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

Well, Santa Claus is a little late arriving at blog HQ, but he finally got here. (I’m not complaining, mind you, because it’s always Kids First!)

He has brought, and authorized me to dispense, candy canes for three examples of good writing and reporting. But he also left one big chunk of coal for New York Times national reporter John Eligon, who is based in Kansas City.

Since it’s Christmas, though, let’s start with the positives…

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Baker

All year long, The Times’ Peter Baker has been calling out Donald Trump and analyzing, without taint of meanness or anger, the man’s small-mindedness and pathetic psyche. Often when I’ve been frustrated and worried about some of Trump’s actions, Baker has, to some degree, put frightening developments into somewhat soothing perspective.

He did it again today in a front-page piece on Trump’s sweeping and mind-bending pardons. In a “news analysis,” Baker summed up the situation by using a quote from Andrew Weissmann, a top lieutenant to Robert Mueller.

On Twitter, Weissmann wrote, “The pardons from this President are what you would expect to get if you gave the pardon power to a mob boss.”

That’s the maddening part. The soothing dimension — from Baker’s pen — is that if Trump really thought he wasn’t leaving office, he wouldn’t be dishing out pardons left and right now.

“(I)t also represents a final, angry exertion of power by a president who is losing his ability to shape events with each passing day, a statement of relevance even as Mr. Trump confronts the end of his dominance over the nation’s capital.”

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Here’s another gem from NYT reporter Glenn Thrush, in a Dec. 23 story about Trump threatening to veto the $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill.

Like a coin flip that never lands, America’s double-headed presidency is queasily suspended in midair as President Trump threatens to veto a bipartisan, Biden-blessed bill intended to speed relief to families, businesses and governments in time for the holidays. Why is Mr. Trump doing this now? One reason: A no has always been more attractive than a yes for the disruptive Mr. Trump, whose 2016 presidential run was impelled by his dislike of President Barack Obama but turbocharged by his contempt for the Republican Party establishment.

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The next one is from a Dec. 23, NYT sports section story that bore the headline “The Fall of the House of Belichick.” Reporter Mike Tanier displayed some felicitous phrasing in these two sentences:

Defeats at the hands of former Super Bowl conquests like the Seattle Seahawks and the Los Angeles Rams and against long-subjugated fiefs like the Buffalo Bills and the Houston Texans took on apocalyptic symbolism. Belichick began appearing before the news media in hoodies that were even more tattered than usual: the emperor now a penitent in sackcloth, muttering about past accomplishments and making uncharacteristic excuses.

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Now, on to that chunk of coal.

Eligon

In a Dec. 21 story about The Kansas City Star’s apology for “Racism in Decades of Reporting,” John Eligon made a flawed comparison regarding minority employment in The Star’s newsroom. He wrote…

While the ambition of Sunday’s series of articles has earned The Star praise, it also has placed new scrutiny on the newsroom’s demographics: About 17 percent of the reporters are Black in a city where Black residents make up about 28 percent of the population. Until it hired…Trey Williams this year to oversee race and equity coverage, the paper had been without a Black staff editor for more than a decade.

There are two problems with his statistical comparison. First, I have no idea why Eligon seemingly limited his comparison to “reporters.” A more representative comparison would be based on the total number of editorial staff members, which includes not only reporters but editors, photographers, copy editors and anyone else involved on the word and image side of the paper. Perhaps Eligon was including the other categories, but, in any event, saying “reporters” is puzzling.

Even worse, however, is using just the Kansas City, Missouri, population as the basis of comparison. The Star, of course, is a metro-wide paper, and according to last year’s U.S. Census Bureau figures Blacks accounted for just 12 percent of the area’s population of more than 2 million.

By that measure, The Star is exceeding the mark.

I’m all for fairness in proportional employment, but I have to wonder if Eligon allowed his personal agenda to override fair and accurate reporting. While I’m at it, I’m giving another chunk of coal to whoever edited the story; the distortion should have been caught.

(I have tried sending emails of complaint to Eligon and national editor Marc Lacey, but my stabs at their email addresses have been incorrect, and all have bounced back. I wrote a letter to the editor and sent it last night, but I doubt it will get in. I intend to call Lacey on Monday. It’s been my experience that NYT reporters and editors seldom return calls, but you can at least leave a message.)

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That’s all for Christmas Day 2020, readers…I hope you all have a great day and a Happy New Year. Thank you for your readership!