Dan Turner recently made a point that I'll be certain to hear more and more as the election season heats up. Pointing to a blogger who noted that The Star didn't always identify Paul Morrison's party affiliation in stories about his affair with a staffer and subsequent resignation.
"If it isn't the Star's policy for such stories to identify party affiliation early in the story, it certainly should be," he wrote. "Doing so as a matter of policy would avoid a lot of hard feelings. Many conservatives strongly suspect that the MSM tends to omit party affiliation when a Democrat is involved in a scandal, but tend to trumpet party affiliation when it embarrasses Republicans. Such routine disclosure would help instill a certain amount of humbleness among members of both parties, since neither party has a corner on moral perfection."
My experience has been that readers especially want party IDs when their political foes stumble, obviously. There isn't a hard and fast policy about this at The Star, and I suspect most of the time the omissions come because reporters write about many local figures so often that they simply don't think to mention affiliation every time -- and many astute political followers know the parties anyhow.
But that doesn't help occasional readers, of which there are many. For the record, I could find only two news stories about Morrison's affair that didn't mention his party.
You've GOT to be kidding!
"I suspect most of the time the omissions come because reporters write about many local figures so often that they simply don't think to mention affiliation every time."
--Derek Donovan
C'mon. You can't really believe that! Do you? You can toe the company line, but always remember: it's better to ignore a question/letter and not answer, than it is to misrepresent. And, young man, you should NEVER fool yourself. Period.
Think hard about what you wrote. Can you honestly say you think the Star is not Left-leaning? I didn't think so. Now be a responsible journalist and fix that nonsense.
Happy New Year!
RE: You've GOT to be kidding!
Really, what I wrote there is bipartisan. I do think The Star falls down on identifying parties sometimes, and I know there's a perception that it's intentional. It may be sometimes, and I've written in the past that I found more emphasis on party during some of the national GOP scandals in the past few years.
But in general, I truly believe a lot of the omissions come from the fact that it's a bit of boilerplate, and reporters working in the trenches simply forget to put it in sometimes. Read my columns - I rarely take The Star's side.
Side-Stepping
Do you believe that the "omissions" that you think are "unintentional" are even-handed? That is, do you believe the party ID is omitted from The Star's stories about bad deeds perpetrated by Republicans, as often as it is from stories about bad deeds perpetrated by Democrats? If so, you should look a little closer.
Along the same lines, look at today's Prime Buzz story characterizing a Huckabee statement about Pakistan as a bungle. It is a real stretch, on a statement I'm sure would be hearalded by The Star, if made by Hillary, Obama, or Edwards.
RE: “Read my columns - I rarely take The Star's side.”
From your columns in the last two months:
Your 12/16/07 column: You defended the Star’s printing of the name of the shooter at the Omaha mall.
Your 12/02/07 column: “The Star’s overall philosophy is not to restate the erroneous information in a correction, the reasoning being that it might cause more confusion in readers’ minds to see the bad information, even while it’s being refuted. I think that makes sense in general.”
Your 11/04/07 column: “In all of these cases, I agree with the editors’ decisions: There were no errors in the coverage, so the pages remained on KansasCity.com until their normal expiration.”
Clearly, it is not a rare occurrence for you to disagree with an action the Star has taken. But, as demonstrated above, neither is it a rare occurrence for you to take the Star’s side. Most readers probably feel that you strike a reasonable balance between defending and criticizing your employer.
Bad, bad examples
VOR, you are cherry picking, and extremely disingenuously. I also didn't claim I never take the paper's side.
There's no journalistic reason whatsoever for anyone not to reveal the name of a mass murderer, regardless of how upsetting it may be.
The corrections thing is simply my opinion - I don't think bad info should be restated, e.g. "A story last week erroneously spelled Mark Funkhouser's name as 'Mark Funkhowzer.'" What's the point there? Don't perpetuate the mistake, unless it requires confusing verbal gymnastics.
And in the last case, there wasn't an error in the coverage, so why should anyone remove it? Do you really think a newspaper should just delete correct information simply because someone feels uncomfortable?
Awful, awful response.
Where to begin?
1) “VOR, you are cherry picking, and extremely disingenuously.” Mr. Donovan, you are certainly free to disagree with my comments. However, when you accuse me of acting disingenuously, you are guilty of the sort of rudeness that you attribute to many of the posters on the Star blogs. Let me assure you that I sincerely meant every word I said, and I consider your use of the phrase “extremely disingenuous” to be both insulting and unprofessional.
2) “I also didn’t say I never take the paper’s side.” That is true, and I never claimed you did. What you said was you “rarely” take the paper’s side, and, to make your point, you encouraged readers to go back and reread your articles. I took you up on your invitation to reread your articles, and, having reread them, I cited examples from three of your last four articles where you took the side of the paper.
3) What you never explicitly articulate in your response but seem to be saying is: “Okay, I took the side of the paper in the cases you cited, but to do otherwise would have been really foolish. In all of the examples you cited, there were few valid arguments on the other side.” Well, that may or may not be true. But, the point is that in each example there were readers who believed that the Star was wrong relative to some aspect of the story, and in each case you provided support for the Star’s overall policy and/or specific position on the story. Given all that, your contention that you “rarely take the Star’s side” is simply false.
Re: Awful, awful response.
Your troll-fu is strong.
Re: Your troll-fu is strong.
Thank you. It comes in handy when dealing with professionals such as yourself.
Now, given that this exchange has lost its charm, I will be more than happy to give you the last word. Then, you can get back to important stuff, like philosophizing on whether the Star should publish the the full list of Grammy nominees. And I can get back to dealing with people who try a little harder to be civil.