If the reader needed just one headline to document the Kansas City Star’s unrelenting bias it would be the one posted quietly on Monday evening: “Trump Steps Up Effort to Dispute and Distract on Russia.”
Here is how CBS News headlined the same story: “Susan Rice asked for ‘unmasking’ for national security, source says.”
And, more on the mark, Fox News: “Who is Susan Rice? Obama administration stalwart at center of scandals.” For those new to the story, Fox sums up the heart of it in the opening sentence, “Susan Rice, the Obama administration official accused of revealing the names of Trump transition officials under surveillance, is no stranger to controversy, and was once at the very center of the uproar over the Benghazi terror attack.”
In virtually all the reporting on the affair, even from those journalists who try to defend Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, Rice is the subject of the story. She has been credibly accused of “unmasking” the names of Trump transition officials under surveillance. The Hill, for instance, headlined its story, “Paul: Susan Rice should testify under oath about Trump unmasking.”
By contrast, the AP story that the Star runs under its own headline mentions “unmasking” in the second paragraph but, incredibly, does not mention Rice until the fifteenth.
Their innocence protected by the editors, Star readers can head blithely to the polls in Kansas City, cursing that Donald Trump and his idiot supporters, wondering why so many of them will vote “No” today on the $800 Go Bonds. “Don’t they know,” the Star readers will ask themselves, “The Star told us to vote ‘Yes.'”