Reader Michael Benson e-mailed me an interesting question about an item he read on KansasCity.com last Tuesday.
After reading a “Most Wanted” posting about two persons being sought by police, Benson didn’t find this salient detail: “Race was not mentioned at all. The two most obvious traits used for visual identification are race and gender. Are you afraid you’ll offend someone if you mention the color of their skin?”
He raises a good point though the back story is a lot more complex in this case.
The Kansas City Star’s stylebook contains a rather lengthy entry on describing criminal suspects. Its underlying advice is sound: The color of a person’s skin is a perfectly useful and appropriate identifying characteristic to mention, but only when combined with other details that distinguish the suspect from the general population.
These guidelines are really just common sense. General descriptors that could apply to thousands of people in the metropolitan area (race, hair color, build) aren’t terribly useful in identifying a person. But more specificity (light skin, shoulder-length blond hair, mid-30s, four piercings in left ear) distinguishes the person enough to make the report useful.
In this instance, though, it should all have been a moot point. The item Benson saw inadvertently appeared on KansasCity.com without the photographs of the two suspects, which accompanied the item in print.
That’s really a problem. A technical glitch in the automated process that translates stories from the paper into electronic form gave the impression of oversensitivity about race. Especially since the word descriptions contained such minute details as the suspects’ tattoos and aliases, I understand why readers might have been confused about The Star’s policy.
Several readers questioned both the tone and headline of a May 25 story about the tax returns of Sen. Jim Talent and his likely 2006 opponent, Missouri Auditor Claire McCaskill.
The story noted that Talent paid $3,700 a year to share a Washington apartment with Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. Talent doesn’t have his own room, but instead sleeps in a bed on the landing of a staircase.
That information might seem a little unusual to some, though rents in Washington are notoriously high, and it’s certainly not the first time that members of Congress have doubled up in their D.C. living arrangements.
But my callers and e-mailers didn’t focus on the facts of the story. They questioned the unusually conversational tone of a few sentences: “Then there’s the ‘say what?’ side.” “OK, but here’s the story that demands its own reality TV show.”
They also found fault with the headline: “Senators” apartment-sharing deal raises eyebrows.”
“Whose eyebrows are we talking about here?” said one caller. “This doesn’t quote a single person complaining about it. Sounds to me like it’s just the newspaper echoing its own biases.”
I asked national editor Darryl Levings for his take.
“I raised my own eyebrows when I saw the headline, too,” he said.
Wire editors combined an Associated Press story with material from The Star’s online “KC Buzz Blog,” which had covered the story the previous day. Hence the informal tone.
Blogs are a mixture of news and comment, and I see nothing wrong with the Buzz Blog’s casual voice in its own context. But I agree with readers who thought it was an odd fit with the rest of the story in the paper.
I’m also with the readers who questioned the headline. The story laid out the facts, and readers should have been left to raise their own eyebrows — or not.
