Former Star overlord Mark Zieman
Long time, no see…
If that sounds trite, allow me to add that since right before November’s election until present, I’ve kind of been busy.
As in three long distance moving trips from Kansas City to Oro Valley, Arizona in Tucson (where I graduated from high school and attended the University of Arizona), six weeks of apartment living and house hunting, a couple weeks of Covid 19 action and a small house fire that necessitated a month of living in the glamorous Hilton Conquistador.
How’s that for a three month snapshot?
I don’t want to bore you – anymore than I already have – but as lame excuses for not writing go, that’s a decent list.
And I am no longer living in Kansas City.
That said, I’ve been kinda keeping up…
How could I miss for example, the gigantic, never-ending mea culpa by the Kansas City Star, fessing up to Dwight Sutherland and others pointing out for years the newspaper’s patently racist, sexist resume and past (including recent).
To which I gotta call BS on current Star editor Mike Fannin‘s attempt to placate the youngsters he now lords over by disavowing pretty much the newspaper’s entire hisory, including Fannin’s contributions to it.
Does anybody with half a clue actually believe Fannin’s a clean cut dude who hasn’t made more than his share of racist, sexist jokes and remarks, had a career of getting hammered, arrested and dipping his proverbial pen in the company ink via an attractive married woman wh0 answered directly to him for both her sports editor job and paycheck.
So like now that we are mired in an age of rewriting history and disavowing people who’s accomplishments dwarf that of our current crop of politically correct leaders, Fannin does the unthinkable and throws everybody under the bus with the possible excerption of himself as he attempts to fit in the today’s cancel culture and squeeze in a few more years of fat paychecks.
Bravo, good job, Mike.
Yakov
Time will tell how history views Fannin’s efforts and accomplishments in helping run a successful news organization int0 a ditch. Because in terms of taking an imaginative, well thought out approach to keeping the ship of state afloat, Fannin has done little besides playing Dutch boy as what’s left of the Kansas City Star continues to circle the drain, while cow towing to the popular ideological mindsets of the far left and pissing off the other half of the population.
The half who mostly no longer take and/or read the Star.
The days of Jim Hale, Art Brisbane, even Mark Zieman are long gone.
Pretty much everybody still standing anywhere near the former 18th and Grand newspaper are in full paycheck protection mode, and so far removed from what passes for everyday, real life that they have little to no concept of what a newspaper can and possibly should be.
As opposed to their personal soap boxes, consisting of little more than rooting sections for Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs and a place to snuff out people like Josh Hawley and anybody else with whom they disagree politically.
Reminds me of the old catchphrase by the ’80s Russian stand-up comic Yakov Smirnoff, “What a country!”
So yeah, for what it’s worth, I’m baauaaaack….deal with it.
Was beginning to think you had said to hell with it all.
Totally understandable, wild man