star’s alone in being less than aggressive in reporting on the various establishment projects. There seems to be an almost complete lack of critical analyses from any source in Kansas City that would have the resources to do the research it would take. ANy insights on why that is?
Not really…It’s just hard to take on groups like the Civic Council; they sort of naturally get the benefit of the doubt from their brethren in the journalistic establishment.
For example, I presume that Star publisher Mi-Ai Parrish is a member of the Civic Council, and I’m just hoping that she doesn’t call Miriam Pepper up to her office one day and say, “Miriam, I want to endorse the sales-tax for translational medical research.”
Yael has been bashing it week in and week out, but, if she chose to do so, Parrish could pull the rug right out from under him.
I don’t thing she’ll do that, however. I think she will defer to the four other members of the editorial board — Pepper, Yael, Barbara Shelly and the always-squirrely Lewis Diuguid.
Yael, by virtue of “covering” city and county government, should have the biggest voice in the proceedings, and I believe the board will follow his lead and recommend that voters reject the tax. In the end, I think that even Barbara Shelly, who on Friday had a positive Op-Ed column about the research program, will go along. And Diuguid, too, although considering his recent preoccupation with cancer, he could throw a wrench in the works. It will be an interesting meeting, the day they take it up…
Does the publisher also still belong to the River Club and some of the higher ups belong to the Kansas City Club?
I don’t know.
Great photo of Jason Whitlock. That sofa hasn’t been the same since the day that picture was taken!
The sofa belongs in the Smithsonian, with a wax likeness of a snoozing Whitlock.
As funny as the photo of JW is, it’s probably time you mentioned that Dave Helling did mention the Freedom vote on Oct. 4:
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/04/4529380/shutdown-makes-it-harder-for-sales.html
And Yael Abouhalkah wrote about it at length the same day:
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/03/4527853/freedom-inc-deals-big-blow-to.html
Thanks, DoreDad…I acknowledged the Helling mention (and that’s every bit of what it was — a mention) yesterday. (See earlier comments.)
I didn’t see Yael’s story, either.
The problem with both of those is that you’d have to scour the entire website, topic by topic, heading by heading, to find the f______ news! They should have had a story on the “news” section of the site — the home page — where the readers go for developments! You shouldn’t have to be Inspector Clousseau to find the answer to a simple question: What did Freedom do last night?
It’s maddening that they gave it a throwaway graph at the end of something called BuzzChatter and relegated Yael’s piece to the Opinion section of the website. I don’t think his piece ever made it into the printed edition.
And none of that changes the fact that the paper didn’t bother to cover the story on Thursday night, when it was HAPPENING, when it was NEWS!