I was rooting around in the attic this morning, looking for some electrical adapters for an upcoming trip, when I came across some yellowed Kansas City Star editions I had filed away long ago.
The first thing that struck me was how narrow the paper has become — from 13 1/2 inches in 1993 to 11 inches now. It brought back memories of the pain we editorial employees experienced when the paper started to shrink — and kept on shrinking.
The second thing I noticed was a commentary written on Feb. 26, 1993, by then-Editor Art Brisbane.
It was a column about my most ignominious and embarrassing experience as a reporter — an incident that ended up being referred to in the newsroom as “Asphaltgate.” And, unfortunately, I was the one who opened the gate and let the shit come cascading down on myself.
It was so bad that my screw-up led directly to the appointment of a newsroom committee that was charged with writing a new KC Star ethics policy.
Fortunately, I survived Asphaltgate and went on, as I’ve recounted several times before, to tack my way to a conventional retirement with the most treasured send-off in journalism — the pizza and sheet-cake party.
But let me tell you about Asphaltgate, which very few people out there have been around long enough to remember.
I was covering City Hall at the time, and Tuesday, Feb. 23, 1993, was my eighth wedding anniversary. My editor got a call that morning from a guy who owned a gas station at about 59th and Swope Parkway. The station operator said a Kansas City Public Works Department crew had come around earlier offering to sell cold-mix asphalt for $30 so station employees could fix several potholes on the station grounds. Clearly out of line, the public works crew was using publicly paid for asphalt mix to do pick up side money, all while on the city clock, of course.
The station owner told them to come back later and then called The Star. The editor sent me and a photographer out to the station to see if the crew returned and, if they did, to document and report it.
When I went out there, I planted myself just behind the office area. The photographer, Jim McTaggart, positioned himself a half block or so away with his camera and a long lens. Pretty soon, the city crew pulled slowly into the station. At that critical juncture, the station owner turned to me and said something like, “Do you have $30,” or, “Will you pay the $35?”
I as caught totally off guard. I hadn’t given a thought to the money for the transaction. But I had cashed a check that morning because Patty and I were going to dinner that night to celebrate our anniversary. So I reached for my wallet and gave the station owner $35. Immediately, it didn’t feel right, but I was caught up in the moment and, well, the money was now walking out to the crew.
The crew dropped a large pile of asphalt and left a rake and shovel for station employees to use to move the material around later.
At that point, I left the station, jumped in the photographer’s car, and we followed the crew to a public works maintenance site off Blue Parkway. There I confronted the crew leader, who had little to say. What could he say? He’d been caught red handed.
Turned out, though, I was in almost as much trouble as the crew was. Immediately after confronting the crew leader, I went to a pay phone, called my editor, told him what had unfolded and said, “I want you to know, I paid the $30 for the asphalt.”
The editor said, “Ooohh,” his voice trailing off, which confirmed my gut feeling that I had made a big mistake.
By the time I got back to the office, the in-house wheels were spinning. But instead of the editors being interested in a story about a city crew cheating the taxpayers, they were completely focused on me having paid for a story. I hadn’t really thought about it in that context — buying a story — but there was no denying that’s what it amounted to.
Art Brisbane, as pictured in a 1995 column
The first decision the editors made was not to run the story. It was getting late by then, and I went home. As I recall, had a pretty nervous anniversary night. First thing the next day, Metro Editor Randy Smith escorted me to a meeting with Brisbane and Managing Editor Mark Zieman. The meeting was in the spacious, wood-paneled conference room, which featured a long, cherry table with a polished glass top. I remember that neither Brisbane nor Zieman offered any greeting. They were quietly conversing when I came in, and Brisbane turned toward me and started talking straightaway about the incident.
I had no idea what was going to happen, but I figured I wasn’t going to get fired. I had had a couple of close calls earlier in my career and had always avoided the ax, partly because I also had a history of turning out big stories that tended to offset my face-down spills in the mud.
This time, I was also lucky because the ethics policy was outdated and did not address the issue of “buying stories.” Had the policy specifically prohibited that, I think I would have been gone.
I didn’t get suspended, either. However, Brisbane told me he intended to write a column apologizing to the readers for the paper’s — for my — ethical failure. Sparing me the ultimate indignity, he said he wouldn’t name me; in print, I would be the anonymous reporter who dropped the turd in the punch bowl.
