Jun

23

Arena plunged into Rebel turmoil

June 23, 2005 | 16 Comments

Update 2: This was definitely a hoax. Pitch Editor Tony Ortega acknowledges it in the comments below, and City Hall has put out a press release denying any truth to the story. However, hats to the Pitch for an elaborate and well-crafted hoax.

Update: This story is very likely satire. Heidi does a great job of debunking it. Thanks for pulling a fast one on us, Pitch. And just I’ve started defending your improving credibility and investigative reporting. Why didn’t you run this on April Fools Day? It would have been brilliant then…

Today’s Pitch has a mind-blowing story on a bizarre crisis at the site of the Sprint Center arena. They claim that excavation at a former UMB Bank branch has yielded an ancient burial site of Confederate soldiers who were in KC looking for prostitutes. Supposedly Mayor Kay Barnes and County Executive Katheryn Shields have been in emergency talks with historians and Governor Matt Blunt about what to do with the rebel remains. Blunt is getting intense pressure from Confederate “heritage” groups to make the arena into a Confederate memorial, or else kill it altogether.

Barnes is apparently enraged that Blunt might be leaning toward accommodating the rebel groups, endangering the most visible symbol of her Downtown revival legacy. Supposedly she is even resorting to trash talk like “that mush mouthed brat” and “Roy’s baby boy” in secret memos to city staffers. Yowza! The next few days/weeks should be interesting, especially depending on how the Star and local TV covers the story. Hopefully the Pitch will stay on it.

Would it be ironic of the arena that’s shaped like a birth control sponge was killed by some rebel whore-mongers?

The Pitch: Rebel Hell

Categories: Downtown, Sports


Comments

16 Comments so far

  1. therblig on June 23, 2005 12:11 am

    My friends warned me to vote against the arena, saying it would be a disaster. How did they know . . .

  2. heidi on June 23, 2005 1:16 am

    here’s my run down of the most obvious things wrong with this story:

    http://www.memyi.us/2005/06/i_call_bunk.html

  3. tony on June 23, 2005 6:23 am

    Hey, I hope you got fooled and you weren’t in on it, but if you were . . . why e-mail me? I was all set to ignore this thing like I do most lead stories from The Pitch and yet I had the thing up for five hours on my page. Luckily, I had all of 10 visitors overnight who hopefully knew I was wrong, as I am about most things. Anyway, har har. Ooooo, what amazing satire! This time The Pitch is wrong on purpose! Pee Wee Herman nailed this bit 20 years ago when he said, “I meant to do that!”

  4. tony on June 23, 2005 7:27 am

    If anything, I think this little stunt shows how powerful the local blogging community is becoming. Bad joke foiled in just a few hours. Blogging rules! Awesome work Heidi!!!

  5. BlogKC on June 23, 2005 7:32 am

    Thanks Heidi, great work! This one went right over my head. I really need to stop drinking and blogging.

    Might be time to move the Pitch back to the Channel 5 category in my estimation. Perhaps Tony O. could apply for Steve Chamraz’s old job.

  6. Tony Ortega on June 23, 2005 9:13 am

    Spoofing on April Fools Day brilliant? You’re kidding, right?

    I can’t believe you guys are patting each other on the back for “debunking” a story that included a book title like “Rebel, Rebel, Your Face is a Mess: Hygiene in the Armies of the West, 1861-1865.”

  7. ScooterJ on June 23, 2005 10:11 am

    I was wondering if there was something phony going on. I had taken a picture on May 1 of the site where the article said the bodies were found on April 25, and digging hadn’t even started yet on that block at that time.

  8. Ryan on June 23, 2005 12:58 pm

    I guess it’s true that ‘PitchWeekly’ is in fact instructions on what to do with the rag, rather than the name of a respectable publication. New Times needs to fuck off, and KC needs to attract a legit local alternative weekly. I’m tired of New Time’s bullshit hoaxes and fabricated satire. If I want that shit I will read The Onion. Fuck you Tony Ortega, and fuck you New Times.

  9. Hippster on June 23, 2005 3:50 pm

    Easy, Tiger. I thought it was a pretty funny article. I agree with Tony that the title to that book was ridiculous. The notion of a Confederacy Hall of Fame was also very good.

    I know everyone thinks Republicans are evil racist theocrats, but did you guys really think that Blunt was thinking about turning our majestic Arena Football stadium into a shrine to the Confederacy? Come on.

    And if not for Pitch, how would we know that popular good bands are shit and unknown crappy bands are actually excellent?

  10. Jason on June 23, 2005 5:04 pm

    Hey Ryan tell us how you really feel :p

  11. Jim S on June 23, 2005 8:47 pm

    “However, hats to the Pitch for an elaborate and well-crafted hoax.”. No. No paper that ever, ever wants to print any story that it would like for the public to take seriously should EVER be willingly involved in any hoax of any kind. It doesn’t matter how patently silly some of the things in the “story” are.

  12. heidi on June 23, 2005 11:05 pm

    Thanks T & B KC….RSS feeds rule! Saw it here first through Bloglines, so didn’t know you had it up too, Tony. (But local blogs as “powerful”? Dunno ’bout that quite yet… ) Yeah, drunk blogging is more magnified than drunk dialing… ;>

    Tony O…sorry, didn’t notice the book title you’re so proud of during my skimming of the story.

  13. NewsGuy on June 24, 2005 2:00 am

    HaHaHa…

    Slow news week, so lets MAKE UP a story.

    Pitch? Exactly what I’ll do to ANY future copy of that waste of perfectly good trees (and bandwidth since I USED to read it online).

    Disgusting….

  14. DTS on June 24, 2005 8:39 am

    Put me in the minority of those who say hat’s off to the Pitch. I thought it was hilarious. I can see possibly being fooled if I only read the first couple paragraphs, but the story got more outrageous as it went on. Come on — Don’t vex the whores of Kansas? KC Sharecroppers? Arena modeled after Tara? These unbelievable notions made the hoax a fair one, I believe.

  15. Kyle Sullivan on June 24, 2005 8:51 pm

    The Sprint Center will be a DISASTER, anyway, regardless of the truth of this story.

    Realize –

    this arena is being built via an illegal collusion between private and public power. The CEO of DST, who sits on the city council and who bought up most of the land that will be used to build the facility (knowing full well that the city meant to build there), is raking in MASSIVE profits in an insider real estate deal with the city.

    The city still has the bond outstanding from Kemper that was floated in the 1970s. THEY HAVEN’T EVEN BEGUN TO PAY OFF THE PRINCIPAL YET. Do you really think the city can support another Arena if it can’t pay for Kemper?

    The taxpayers will ultimately shoulder the financial burden this Arena will cause the city.

    Downtown has nowhere near the traffic infrastructure to handle the traffic influx of the arena. This will ruin downtown for small businesses.

    This is just a sampling of the LITANY of terrible problems will beset the city if the arena gets built.

    I urge the citizens of KCMO to oppose this new development will all their energies.

  16. SteveC on June 28, 2005 12:26 pm

    I was visiting family in KC and picked up “The Pitch” because of the headline and the cover (a confederate flag in KC? hmmm).I admit I was completely taken in Why? I have been practicing architecture for 30 years and I have seen stuff happen on projects that makes this supposed incident a cakewalk. Hats off to Heidi, she did her research. But hats off to The Pitch as well. We live in a time when the outlandish is commonplace and any sense of rationality is out the window.

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