How much longer will the powers that be at what’s left of the once vaunted Kansas City Star put up with lame, over-the-top editorials and biased reporting?
If that sounds like a mouthful, trust me it is.
The once-thoughtful, local news organization has veered so far left – in a market that as one comments section person noted is at the very least, equal parts middle-of-the-road to conservative – that even free thinkers like longtime movie critic Jack Poessiger can’t stop scratching their collective heads.
“Did you see the editorial today that they want KC police chief Rick Smith to resign?” Poessiger says. “I tell you what, if you read that editorial – and it’s a long one – it’ll make you want to throw up. It’s so anti-everything that most traditional Americans stand for. It’s almost anti-police – even though technically it’s not -although it reads that way.”
Not only is it wrong-headed, it doesn’t bode well for a dying newspaper in a dying industry, struggling to remain afloat and coming out of bankruptcy and a dozen years of hemorrhaging readers, news staff and revenue.
“It’s going to piss a lot of their longtime readers off,” Poessiger nuses. “It’s so very, very hard to the left. I would say it’s too left wing for the paper’s own good.”
Aside from laying waste to the tenets of traditional journalism, the Star’s new extreme political views and style of “reporting” has cost it dearly in terms of readership.
“I would certainly think so,” Poessiger says. “Especially with the older demo which is their bread-and-butter, because people that are younger don’t read the newspaper.”
Westport entertainment spark plug Bill Nigro couldn’t agree more.
“I read the editorial today calling for Kansas Chief Rick Smith to resign, and then I went to the Star website to see a picture of who the op ed people are,” Nigro says. “And they’re just a bunch of schmoes that have never stood out in the real world at night, Chief Smith has already worked and is familiar with the problems we have here. What makes them experts in the security field when they have absolutely no experience. And explain to me why its the police chief’s fault that there are more murders. Those writers from the Star are idiots.”
Nigro’s take the newspaper editorial board’s numerous critiques:
“I could go down the list and shoot a hole in every one of them,” he says. “Out of like 1,500 police on the streets, three of them had issues where they were too aggressive. But people don’t understand what police go through. It’s like somebody points a gun at you or hits you in the mouth. Believe me, when you’re out there under pressure there’s going to some guys that crack – and when they do, they get rid of them.”
As I said before, if the Koch Brothers bought the paper it would have been the best thing for the Star in the long run. About 70 to 80 percent of the staff would of been fired or quit and the Koch Brothers would have had to get competent people to replace them. Maybe by now readership and subscriptions would stablelize.
That editorial was disgusting. Want to know who is to blame for the rising amount of crime in Kansas City? Sly James, former KCPD Chief Darryl Forté and most importantly, Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.
That trio did nothing to stop crime in the city. Now it’s starting to spill into the suburbs. James ignored the issue his whole time in office. Forte always gave lip service to the issue until he left for the Sheriff’s office. And Baker, slapped wrist, after wrist, after wrist of violent criminals instead of locking them up and throwing away the keys.
All the Star did was give that trio praise all the way to record crime numbers. Personally, I hope the Star closes shop. a city without a newspaper seems like a good one to me.
Hard to argue m any of your points, Brian…
As for a city without a daily newspaper, you may not have much longer to wait.
That said, it’s too bad in many ways because people want to know what’s going on. What they don’t want is to be lectured and talked down to by people taking advantage of their positions to try and turn public opinion in the direction they think it ought to go in.