The Star has hard work ahead to gain trust of Black Kansas Citians, panelists say
The Kansas City Star’s apology to Black residents was the first step in reconciling with its racist past, but the newspaper has more work to do to establish community trust, said guests of a live panel discussion Wednesday evening.
During the virtual event about The Star’s six-part ‘Truth in Black and white’ project, Michele Watley, founder of Shirley’s Kitchen Cabinet, said the newspaper’s path to reconciliation with Black residents will take years to accomplish.
“You can’t take back what’s already happened in history. How do you make up for 100 years of bad narratives?” said Watley, whose nonprofit focuses on issues of importance to Black women and families in Kansas City.
“It is really rooted in The Star’s work to ensure that race and equity as a lens is used” in the internal processes that create and support its reporting, she said.
The event, “Racial reckoning at The Kansas City Star: ‘The Truth in Black and white,’” was presented in conjunction with the Kansas City Public Library and was moderated by Toriano Porter, a member of The Star’s Editorial Board.
It came about a month after The Star published a Dec. 20 series investigating its own history of how it covered — and failed to cover — Black residents over its 140-year history. The project included an apology from Editor Mike Fannin, who wrote that The Star and its now-defunct sister paper, The Times, had “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.”
The project was spearheaded by education reporter Mará Rose Williams, who said what reporters uncovered about the paper’s treatment of Kansas City’s Black community “stirred our journalistic souls.” She said she hoped the long-term effects of the series will be seen in day-to-day coverage, not just in profiles about prominent Black Kansas Citians.
“Yes, we will do those stories, and we are planning those stories going forward,” she said. “But what will be sustainable is when it becomes part of the very fiber of everything we do, every single day when we walk into the office ... to do a story.”
Asked in a live question from a viewer how Kansas City can judge The Star’s progress toward reconciliation, Williams said it will take time, but to read and watch The Star and its reporters. One of the measures, she said: “Do we show up?”
“The measuring stick is going to be what you see coming out of The Star, the response you get from people you talk to at The Star, whether you’re seeing reporters in the community ... Are we showing up?,” she said. “Those are the things that are going to be the measuring stick.”
Critics of the project have called for action from the newspaper, Fannin said, not just what some see as an empty apology.
Fannin agreed actions had to follow. He said one of the paper’s first steps, though mostly symbolic, was stripping from The Star words and image that recognized William Rockhill Nelson, its first publisher and founder. Nelson supported local developer J.C. Nichols, whose use of racist restrictive covenants accelerated Kansas City’s racial divide.
The Star has also created a board to advise editors and reporters on a host of issues, including how to improve coverage of all communities of color, Fannin said. The group will meet for the first time Thursday with “a full agenda,” he said.
“Every investigation has to be judged by its impact,” Fannin said. “And the impact of this one will be in how we’ve changed.”
Nicole Sussner Rodgers, founder and executive director of Family Story, a New York-based think tank working to broaden perspective on family arrangements and models, said biased media coverage not only damages Black communities, but harms non-Black people who are not presented with the complete picture of experiences they do not understand.
“If the news you consume and you read everyday as a white person does a caricatured version of Black people, or doesn’t give them their full humanity or their full stories, you are the one missing out,” Rodgers said.
Watley, who is a member of The Star’s advisory board, said it was important to acknowledge the work the newspaper did to unearth its neglect of the Black community. But she said it had to “walk and chew gum” at the same time — put in the sweat.
“I’m hopeful and excited to see how The Star continues to roll up its sleeves and do the hard work in atoning for its past and setting a path to the future that we as a Kansas City community as a whole can be proud and be a part of,” Watley said.
This story was originally published January 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
