Every day, with its buzz-cut staff, The Kansas City Star faces a difficult balancing act in terms of what stories its editors decide to pursue and what beats it should focus on.
But that reality does not lessen my frustration — and I believe that of many readers — at important stories going uncovered as a result.
The latest example of The Star opting for a big-splash story at the expense of important daily coverage is Sunday’s lead story about a UMKC pharmacy professor and department chairman, Ashim Mitra, who “used students as servants,” with UMKC administrators letting him get away with it for years.
Reporters Mara Rose Williams and Mike Hendricks spent several weeks on this expose, and it’s a very good, important story. It is also, however, partly to blame for The Star failing to cover another, less eye-catching, story before the Nov. 6 election.
First, a little background. It was the Williams-Hendricks team that brought us the 2014 investigation that shattered the UMKC’s claim that its Henry W. Bloch School of Management had attained the rank of No. 1 business school in the country. Williams and Hendricks exposed the ranking as a sham, mainly because the business school had previously employed the two experts who produced the rankings. Obviously, it was extremely embarrassing for UMKC.
The lead Sunday story
This year, Williams and Hendricks pounced again after someone familiar with the business-school story tipped them that Professor Mitra had been using students as his personal servants, for such jobs as yard work and house sitting when he and his wife were away.
Williams has been an education reporter at The Star for more than 20 years, so the Mitra story was clearly up her alley. Hendricks is spread much thinner, dividing his time between investigations and the Jackson County Courthouse, which is his assigned “beat.”
The problem is Hendricks’ investigative work leaves him very little time to cover the courthouse, one of the most important beats at the paper, along with the Kansas and Missouri state houses, City Hall and cops.
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A perfect example of a significant, developing story going uncovered was the Jackson County Legislature’s attempt to get voters to approve several amendments to the Jackson County home-rule charter. Like constitutional amendments at the state level, charter amendments are a big deal.
As most of you know, a package of seven charter amendments was on the recent Election Day ballot. But because Hendricks was devoting most of his time to the UMKC story, Star readers got precious little information about how these amendments came about and what effect they would have on county government.
It was a very confusing package of amendments, produced largely by an outgoing eastern Jackson County legislator named Greg Grounds. The best way to go about amending the Kansas City or Jackson County charter is to appoint a blue-ribbon commission, including at least some citizens, and give them plenty of time to hold public hearings, study the issues and come up with a package of recommendations.
But the “Grounds amendments” were shot from the hip and shot full of holes. Grounds’ main goals were to give all county elected officials big pay raises and strip the county executive of significant powers. Frankly, the amendments were a bouquet — fragrant only to county legislators — that Grounds tossed over his shoulder, to his friends, on the way out the door.
This situation could have provided The Star with at least a dozen stories over the last several months. If Hendricks hadn’t been otherwise engaged, he could have reported compellingly on the wheeling and dealing that was going on behind the scenes, with little or no public input.
As far as I can tell, however, coverage consisted of a couple of news stories and a couple of editorials. More important — and more disturbing — Hendricks failed to write an explanatory story in the days leading up to the election. In times past, The Star threw a phalanx of reporters at pre-election coverage, publishing “election guides” that covered every contested race and every issue on the ballot.
…In a last-minute attempt to catch up, The Star published an editorial a week before the election attempting to sort out the charter amendments. The editorial was very confusing and frustrating, however, partly because readers — as well as the editorial writer — did not have the benefit of previous stories to imbue it with depth and familiarity.
In the editorial, The Star endorsed three of the amendments and recommended a “no” vote on the other four…That, in itself, was confusing because voters relying on The Star for guidance would have had to take the paper to the polls as a voting guide.
…If you’ll recall, after reading that editorial and doing some research on my own, I recommended a “no” vote on all seven amendments. In my opinion, all were half baked and ill advised.
In the end, voters approved three of the amendments — two authorizing term limits and pay raises for the prosecutor and sheriff and one allowing the County Legislature to fire the county counselor — and voted down the four others, including two that would have set term limits and provided pay raises for the county executive and the County Legislature (themselves, in other words).
I believe that if the paper had covered the story properly, voters may well have rejected all the amendments and forced the Legislature to go back and start all over again, this time doing the job forthrightly and with extensive public participation.
In the end, thankfully, voters did a pretty good job of sorting through the mess, even with the benefit of very little information from the hometown newspaper. Unfortunately, readers are getting accustomed to being left starved by The Star when it comes to routine coverage of developing stories.