Brisbane didn’t say this, but I am sure he had consulted with Publisher Robert Woodworth and that it had been a joint decision to handle the matter with a public apology.
The column appeared two days later. Perhaps the most ignominious part was that I had to help write the column because, of course, I was more familiar with the circumstances than anyone.
The column appeared under the headline, “When paper manipulates the news, it’s time to back off.”
Besides recounting the facts of the incident, Brisbane made had two key points:
:: “In our eagerness to report the news, we stepped over the line of journalistic propriety.”
:: “By participating in this story, we have compromised ourselves. We regret very much that we have let our readers down in this case. We pledge to maintain the highest ethical standards in the future so that we may earn and keep your trust.”
**
After the column was published, several reporters sympathetic to me said they thought Brisbane had used the column as a back-door way of reporting a story he had decided would not be published.
Personally, I thought the matter should have been handled internally, but, on the other hand, city officials were aware of what had taken place and could have pointed quietly to The Star having conveniently overlooked an error in judgment by one of its reporters.
A couple of other factors were at play, too. For one thing, both Brisbane and Woodworth had ascended to their respective posts the previous year, 1992, and were undoubtedly eager to establish their bona fides. Woodworth had succeeded legendary publisher James H. Hale, and Brisbane had succeeded another KC Star legend, Joe McGuff.
Perhaps an even bigger factor, though, was that journalism had very recently been caught with its pants down. Just two weeks earlier, NBC had publicly apologized for a “Dateline NBC” program in which the network had staged a fiery test crash of a General Motors pickup truck. The network made it look like the crash was spontaneous, but it was rigged. Not only did NBC apologize but it also agreed to settle a defamation suit filed by GM. It was one of the biggest scandals in modern-day journalism.
Fresh on the heels of that blockbuster journalistic embarrassment, along came JimmyC reaching in his pocket and forking over $30 for cold-mix asphalt.
For many months after that, I was extremely pissed off at Brisbane and once spoke very critically about the paper at an intimate meeting among him, my editor and one or two other City Hall reporters. To Brisbane’s credit, he held his tongue. He could have unloaded on me then and there, or he could have bided his time and had me demoted. He didn’t do that, either. In fact, two years later I got promoted to assignment editor and took charge of the Wyandotte-Leavenworth bureau.
After the meeting, I asked fellow City Hall reporter Kevin Murphy for his impression of my performance. He replied, “Oh, I just figured you were still hot about asphalt.”
Yes, I was. Yes, I was. But I got over it. It only took a couple of years.
Oh…and those public works crew members? They were fired. Also, a week or so later, I turned in a phony mileage expense voucher for the $30 I had handed over. I even told my editor exactly what I was doing. He hesitated, then quickly scrawled his signature on the expense voucher and turned away with a grimace.
Jim — Very good!
I know of very few reporters, editors, producers and so on who would write about their own errors the way you did here.
I’ll use this when I do my ethics journalism class at St. Louis Community College in a few weeks.
Regards and best wishes,
rh
Thanks, Repps…I’m sure you can identify, at this stage of my career and life, there’s no reason to hold back anything. I want to get all the stories out there.
Never came close to anything like this during my cup of coffee at The Spokesman-Review, but I do remember occasionally picking up drink tabs while interviewing sources at The Dark Horse during my College Press Service internship.
I remember Asphaltgate. And although I was not in attendance, I heard that Brisbane held a staff meeting a day or two after that column ran and chewed out a colleague for taking notes while he spoke.
I admire your willingness to bring up this embarrassing episode from your past. Was it wrong? Yes. But everything at that gas station was happening so fast, that it was probably hard to think things through. Any journalist, including Brisbane and Zieman, could have made that mistake.
Thanks for your retrospective forbearance, Mike…I vaguely recall that such a post-Asphaltgate meeting took place with Brisbane presiding but did not recall him chewing out somebody for taking notes.
I’ve sent the link to both him and Randy Smith. Randy’s been a longtime friend, as you know, and time took care of my hard feelings toward Art. He was a good editor and a strong representative for us in the community as well. The Star prospered under his leadership as editor and later publisher.
Jim:
You are very brave and up-front to be so totally honest about the asphalt story. I am sure there are not many of us who have not screwed up royally in print. I misquoted Gene Tunney when he was quoting Shakespeare. I had stayed up all night in the Star’s library to read about him, but I was concentrating on the Long Count with Tunney and Jack Dempsey. I overlooked the fact that Tunney was a Shakespeare buff and lectured on him at Yale.
