It sometimes seems easy to bash The Kansas City Star these days.
The McClatchy-owned newspaper has had so many cuts over the years that it sometimes seems to be a shell of what it once was in the community.
However, that doesn’t mean that despite severe staff cutbacks and slashed budgets, some quality journalism isn’t still delivered on a fairly regular basis at the newspaper.
Take for instance the Sunday paper (6/24) where veteran journos Eric Adler and Laura Bauer penned a superb front-page story titled “Discipline on Trial” about whether military schools have a culture of violence with harsh discipline meted out by students.
That story was followed up by sterling effort by Star multimedia reporter Dave Helling questioning if the non-profit Missouri Legislative Black Caucus Foundation was really offering scholarships to assist minority students, or simply wasting money on its own conferences.
Adler and Bauer (who collaborated on a book, “Joplin 5:41,” last year about the devastating Joplin Tornado) outlined a number of accusations that have been raised against St. John’s Military School in Salina, KS. The school is accused in lawsuits of allowing classmates to physically and mentally abuse other cadets.
It would have been easy for Adler and Bauer to simply highlight the sensational charges against the school. But the duo gave sufficient balance to the story by allowing the school to respond to each specific allegation.
When readers finished the lengthy article they could make up their minds on the situation. Were students abused, or were many of them troubled, out-of-control youths from single-parent families who were not able to manage their own children and sent them to the military school for the discipline they could not provide?
The duo presented the facts and let readers decide which side is correct. Maybe the truth is somewhere in-between. It was journalism at its finest.
Helling, who has been involved in radio, TV and the print media since 1977 in Kansas City, showed his writing and investigative skills by pointing out in his story that more than 80% of the money collected by the Foundation went for its annual meeting and conferences.
”The group spent just $15,400 on 20 college scholarships, an average of $770 each,” wrote Helling.
Students can spend that amount for books in a single semester. The paltry figure is an embarrassment for a group reportedly created to assist needy students.
Quality journalism may have suffered some setbacks in Kansas City, but it is not dead as shown by this Star trio of reporters (L-R: Adler, Bauer and Helling).