Now, we know the Star is cutting reporting staff left and right, essentially transforming the paper into a mere repository for AP stories, but some of the choices regarding what local news stories are worthy of coverage are absolutely appalling.
Last week, we discussed the unfortunate passage of California’s Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriages in the state, and also mentioned that the local LGBT community was joining with other supporters around the nation to hold a “Stop the H8″ rally on Nov. 15. During the weekend, we perused local news outlets’ web sites, seeking coverage of the event — we only were able to find two pieces online, one preview piece posted Nov. 12 on KSHB, and an actual video report about the event, courtesy KMBC. Thinking that maybe we’d just missed other stations’ coverage or had overlooked it in the Star, we gave up the search and went about our non-blog lives (a very small sliver of existence these days, it seems).
However, we were not alone in our thoughts that les journalistes de KC had dropped the ball – come Monday, Blog KC commented on the failure of the local media to cover this story, particularly the Star. As Willie (Rockhill) Nelson astutely observed:
Interesting that the supposedly “liberal” JO KC Star seems to have completely ignored the local angle of the recent nation-wide protests for equal marriage rights that sprung up in the wake of the California gay marriage ban. The Star only ran an AP piece, and didn’t even bother to insert a sentance mentioning the local event.
Truly, the Star is practicing lazy journalism when it doesn’t even report on a local angle to a national event, and instead picks up a wire dispatch. For a paper that claims to be the end-all, be-all of Kansas City news, this is quite the slight. Just to give the paper the benefit of the doubt, though, we did a quick search at kansascity.com for “proposition 8, kansas city rally” — here’s what came up in the search results:
That’s right — two stories, one of them being a completely unrelated piece about two New York NFL teams. Incredibly, while the Star neglected to cover an event in its own backyard, it included a piece from the Wichita Eagle about that city’s “Stop the H8″ rally, which drew 100 protestors (and about 10 counter-protestors from Kevin Bacon-loving Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church). Granted, we may have missed something in the print version, but one would think that there would be some sort of coverage about a rather high-profile protest at a Kansas City landmark.
As an extra slap in the face to REAL local news, what large, eye-catching story appears at the top of today’s kansascity.com home page? A story about David Cook’s new CD. This, the Star deems worthy of serious coverage. A local event that protests the trampling of civil rights and abuse of the ballot initiative process by radical fundamentalists? Not so much.
[...] Protest? What protest? [...]