AUG 6 (morning)--As a contributor to this site I have never been bashful in showing my colors. I am a Chiefs partisan through and through. Having said that, let me also add that I am no different than many members of our local media who while proclaiming that they are constrained by their integrity, sense of fair play and high journalistic standards, write and broadcast with just as defined prejudices as I openly admit.

One of the bosses at Knight Ridder Newspapers, the nation's second-largest newspaper company and owners of the Kansas City Star, has said that his writers "virtually always have an agenda." In a confidential memo released last year, Polk Laffoon, the chief spokesman and vice president of Knight Ridder, also encouraged company execs that "there is nothing the matter with saying nothing, or 'no comment'" when confronted with questions about the company's recent cutbacks. One could almost hear a collective gasp coming from the newspaper giant's newsrooms.

Agendas are nothing new to media. In a tell-all book entitled Bias written by Bernard Goldberg, a 28-year veteran of CBS News and a contributor to HBO's Real Sports, the six-time Emmy winner documents years of media bias at one of the country's most venerated media giants.

Goldberg writes that CBS Evening News senior producer Susan Zirinsky, an executive producer of "48 Hours" admitted to him that she never asked conservative women's groups for on-camera reactions regarding women's issues. He said that although Zirinsky didn't see it as "an act of malice" it was her mindset and most of the others working at CBS to give the news a liberal perspective at the expense of every other kind.

Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post early in July of this year ("Enron-N.Y. Times Co. Deal Highlights Media's Dilemma," Washington Post, July 18, 2002) noted the New York Times' repeated editorial attacks on Enron for the company's "tangled finances." But as it turns out, Kurtz writes, the newspaper taking the shots engaged in the same practices of "corporate accounting and the aggressive use of stock options" that it was so critical of Enron for employing. Just as hypocritical, the New York Times Co. "struck a financial deal" with the very same Houston energy company it found so unethical. The Times was not alone, according to Kurtz. "Many of the media companies that have been reporting on - and often criticizing - corporate accounting and the aggressive use of stock options engage in the same practices themselves, according to federal records."

Part of the problem may be the education reporters are receiving. Calling Columbia University's prestigious journalism school "little more than a vocational workshop," Tunku Varadarajan of the Wall Street Journal noted that the school's president has suspended his search for a new dean until the "J-school's curriculum is rendered dignified enough for a place of Columbia's stature." ("Who Needs Dr. J," Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2002) He wants the curriculum "to include the teaching of law, economics, science, and history and to focus less obsessively on Reporting 101.

" A course or two in ethics might be in order too. Can you imagine how it might play in our local newspaper if a team official refused to comment on the subject of layoffs? Yet that's exactly what Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder did in refusing to talk to the media about his company's layoffs. Apparently, it got so bad at Knight Ridder that some media outside the Knight Ridder family accused the company's reporters of bashing Ridder because "they don't like him," according to a Washington Post story. (July 23, 2001)

Now, only the most naïve among us would admit that newspaper people don't have agendas. Everybody has agendas, even the media, most especially the media. They don't like you, they'll tell the world about it. And, if they really don't like you, they'll tell the world about it over and over again. The Star's Jason Whitlock's hysterics about the Chiefs in general and team president Carl Peterson in particular have reeked of bad faith for as long as he has been in Kansas City. Grudges are just as common among some NFL players who have shed their uniform for a broadcaster's sportscoat. It's a free country and these individuals have every right to do that, just like you and I. But don't think for a minute their behavior is driven by the fair practices of their profession or that they are somehow immune to personal agendas. So, some advice to Mr. Ridder and Mr. Laffoon: get used to it or do what Dick Vermeil said he intended to do when he took the Chiefs job more than a year ago. Don't read the darn things.

Rufus Dawes