Guest Blogged by Howard Beale of Fired Up! Missouri
The Kansas City Star just can’t help itself. When it comes to high-level reporting on the issue of the national GOP’s attempts to politicize justice and steal elections with its phony “voter fraud” project, it seems there’s no story that the Star’s editors can’t make mushier and more GOP-friendly.
Today the Star again does with a piece by Greg Gordon of news syndicate McClatchy what it did to a Gordon story from some weeks ago, refusing to print some of the most important facts underlying the lack of factual basis for GOP allegations of voter fraud.
Most notable in the Kansas City Star version of today’s Greg Gordon piece for McClatchy is the treatment of the disposition of the Department of Justice lawsuit against the state of Missouri regarding voter rolls. Of the suit, Gordon writes (emphasis added):
The KCStar’s rewrite of that graf rips out its substantive guts. The McClatchy-owned Star goes with this GOP-friendlier construction instead…
Of course, the Star doesn’t want to elaborate on why the suit was thrown out, because doing so might jeopardize their longstanding practice of trumpeting overblown –or outright fabricated– Republican charges of “vote fraud.” After all, it’s not as though the federal judge who tossed the suit was ambiguous about the rationale for tossing the lawsuit. The ruling included this:
Just as it did previously, the Kansas City Star has gone out of its way to exclude from a story factual information, the exclusion of which makes the story less accurate, less newsworthy, and less meaningful.
People have asked the question before, and it should be asked again: does the Star refuse to print the reported fact that the DOJ had “no evidence of voter fraud” because it believes its parent company is misreporting the fact, or because editors would simply prefer not to see that fact reported?
Though the passage about the 2005 DOJ suit against Missouri may be the most egregious rewrite done by the Star of this Gordon piece, it is not the only one. In fact, near the top of the piece, the Star drops half a sentence which Gordon uses to allow Justice Department lawyers to lend important historical context to the national Republican “voter fraud” effort. Gordon’s version reads:
The Star apparently would prefer that its readers not be informed by former Department of Justice officials about what has historically gone on with Republican efforts at “caging” Democratic voters in other states. The Star offers this redacted sentence:
I suppose the KC Star’s editors are simply using their knowledge of what did or didn’t happen with voter obstruction in Florida in 2000 –knowledge which is presumably vastly superior to that of DOJ career Civil Rights attorneys– as a basis on which to omit a substantive portion of the reporting upon which the story was founded. How thoughtful of them. I’ll bet the Republican Party appreciates the paper’s discretion.
The Kansas City Star, whatever its reasons –though I can’t conjure up too many good ones– has decided again that the facts reported by Greg Gordon are good enough for its parent company McClatchy and its readers in other outlets, but are unacceptable for its Missouri and Kansas readership. This persists in being a shame.
Newspapermen, of all people, ought to realize hat facts are facts and that some facts are not more appropriate for printing than others merely because they are less difficult to assimilate into their business’s portfolio of political need, or because they go beyond an editor’s arbitrary comfort zone.
Perhaps the Star’s readership ought to start regularly circumventing the middleman’s institutional censors and getting its news –at least on voting and DOJ issues– straight from McClatchy itself.
Censorship by omission, It’s the Con way
Brad,
I think you’re seeing the down side of the kind of management infrastructure that Knight Ridder used to have (and apparently is still at McClatchy now) that also helps in other ways allowing McClatchy Washington Bureau to have more independence than other news operations from topside oversight.
As someone who worked at Knight Ridder when they first started the Washington Bureau, I believe the content editing oversight comes HEAVILY from local VPs. They had an oversupply of them while I was there who were basically the local editors of each of the larger papers around the country. I don’t believe there’s a lot of centralized oversight from the top. That allows someone at KC to do the crap you are talking about here (I’ll bug some old friends there to see if I can get any more poop on this), but it also keeps heavy content editing from coming down on the Washington Bureau.
I guess given the choice, I’m glad that at least the Washington Bureaus is more free to give us the truth and have a few bad apples running the local papers of that company around the country rather than a Fox/NewsCorp style “we define the truth the way we see it” that goes about firing folks like they did with the folks down in Florida trying to do an investigative report on Monsanto a few years back.
