Case Against the Star

"The only justified monopoly," the founder of the Kansas City (Mo.) Star was fond of saying, "is the monopoly of excellence." By trying to practice this maxim advocated by Founder William Rockhill Nelson, the 72-year-old evening Star (circ. 361,226), together with its morning edition, the Times (353,202), has built a monopoly reaching into 96% of all Kansas City homes, and stretching into communities on both the Kansas and the Missouri sides of the Missouri River. Like the county clerk's office, the Star has become such a public institution that it dutifully prints news items on every death and wedding submitted. Neither does the Star ever pass up a local story about children, dogs or retiring locomotive engineers, though it still dislikes mentioning snakes, freaks or malignant diseases because "newspapers are read at the breakfast and dinner tables."

The Star is also unusual because it is owned by its employees, who bought it in 1926 for $11 million after Founder Nelson died. Bonhomious, 250-lb. Star President Roy A. Roberts, 65, owns 8% of the stock, and is a political power both in Missouri and Kansas. Star readers take his politicking, notably for Eisenhower, as much for granted as they do the paper's oldfashioned, low-keyed front page, where big headlines are a rarity.

"Vindictive Action." Last week the Star used one of its front-page headlines for a story about itself: THE U.S. ACCUSES THE STAR. Star President Roberts and Advertising Director Emil A. Sees were indicted on antitrust charges. The Star, charged the Government, had forced advertisers to 1) put more ads than they wanted in the Star and Times to get any space at all, 2) buy ads on its TV & radio stations or suffer rate penalties in the papers, and 3) take ads in morning, evening and Sunday papers as a unit. Furthermore, said the Government, the Star forced subscribers to buy the three papers, instead of offering the papers individually. The Government also charged that when the Kansas City Journal-Post died in 1942, the Star helped prevent a new paper from moving in by buying its equipment, then jacked up its own subscription price.

As soon as the indictment was handed down, it was criticized in the Senate by Kansas' Republican Frank Carlson, who saw more politics than justice in the Justice Department's suit. Said Carlson: "Those of us who are somewhat familiar with the campaign of the Kansas City Star against the Pendergast machine . . . could well anticipate this vindictive action on the part of the President."

Fact-Packed Answer. Roberts himself fired back at Justice with a fact-packed salvo against each charge. "We give the subscriber a morning, evening and Sunday edition for one price [40-c- a week],", said Roberts. "That service was started . . . by [the] founder of the Star [and] has never been challenged until now." Roberts argued that there is no coercion on advertisers and that the paper's ad rate for all editions, even if applied to only one edition, "would still be lower than the average advertising rate of the major newspapers in the country."

As for buying up the Journal-Post equipment, the Star bought only a few scattered pieces, which were auctioned off three years after the paper folded. The increase in the paper's price, said Roberts, came at a time when the Star -- like every U.S. paper -- was raising its daily price to meet such increased costs as a near tripling in the price of news print, 185% increase in its labor bill and a 265% tax hike. Roberts bitterly recalled two other cases in which the Gov ernment and the Star were involved. During the late 1930s, the Star finally began to slam away at the corrupt Pendergast machine, which had given Truman his start in politics. The FBI moved in, and 259 politicos were found guilty of vote fraud and ballot-box stuffing. In 1946, the Star again struck at the Pendergast machine. But this time, said Roberts, under the Truman Administration the FBI came in only after the evidence had been destroyed in a mysterious explosion and conviction was impossible.

The Government's case against the Star is similar to the antitrust suit (TIME, June 9) it won against the unit ad rate used by the New Orleans Times-Picayune (and some 170 other U.S. dailies). Even if the verdict against the Times-Picayune is upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, Roberts expects to fight the Star's case right up to the top. Said he: "There will be no effort ... to quash or delay the antitrust indictment."

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