Daily News to Star: Drop Dead

The Strip has met The Kansas City Star's "readers' representative," Derek Donovan, and we think he's a swell guy. But we find ourselves cringing whenever we read the ombudsman's overly defensive explanations of why the Star does what it does.

Still, nothing prepared us for last week's hyperactive screed, in which Donovan demanded that the New York Daily News take back a slur against a Star writer like he was defending a classmate in a schoolyard rumble.

Donovan was worked up because, he wrote, a transcript clearly showed that Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin had wronged the Star's Lee Hill Kavanaugh when he accused her of giving an "anti-war speech" during an August 16 telephone conference call with famous protesting mom Cindy Sheehan.

"I see no way to misconstrue Kavanaugh's comments in the call as 'anti-war,'" Donovan huffed. "The Star alerted the Daily News to the error ... but editors there declined to run a correction."

All right, settle down, Derek. Let's consider what actually happened.

First of all, let this meat patty put the episode in context. Just a week earlier, the Star had been forced to run a very telling correction about one of its own stories. Like other dailies following the Cindy Sheehan drama, the Star had given readers the impression that Sheehan was camped outside President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch simply because she wanted the opportunity to talk with him in person about the Iraq war that took her son's life. The Star wasn't the only news outlet forced to correct that picture after enormous pressure from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their legions of Web warriors: Bush, it turned out, had already met privately with Sheehan and other parents who had lost sons and daughters in Iraq.

Sheehan has said she didn't feel that the meeting, which took place at Fort Lewis in Washington in June 2004, was the appropriate time to voice her concerns about the war. But the revelation that she'd passed up that chance did suggest that she was less grass-roots grieving mom than canny anti-war activist -- one who had come up with a dramatic way to get the country's media thinking again about our dumbass war effort.

For a mainstream press already smarting from constant criticism for its supposed liberal leanings, the episode was a smack upside the head. As a group, the country's journalists looked like naïve liberals who too easily bought into Sheehan's innocence.

The last thing the Star needed was more evidence that it was reporting on Sheehan's vigil without a healthy dose of skepticism.

Into that setting stepped Lee Hill Kavanaugh, the journalist the Star sends to the most frightening places on Earth so she can bleed all over the page.

We hear that Kavanaugh's a sweet-tempered soul who is known around town as the reporter who plays a mean jazz trombone. And she's an award-winning journalist who has lots of experience covering the military -- in fact, she's the first female reporter the Star has ever sent to cover a war.

But readers may also have noticed that Kavanaugh has a signature style -- she often finds ways to soften hard-edged news by looking for heartfelt human-interest angles and writing stories that seem more apt to reassure readers than challenge them.

On August 16, Kavanaugh took her place in a telephone queue with other reporters who were waiting to ask questions of Sheehan. Also listening was Goodwin, former executive editor of the Daily News, who has a Pulitzer Prize and (with the Daily News' editorial board) a Polk Award on his résumé.

Given the furor over press coverage of Sheehan, Goodwin wasn't the only scribe who called as much to hear other reporters' questions as what Sheehan would say in response.

But what Kavanaugh said floored Goodwin, he tells this tenderloin.

After several rapid-fire questions from other reporters, coordinator and MoveOn.org spokesman Trevor FitzGibbon announced that the next query would come from a Star reporter.

"Hi, Cindy. Thank you for doing this," Kavanaugh began, according to a transcript that the Star itself put on its Web site last week.

Goodwin says he was stunned.

"What was she thanking her for? Sheehan does a press conference every day," Goodwin tells the Strip. The greeting was so naïve-sounding to the ears of a hard-bitten New York scribe that Goodwin says he couldn't help suspecting that Kavanaugh was thanking Sheehan for the protest, not for simply getting on the telephone. "It's not a professional greeting," Goodwin says.

Then, the transcript shows, Kavanaugh began a long, somewhat rambling rendition of what Sheehan's experiences apparently looked like from where Kavanaugh was sitting: "A little more than a year ago, you were a mom -- a youth minister -- with four kids. And then you get that awful knock on the door. And you've been thrust into this ... where [you're] sitting up your lawn chair in the ditch, waiting to speak to the President at his doorstep ... I mean, I feel like we just are in the middle of the country watching this show happen. And ... you're being attacked in so many different ways."