There’s an unfair disconnect between the values that have made Kansas a great place to live and the telling of the story of those values. A budding organization of rogue Kansas media plans to change that, and we plan to be just as aggressive about telling the story as the liberal press in the state has been ignoring it.
A friend and fellow conservative previously employed at a major newspaper renown for its liberal approach termed himself the staff “unicorn.” That might be an apt moniker for this gathering that’s underway.
In a nutshell, we’re talking about the values that determine whether you live in a “Red” or “Blue” state. While the illustration of those differences has been clear for decades, it’s never been more pronounced than today, when media bias and resulting public distrust of print and television journalism is at its highest point perhaps ever.
In Kansas, where the vast rural areas are definitively conservative and liberals mass in the university towns and minority strongholds. Leftist-influenced media practitioners promote liberal causes sometimes out of mere conditioned reflex. It is ordained from on high in the high-browed world of Western Journalism: If it’s LGBTQ friendly or minority friendly or give tax money to “the arts” or “green energy” or to “underserved” people or funds “more government help” or paints Judeo-Christian followers in a bad light, it’s obviously innately virtuous. Why? Because college professors or RuPaul or Al Gore or Ben Crump say it is.
Any opposition for any reason from us troglodytic, skinflint, Bible-thumping Republicans should be aptly presented as such, these ordained mass messengers confirm. Opposing abortion, afterall, isn’t really trying to save a life; it’s forcing a woman to forgo her freedom, shackled to a pregnancy and the rearing of a child.
That national journalistic orthodoxy is fiercely adhered to by myopic writers and news producers in the Sunflower State, where nubie reporters and Watergate-spiced journalism degreed liberals in charge at the Kansas City Star, Wichita Eagle, Topeka Capital Journal and a handful of metro radio station recite the anit-conservative mantra daily and accent it more frequently on their websites and social media updates.
Worse yet, a growing chain of ownership of smaller newspapers in Kansas continues to bleed out their acquisitions with no real regard either way, but debilitating the properties to the point they will eventually evaporate.
The Left knows the value of seizing and maintaining news sources. When Trump won the presidency in 2016 and the Left was knocked on its heels, socialist money bags George Soros and others funneled money through a string of non-profits to form “States Newsrooms,” which launched leftleaning news websites like the “Kansas Reflector” in 26 states aimed at filtering anti-conservative biased stories into the voting populace. They even artfully use the offer of “free content” to starving Kansas newspapers no longer able to pay their own reporters, in an effort to spread the Soros gospel and sway the electorate leftward.
Similar efforts even absorbed the Kansas Press Association, which a few weeks ago promoted its new “Diversity Coverage” award for its member newspapers of various sizes - from tiny community weeklies up to larger dailies. The award sought to honor writers for their efforts to chronicle the least White, least straight, least Christian aspects of their communities - as if the virtue of bringing people together during divisive times can be pursued by focusing on their differences.
An association of conservative media types - and despite the clarion call above there actually are a few of us in Kansas - defines our intention to level the playing field in political, social and cultural discourse in the state. The effort will combine the strengths of seasoned media careers, longevity in Kansas community journalism, academics, politics, and data-based perspectives - and most of all good old-fashioned gumption. This synergy will create public access to thought and policy that counters the established orthodoxy backed by the liberal enclaves of universities, entrenched government bureaucracy and pop culture. And it will do so with a focus on Kansas first.
Because the Kansas values and ideas that created what we see around us and which a good half of us embrace aren’t getting the airplay they deserve. Those values are being attacked and belittled by people who want to radically change our state and our country. In the coming weeks and months some of plan to make that tougher on them.
Dane Hicks Publisher The Anderson County Review June 20, 2023