But we SHOULD be holding these guys’ fee to the fire when they screw up! Thanks for trying to keep them honest!
To be clear, it’s the KC Star’s feet that are being held to the fire here. Not the DC folks, or Greg Gordon, whose been doing extraordinary work.
KC Star is allowed, I guess, to rewrite as they wish. The concern, however, is that they keep rewriting to remove the reference to “voter fraud” (or more aptly, the lack thereof) in a Missouri paper, of all places, which was ‘Ground Zero’ for this scheme.
It’s certainly not McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder’s) fault. Not sure what, if anything, they can do to keep their member papers, such as the horrible KC Star from rewriting in that way.
Brad, you are certainly right! I’m so glad that the investor pinheads weren’t able to shut down the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau when they pushed it to get sold off and that it is still McClatchey.
I’m looking at RealCities.com, and it looks to be now more of just a sales and ad network than anything else. It used to have centralized search indexes, and a national news desk in San Jose where Knight Ridder used to be headquartered at (unfortunately not in Miami in 2000 where it was before the year before then and perhaps some votes could have made the difference!). I knew the folks handling those, but it doesn’t look like there’s much of that going on at a centralized level now. I would have tried to ping the national news desk to see if they could put pressure on the KC Star to do the right thing. They also used to have a huge contacts page too with just about every VP and various contact on that page too.
Here’s a page at McClatchy Interactive’s web site that’s now in North Carolina instead of San Jose. It looks like it handles some of the content centralization and aggregation there. Perhaps comments directed to people mentioned on this page might alert them to readers’ concerns that the news content they are responsible in disseminating to the Real Cities network is being handled improperly.
Brad-
Good aricle, thanks for keeping your readership informed.
I don’t understand why McClatchy allows “local rewriters” to constantly modify Greg Gordon’s fine work? This is the 3rd or 4th time this has happened. Why a page two national political article of this stature would be edited just amazes me.
Why should a newspaper subscriber believe anything printed in the KC Star?
When a newspaper performs a rewrite of a page one or two national news article the only intent is to alter the article not condense. If space is a concern then edit or cancel the local stories and shrink or change ads. I can only assume the KC Star has intentionally modified and/or slanted several fine articles written by Greg Gordon to express partisan views or fear offense of local political, legal and /or other business interests.
What about my interests? I have been a weekly subscriber of the KC Star for over 32 years and tired of the local editorial staff filtering my national news. I’m very capable of making my own decisions and ask only that all facts be presented not some local editor or rewriters biased and/or watered down opinion.
The media industry wonders why newspaper subscribers are canceling their subscriptions and going “on line” for news. The readership want facts presented in the main body of the paper… “all of them  not someone’s opinion. That’s reserved for the editorial page.
I wonder if there is any way the true journalists at McClatchy and their supportive editors in Washington can adopt an “all or nothing” use policy for certain stories?
Probably not.
It’s up to the people of Kansas City to decide they want the truth and to DEMAND it of the Kansas City Star via the only mechanism that seems to work with corporate print journalism… the old “Cancel my Subscription” method.
I know that THE OREGONIAN in Portland, Oregon has improved their coverage and moderated their right-wing editorial slant (and news coverage, placement, headline writing bias) as a result of a downturn in subscriptions as the intelligent, progressive, and well-electronically-connected Portlanders ditch them in droves for BradBlog.com, BuzzFlash.com, OpEdNews, Truthout, RawStory, AlterNet, FreePress, and the rest of the cybernewsphere.
Kansas City — talk with your feet. Those corporations that pay to advertise in the KC Star will quickly notice, as will the Star itself.
G. –
Just for credit where it’s due sake. Today’s KC Star piece was filed by Howard Beale (not myself), who did, I concur, a great piece of coverage.
To complain about the KC Star’s edit of Greg Gordons fine article pick a McClatchy Editor’s email address from this web site —
http://www.mcclatchy.com/106/story/383.html