Reader Kenneth A. McGee wrote me last week, wondering if he smelled a setup in The Kansas City Star newsroom.
Reporter Karen Uhlenhuth wrote a story in the July 3 paper about a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study on teen driving. The research indicated that “graduated drivers licensing programs, which grant driving privileges to teens a step at a time, can reduce accidents involving 16-year-olds by 21 percent.”
The story noted that Missouris system received the highest of four possible marks from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, but Kansas’ much less graduated system ranked in the second-to-last tier.
McGee copied me on a letter he sent to Uhlenhuth, pointing out what he felt was a hole in the story: “You don’t directly address the issue of what state [Kansas or Missouri] has the better 16-year-old drivers. You know that when I see a story like yours I figure an agenda is being promoted.”
I do see a bit of his point, in a philosophical sense. I agree that people can use statistics to buttress arguments about very broad topics and the same figures can sometimes be interpreted in entirely different ways. In this case, I dont particularly think the story argued that one state had safer teen drivers, but I agree that the inference might not be a huge leap.
But even more interesting to me was a follow-up McGee sent later in reaction to a Monday Star editorial calling for further teen driving restrictions in Kansas.
“I have seen this happen several times before,” he wrote. “First a ‘news story’ appears in the paper followed not long after by an op-ed piece calling for some change supported by the ‘news story.’ This rather transparent, and I might add juvenile, effort by The Star at ‘agenda engineering’ is, in my opinion, several levels below professional journalism.”
Here, I fully understand why McGee might suspect one hand guiding both pieces. Editorials, which are written by The Star’s Editorial Board, do indeed frequently address issues covered elsewhere in the paper.
I asked editorial page editor Miriam Pepper for her take. “Some editorials ‘follow’ the news; some editorials represent our own projects or issues,” she said. “We work independently, separate from the news side, and we don’t influence what or how they report the news. We’ve commented on driving license age requirements several times, well before the most recent story and following it.”
So there is often a chain of cause and effect when a news item prompts the Editorial Board to comment. There is truly a strong separation between the news staff and the board a distinction that is second nature to journalists. But I know this division is enigmatic to many readers, who see both as part of the same institutional whole.
