KC Voices: Mainstream media fails the city by not covering intensifying protests

Photo courtesy Pamela Smith

In the KC Voices column, we ask members of the KC community to submit stories about their thoughts and experiences in all walks of life. If you’ve got a story you’d like to share with our readers, please send it to brock@thepitchkc.com for consideration. Today, local activist Pamela Smith shares her frustration with mainstream media’s lack of coverage from a range of political protests in recent weeks—especially the Plaza demonstration on International Women’s Day. 

Illustration by Jack Raybuck

This past Saturday, March 8, 2025, on International Women’s Day, a passionate group of women, allies, and activists gathered at the Plaza in Kansas City to march for women’s rights.

We stood together, holding signs, chanting for justice, and making our voices heard.

Yet if you checked the news that evening, you wouldn’t have known it happened at all. It’s now Monday, and still nothing. It was as if the march had never happened at all.

Meanwhile, local headlines are flooded with another corruption scandal in city government, yet another hometown football player arrested for domestic violence, more of our red-state Republicans scheming new ways to strip away our rights, and parents now deciding what books other people’s kids can check out at the library.

Don’t get me wrong—those are all important issues. But what do they all have in common?

Our rights. The very thing this Women’s March was about.

Yet somehow, not a single major local media outlet thought our march was worth covering. No mention on the evening news. No articles in The Kansas City Star. No tweets, no Bluesky posts, no social media updates from reporters who regularly cover city events. This wasn’t just a symbolic march for an annual event. This was a protest in a country facing a hostile takeover by a wannabe authoritarian dictator, his circus of miscreants, and the billionaire oligarchs funding their assault on our democracy.

So, I can’t help but wonder why?

Kansas City news outlets routinely cover other community gatherings and events so why when hundreds of people gathered to demand bodily autonomy, equal pay, an end to gender-based violence, and reproductive rights, when we showed up to express our outrage at the current administration and its attacks on basic freedoms, somehow that wasn’t newsworthy?

Someone in a social media group suggested, “Maybe they just didn’t know about it.” Really? Their entire job is to report breaking news, and several TV stations are less than five minutes from the Plaza. So I’m definitely not buying that for an excuse.

Our voices weren’t just ignored, they were intentionally silenced.

The fact is, mainstream media has been failing us for years. It no longer serves the people, it serves corporate interests, controlled by a handful of national conglomerates that have swallowed up local media markets across the country.

Media consolidation benefits corporations and the politicians they lobby, and that has never been truer than now. The public are the ones who pay the price. We’ve seen it result in fewer diverse viewpoints, a shift toward sensationalism over substance, and an increasing focus on entertainment-driven headlines instead of real, factual news that communities need.

So should we be surprised that Kansas City’s media ignored a protest about bodily autonomy and government overreach? Of course not. When media outlets are owned by corporations that profit from the same politicians pushing anti-women, anti-worker, and anti-democratic policies, they have a vested interest in what doesn’t get covered.

But the tide is turning. Independent media is growing by leaps and bounds, and people are choosing it over corporate-filtered narratives. They want real stories, reported by real people, about issues that actually matter. We don’t have to settle for being spoon-fed whatever they feel financially and politically benefits the broadcasting giants the most. Traditional mainstream media’s time is running out.

So, what are our options if the media won’t cover the issues that are important to us….. we’ll cover them ourselves. We’ll document. We’ll distribute. We’ll make sure our stories are told, not by those who pick and choose if they ignore us, but by those who stand with us.

In parting, to those who attended Saturday’s Women’s March or any other protest:

Keep speaking up. Keep marching. Keep documenting. Keep fighting.

And to Kansas City’s media, if you want to stay relevant, if you want to truly represent this city, ask yourselves: Why didn’t you cover the Women’s March? We’ll be here waiting for your answer.