And in helping write “Come Into My Kitchen” for 7 years, I put 2 cups of lemon peel into a recipe for a chicken casserole. It should have been 2 teaspoons. We ran a correction but for weeks photographers puckered their lips when they walked by my desk. And after 18 years at The Star, Michael (O.J.) Nelson, my editor at the time, listed multiple reasons on my evaluation why I was failing as a reporter. I wrote a rebuttal to Michael Davies. Mike Waller asked me to go to lunch and over a hamburger at Union Station he told me I was not going to be fired. I stayed on another 18 years. And was grateful for them.
It’s hard to imagine you interviewing Gene Tunney, Laura…But, of course, you had a life as a journalist before becoming society editor, your “claim to fame.”
O.J. was one of a kind. A brilliant, strange fellow. Everybody who worked with him had problems with him at some point. You’ll remember, of course, that he and I were roommates back in the late ’70s. I’ll never forget the night he came home after learning he was in line for a big promotion — from night-side copy desk to features editor — an almost unheard of leap forward.
When he came in the door that night, his eyes were wide, and he said, “I think they’re going to make me king!”
Thanks, Jim.
It was a thrill to talk to Gene Tunney, a very gentle man. O.J. was fun outside of the office. He had a good sense of humor. But he could be frustrating as hell as an editor.
And yes, I remember your roommate days on Baltimore or Grand.
Am glad you both survived.
All best,
Laura
At least you were refunded your $30 bucks!
Wait a sec. Two people lost their livelihoods over $30?
Maybe three, Laura…I also recall that one of the crew members went back to the station later and threatened to kill the owner. As our commander in chief would say, “Not nice!”
Jimmy C are you feeling alright ? This smacks of a death bed confessional and I’m worried; loved the story though. Appreciated hearing the management response to a eager young reporters glaring blunder. Too bad memorable character building team exercises like these are seldom used these days. What a hoot in retrospect. Stay healthy.
I’m in the pink, Jayson. Thanks for the concern, though. No deathbed confessional, just an interesting bit of KC Star lore that otherwise would have remained consigned to obscurity.
I exchanged emails with Art, and he gave me permission to use this about Alphaltgate from the editor’s perspective…
“I was still new in the job. I had faced a number of novel (to me) decisions and choices. But this topped all. I recall being guided, not particularly by Woodworth (though it is possible I consulted with him on this — I don’t remember that) but by Hale in absentia. Hale was a huge influence on me, even after he was gone. He was an expressive guy, as you will remember, though he required very few words to make his thoughts known. I remember the gist of one of his thoughts — the basic idea resembled Colin Powell’s doctrine of warfare: if you act, act with overwhelming force. In the case of Asphaltgate, the situation was so f-ed up that the only recourse, I thought, was to just put it out there, take our lumps and move on. I think it actually worked. I don’t remember anybody in the public saying a whole lot. What more could be said?”
So let’s extrapolate this decision to another situation. You’re covering our former president as he’s vacationing on the golf course and you’re standing next to one of Obama’s Secret Service detail and he says “I’ll sell you a bag of weed for $30.” So you say “pardon me” as you turn on your tape recorder and whip out the $30 to buy the evidence. That would be a bad thing?
Secondly, I have a problem with the River Club’s lawn jockey complaining about anyone’s ethics. This is the same person who published the Civic Council’s agenda on the front page without ever advising the readers who the Civic Council was, or why anyone would give a hoot in hell who they were. This is also the same person who hobnobbed with ol’ Reverend Bob Meneilly and had reporters and editorial writers participate in his political events while at the same time trashing some poor slob who played in a band for playing at some politician’s birthday party. The hypocrisy is absolutely stunning.
I also know for a fact that reporters bought lunches for folks involved in politics during Art’s tenure, and no one complained. What’s the difference there? It seems to me that there was a lot of splitting of largely irrelevant hairs in that situation.
PS Congratulations for getting your money back, you had a right to be mad.
Ah, the old “source lunch” tradition. Actually, John, that was a pretty good system. It was encouraged for a long time, but then, like every other expense-side item, it was curtailed. It was very good for keeping current with sources and developing new ones. There wasn’t enough money involved to have a source “in your pocket,” so to speak, but Ii think it did help reporters get stories they might not have gotten otherwise.
