Earlier this month the Lawrence Journal-World closed its Capitol bureau and laid off the paper’s full-time Statehouse reporter, the tenacious Peter Hancock.
Hancock is an astute veteran with a precious talent for explaining complicated issues in plain language. He has been in Topeka for decades and had been one of the five remaining reporters on the Statehouse beat.
Now there are four. Only two of them report for daily newspapers, and their readers are mostly in Northeast Kansas; one splits reports for both the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle; the other writes for the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Of two other veterans, one reports for the Associated Press and another manages coverage for Kansas News Service, a print and broadcast venture affiliated with a Kansas City, Mo., public radio station.
Thus Kansans, beyond that nook of the northeast, have the eyes and ears of one AP reporter looking out for them on a regular basis. The AP may add a temp reporter during the scramble of January-into-May legislative sessions.
The work of a legislature and the year-round mechanics of state government are complex. During a legislative session the House of Representatives convenes in the morning while Senate committees are at work on bills in process; in the afternoon the Senate convenes while House committees meet.
At the same time there are continuing schedules for the Board of Regents, the Board of Tax Appeals, Kansas Corporation Commission, State Finance Council, Ethics Commission, Kansas Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, the Budget Division, the Departments of Education and Agriculture and Transportation, offices of the Attorney General and Secretary of State. For starters.
A seasoned Capitol reporter knows the lines of politics and authority, the officials, bureaucrats and lobbyists who have influence within and beyond these schedules, the people and the process that can make or break laws. None of this can be absorbed overnight, or even in a year. The seasoning emerges when reporters apply their institutional memory, when they know how things happen, who ultimately benefits or gets hurt, and why.
These days four reporters will cover what they can. Given the pull of their northeast and Sedgwick territories, the rest of Kansas is bound to come up short in the demand for attention. Property taxes, school finance, college tuition, nursing homes, social services, high-way funding and other issues will be relayed mostly for a mostly urban readership. The big picture, one that includes rural regions or special cases, will be reported when possible, if at all.
It wasn’t always this way. Thirty years ago, before the Internet and hedge funds and private equity groups began gobbling up newspapers and draining their bank accounts, our Statehouse was alive with full-time reporters. Their occupation peaked during the administrations of Govs. Robert Bennett (1975-’79) and John Carlin (1979-’87).
During that period there were roughly 14 full-time accredited members of the Statehouse press. They represented the Associated Press (2), United Press International (2), The Wichita Eagle (1), Kansas City Star and Times (2), The Topeka Capital and State Journal (2), Harris News Service (1), KAKE-TV (1), WIBW TV and radio (1), KSNW-TV (1), Kansas Public Radio (1).
When the legislature was in session the Statehouse press expanded when the AP, UPI, and Eagle each added a reporter for the duration. Local newspapers and broadcast outlets occasionally sent reporters to Topeka on special assignment, and during a legislative session two dozen or more reporters might be covering certain meetings or events. Even then, in what seems less complicated times, it was hard to keep up.
Today it’s improbable. Hedge fund journalism has neither the time nor the inclination to waste its siphoned cash telling the public what’s going on in Topeka.
As the light fades in Topeka, shadows fall over the public’s view to their government, leaving a forum for amateur bloggers and professional hackers. But many issues involving crucial decisions and how they affect our lives, how power is allocated and managed, will remain. The press is leaving the Statehouse, and with it a big part of our eyes and ears there.
Oh, how it shows – or doesn’t.
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DEPT. OF FOOTBALL:
Butchering the Anthem
Has anyone put a stopwatch to televised renditions of our National Anthem before sporting events?
The microphone often comes to the lips of yet another warbler, one of especially long wind. At times we wonder if it will ever end.
Competent musicians know that the Anthem is difficult to master vocally because of its broad range. In our viewing experience, roughly 40 years, only a handful of singers have done it well. It is no piece for amateurs, who include nearly all rock, R&B, country-western and jazz vocalists. They often slide into the difficult notes and warble out of them to mask an obvious failure to nail them in the first place.
The result is embarrassment: Again, someone who has sold a lot of records is unmasked, unable to sing the Anthem without schmearing over its most beautiful phrasing, when the rockets’ red glare, and missing (by sliding into) all the high notes and wailing out of them – like a non-swimmer who has tumbled into water just over his head.
The mess is compounded when “singers” take an eternity to finish their butchery. The Star-Spangled Banner is written to be performed in about a minute to a minute and 15 seconds. Thirty or 40 seconds longer than that becomes torture, even if all the notes are well struck.
Who does it best? Any of the armed forces’ bands or choruses, and those from the service academies. The military artists’ expertise is guaranteed when it comes to the Anthem because of their intertwined and long-standing discipline, interest and heritage.
The Star-Spangled Banner is no work for the weak. And it is to end before the dawn’s early light, not after the first moonrise.
