We specialize in truth: As it did in the 1960s, today’s Star shows integrity, grit
Even I find it hard to believe that 58 years ago, about 30 of us virtuous young journalists created the Kansas City Star Newsmen’s Forum and set out to lecture the editors. Our leader that day read the founding document to a tense gathering of the staff.
“We of the Newsmen’s Forum are agreed unanimously that these practices now followed by Star employees should be eliminated as a matter of Star policy.”
To avoid conflict of interest, we advised, staff members should be stopped from accepting free passes and tickets, plus gifts at Christmas like cases of whiskey; cartons of cigarettes; free luncheons and dinners and drinks; plus records and books, even for reviewers.
For many years Starlight Theatre had given free season passes to all our editorial and business employees. The newspaper’s elder critic warmly and sincerely reviewed Starlight on page one.
“We view in the same light the payment of transportation for Star staffers on junkets, be it from a branch of the armed services or an airline,” our lecture continued. “If they are worth the coverage, they are worth the Star’s paying for them.”
This is from a copy of the original text, which I turned up recently in an old file. It had been sent to me by John Ratterman, a dear friend and long-ago Forum colleague.
“I’m still amazed we weren’t all fired!” John wrote.
Indeed, we were not fired. Far from it. New faces among our editors, plus more episodes of such reporter pushiness, slowly led to desperately needed reforms.
After sometimes loud arguments at the Star’s city desk, for the first time we began publishing obituaries of African Americans. We reported shameful segregation policies of the real estate industry that constrained Black home ownership and caused racial turnover of neighborhoods in the east side
We began hiring Black reporters like Helen Gott Gray and Mel Lewis, who proved courageous and useful during the city’s 1968 riot. Reporter Laura Hockaday, from a high society family herself, for the first time brought elegant Black weddings and parties into the society page.
After leaving The Star in 1973, I took on other writing projects and taught journalism for 20 years at UMKC, not returning to write this column until five years ago. To be rehired, I had to sign a comprehensive Star code of ethics demanding journalistic integrity similar to, but well beyond, our Forum ambitions of 1963.
I write this now in response to savage attacks former President Donald Trump and fellow Republicans hurl at American journalists. Trump called us “enemies of the people” and “scum” and “slime.”
“I would never kill them, but I do hate them…And some of them are such lying, disgusting people…It’s frankly disgusting the press is able to write whatever they want to write.” He told supporters he would “open up our libel laws” to sue journalists.
“We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”
“Fake news” Trump calls us, though in fact we almost never get sued because it’s hard to catch mainstream American journalists in a lie. We specialize in truth. With a diminished advertising base because of social media, the Star journalistic staff today is not half the size of the one I knew.
Coverage of routine car crashes, robberies and council meetings has dwindled. The paper focuses more on issues raised in local school and government meetings.
But I believe today’s Star does more fine investigative work than we ever did in those long-ago days with our huge staff.
It superbly reports subsidies to the wealthy, like tax dodges for millionaires and local property tax giveaways for strip malls and office buildings. Never has it done better at exposing unaccountable police shootings of unarmed citizens. Never has it done better at reporting on blind resistance in Missouri and Kansas to expanding Medicaid for the poor and freeing prison inmates proven to be innocent.
The modern journalistic virtues of The Kansas City Star come together in the person of Melinda Henneberger, its vice president and editorial page editor, who for the third year in a row in 2021 was judged a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
No paper is perfect, but I’m proud to be a columnist at The Kansas City Star.
Contact the writer at hammerc12@gmail.com.
This story was originally published July 6, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "We specialize in truth: As it did in the 1960s, today’s Star shows integrity, grit."