I remember that Jim Kuhnhenn, an outstanding political reporter, got the “secret list” of the members of the Civic Council. He got it from a source close Mayor Richard Berkeley, and it was a good story. Just breaking through that thick glass wall was a triumph. You’ll recall the CC tried to hand select the mayor who would follow Berkeley, and it was a political novice named Brice Harris, a junior college administrator. He didn’t even make it through the primary, and then-Councilman Emanuel Cleaver ran off with the victory. The CC never again tried to pick a candidate.
Note to self: save “River Club’s lawn jockey” for future use.
John will be thrilled you noted.
Jim, one thing that no one else has pointed out yet is that right after Asphaltgate hit, Skip Sleyster defended you in his column in the Star’s Sunday Metro section. I just wanted to make sure you were reminded of that while you’re still in the pink.
I vaguely remember that, Julius, but wouldn’t if you had not reminded me. Skip, tireless advocate for the horse race track that never came to be — Brookfield Downs — was a great friend of reporters. You’ll recall he got me the hospital-bed interview with mobster Carl Spero after Carl was shot and paralyzed by Civella hit men at the Virginian Tavern.
Hey John, I’m certainly not defending Art Brisbane here but the incident involving the reporter who played guitar at that fund raiser for Ed Ford occurred in 2008. By then, Brisbane had left The Star for greener pastures.
You might be the only reader who knew what John was referring to, Mike! And I still don’t know what the heck the point was.
The point being Fitz that the guy playing in the band got hit on an ethics violation based on the most tenuous of connections to a political candidate, probably didn’t even know what the gig was for before he got there, and yet reporters and editorial writers could participate in brazenly political events with Art’s cronies with no sanctions whatsoever.
As I recall, and Mike, correct me if I’m wrong here, they even called the guy out by name and made him return the money from the gig. Reminded me of an old fashioned show trial.
I knew what John was referring to. I also remember the following episodes from the Star’s more recent past:
1) Repeatedly telling the readers Whitlock was on vacation when he was actually on strike.
2) Publishing an article saying Penn was fired for plagiarism, but not giving Penn the opportunity to provide his side of the story in the article.
There have been other incidents that also left me unimpressed with the Star’s ethics. But, I’m just a lowly subscriber of 26 years, so my opinion isn’t going to change anything the Star does.
Thanks for the correction, Mike. That really sucked. Like playing in a band is a major endorsement of the guy. Far more telling when reporters and editorial writers show up and participated in Meneilly’s dog and pony shows.
“And so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.”
Yes, there was an article put in the paper with the reporter’s name. And he was ordered to pay back the money. As for these political events that you’re referring to, John, like Mainstream Coalition and Civic Council, I don’t know anything about that. I do know that Art Brisbane was involved in civic matters like the beautification of the Broadway Corridor. I covered that initiative and wrote several stories about it. But I don’t recall any interference from him or, for that matter, any real heat to cover it a certain way.
Great back-and-forth. An oral history of the Star.
Mark — Saying Whitlock was “on strike” back in 2010 is not accurate. He and management — then sports editor Mike Fannin — were squabbling or negotiating over pay. The Star papered over the breach by saying he was on vacation, and technically it could have been right, although the Star doesn’t give anyone 10 weeks of vacation, or however long they kept up the facade. On the other hand, you couldn’t have expected the paper to run a box saying, “Jason Whitlock is not writing while we try to work out a new deal with him.” So, don’t judge too harshly on that count.
…At the time, I wrote a column for Hearne Christopher’s blog — kcconfidential — predicting Whitlock was through at The Star and doing an obit of sorts on his career at The Star. (I knew they’d never authorize that much vacation time, and I knew something big had to be going on.) Hearne wrote a corollary piece contending Whitlock really was on vacation and predicting he would return. I was right, of course, and my column got great readership. I had started my own blog five months earlier, and that was one of the last pieces I wrote for Hearne.
“On strike” is a lot more accurate than saying “Jason Whitlock is on vacation.” As you point out, “vacation” probably wasn’t even technically true, since it’s doubtful Whitlock had that much vacation accrued.
The Star should have said nothing at all rather than something as deliberately deceptive as “Jason Whitlock is on vacation.” So, I stand by my harsh (but sound) judgment.