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

The Star’s Allison Kite and Bill Turque have been doing a good job overall of covering the attack mode that candidate Jolie Justus recently embarked on in the mayor’s race, but sometimes they have failed to get to the heart of things.

Such was the case with today’s coverage of a low-blow mailer produced by a political action committee affiliated with the carpenters’ union in Kansas City and St. Louis.

The carpenters PAC — called Carpenters Help in the Political Process (CHIPP) — has been going all out to get Justus elected over her opponent Quinton Lucas. The carpenters’ regional council represents more than 20,000 members in Kansas, Missouri and southern Illinois, and the PAC has spent about $90,000 promoting Justus.

What do they want? The Star hasn’t offered readers any explanation, but here’s the deal:

The carpenters are trying to insure a Justus victory so that union carpenters will get hundreds of carpentry jobs that will be available in building the airport terminal. As chairperson of the City Council’s Aviation Committee, Justus has been a driving force in charting the course for the new terminal, and as mayor she would have even stronger control of airport-related matters.

The carpenters are worried that if Lucas wins the mayor’s race, he would push for more non-union, smaller outfits, which tend to have more minority workers. Lucas, of course, is African-American.

In their eagerness to make Lucas look bad, the carpenters went beyond the pale with their mailer. In a story today, Turque (who functions more as an editor these days but occasionally writes a story) said the problem with the mailer was that it included a “dark, grainy photo” of Lucas. (The mailer didn’t come to my house.)

The fact is dark and grainy weren’t the main problems; what makes the mailer so objectionable and nasty is that the photo depicts Lucas as an “Uncle Tom,” with drooping cheeks and lips and eyes cast downward. If the photo was doctored and had him in working clothes, he would have looked alarmingly like a slave.

Jolie, on the other hand, is depicted as her usual, smiling self, dressed in the bold red colors she tends to favor.

Check it out…
There is nothing particularly objectionable in the text below the photos; it’s all in the photo.

During an hour-long debate yesterday at Union Station, Lucas said the carpenters use of the photo was “disappointing” and “distasteful.”

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if it was my campaign” — that produced such a mailer, he said.

Justus didn’t respond to Lucas’ criticism during the debate, but Turque reported she denounced it shortly afterward and said in a statement, “I found the photo distributed by the CHIPP committee to be racially insensitive and in poor taste.”

Carpenters Regional Council political director Joe Hudson issued a statement saying, “We deeply regret using imagery that some of our fellow Kansas Citians felt was offensive.”

That was a lame apology — another instance of what we see a lot of these days: qualified, back-door apologies. Instead of saying flat out that the photo was offensive, Hudson light-footed it by saying “some of our fellow Kanas Citians” might regard it as offensive.

Translation: We’re not really sorry, and we hope the photo had the desired effect.

**

Online, The Star ran a photo of the mailer at the bottom of Turque’s story…Not prominent enough.

In the print edition, the story ran on page A-4 without a photo of the mailer…Big mistake.

The story should have run on the front page in the print edition, with a photo, in place of a story about Kansas officials negotiating to send some inmates to a sketchy, private prison in Arizona.

**

While Justus probably wasn’t directly responsible for the carpenters’ mailer, she and they have been pursuing similar lines of attack striking at Lucas’ trustworthiness.

Calling Lucas’ trustworthiness into question is one thing but depicting him as “Uncle Tom” is another. This is the kind of thing that could backfire on Justus. She’s lucky The Star underplayed the story and failed to accurately describe the objectionable photo. That might limit the degree of backfire.

Now we’ll see what editorial page editor editor Colleen McCain Nelson and her writers have to say about this. The editorial board already leaned toward Lucas, and this episode will probably seal the paper’s endorsement for Lucas.

And that could cost Justus the mayor’s race.