Clear the children from the room; I’m goin’ on a rant…
Yesterday, The Star turned four reporters loose on the Sam Brownback story: their top political reporter, their Washington (McClatchy) correspondent, their Topeka correspondent and the Wichita Eagle’s Topeka correspondent.
In today’s print edition, those four reporters produced 65 inches of copy — more than enough to fill half a page without photos or graphics.
They topped their story, naturally, with the news that Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate to put Brownback’s ambassadorial nomination over the top on a 50-49 vote. (Bear that count in mind.)
Then, they proceeded to review Brownback’s checkered legacy as Kansas governor.
…I have no beef with the structure of the story or its length. Brownback’s stand as governor has been a certifiable disaster, and it called for an extensive look back.
But, my God, these reporters — all four of them — skipped over one of the most important elements of the Senate’s dramatic vote: Who were the two absent Republican senators, and why were they not there?
I had to do a Google search today to find the answer. On about my third hit, I got the critical information in a Chicago Tribune story that was generated by The Washington Post. The Post writers — Sean Sullivan and Julie Zauzmer — put the information up high, where it belonged, and described the climactic vote this way:
In a dramatic turn Wednesday afternoon, the Senate hit a 49-49 stalemate on a procedural vote to end debate on the nomination. Two Republican senators were absent: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is in his home state battling brain cancer, and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Pence quickly traveled to the Capitol to break the deadlock.
Senators John McCain and Bob Corker
The Post reporters understood that on a vote of this magnitude, the vast majority readers would want to know which senators were absent and why.
(In a follow-up, online story posted several hours ago, The Star included the information about McCain and Corker. But it was a day late and a lot of dollars short.)
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To me, it’s ridiculous that The Star omitted that basic information in its print edition, which is still what the vast majority of Star rely on for their news.
I’ve been bitching (I told you to get the children out of the room) about The Star’s consistent failure to detail who voted how on any number of local stories, and yesterday they dropped a turd on a major national story.
And while the reporters were certainly at fault, here’s the bigger question: Where the hell were the editors??
Well, I’ve got the answers: Heads up their asses. Brains drifting on wispy clouds. Faces buried in their phones, checking for incoming texts.
We know The Star can do some good work — we’ve seen it in the secrecy in government stories in both Kansas and Missouri — but on the whole the paper has lost its moorings. It no longer covers local news anywhere close to what it did up to the mid-2000s. And more and more, it shovels overly long stories into the paper without giving them a decent edit. Just slaps them online and moves them along for the press run.
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Yesterday, the editors turned four reporters loose and let them write a dirge about a horrible governor, but everyone involved in the story missed one the fundamental elements of any newspaper story: the “Who” of the “Who, What, When, Where and Why.” In a sense, they also missed part of the “where,” that is, where were the two missing senators?
For the record the four reporters wearing dunce caps today are political reporter Bryan Lowry; Washington correspondent Lindsay Wise; and Topeka correspondents Hunter Woodall (Kansas City) and Jonathan Shorman (Wichita).
I’m sorry I don’t know the name of the editor who was ultimately responsible, because if I did, I’d put an extra tall dunce cap on him (or her), set him in the middle of the classroom and let the kids fire away with tomatoes.
Splat.
I’m actually a fan of Jonathon Shorman’s. He’s an excellent writer and from everything I’ve seen, a solid journalist. Both Woodall and Lowry are disasters, Woddall more so than Lowry because he can’t write worth a hoot.
I had a chance to evaluate Woodall and Shorman when they both wrote a story off the same interview after Hesley and Ward criticized my Twitter comments. Woodall did the interview and it was clear from the questions he was asking that he was trying to do a hatchet job. In the end, Shorman was a vastly better writer using the same comments from both sides. Woodall’s piece was even worse than Mary Clarkin’s piece in the Hutch News and she didn’t even have an interview to work with.
Perhaps if Woodall and Lowry focused a little more on their craft and spent less time on Twitter bullshitting about Kanye West and atrocious punk bands they might turn out at least mediocre copy.
By the way, I haven’t gotten along with Brownback since I got into it with him at a meeting out in Hays in the late 90s where he wanted us all to subjugate the entire conservative movement to getting him re-elected to the Senate.
That’s fine and dandy, but where was his common sense yesterday?
As the odd man out from Wichita, I suspect he didn’t have much say on the editing. I’ve got to think that Star editorial staff assembled the article, but you would know that better than I.
A little off topic but I just can’t get over what a turd the governor just across the state line is. Was on Instagram earlier and saw a paid for add on my timeline by Greiten’s with the caption “Next time you hear accusations about somebody, consider the source” followed by a one minute video of people discrediting CNN (although they were just one of probably hundreds out outlets that reported on his affair). Somebody had a drop the mic response saying “Next time a politician tells you he’s all about family values, consider the source”. It really just sickens me that in today’s society politicians can actually get away with actually trying to discredit a legitimate news story.
The editors ultimately responsible ought to be Editor Fannin, cap size about 7.5, or Managing Editor Farmer, 8-plus.