Starbucks, censorship, and diversity in the heartland

Yesterday, I learned that my longtime friend Mike Marlett, who publishes an alternative newspaper called F5, has had his publication banned from the newsracks of Starbucks coffeeshops in Wichita, Kansas.

Since Kansas has a reputation for being one of the more conservative states in the nation, one might assume that the decidedly left-leaning F5 newspaper was kicked out of Starbucks by some sort of local uprising. But that assumption would be wrong, since local Starbucks managers in Wichita actively asked Mike to stock F5 in their shops, and Starbucks customers avidly read the paper each week.

Indeed, the decision to ban F5 from Wichita Starbucks came not from the local level, but a far-off regional manager. His reason for this pre-emptive censorship? Essentially, his rationale was (on the basis of a single complaint) that Starbucks wants to reflect "local values", and he had determined, without actually reading the newspaper that F5 was not appropriate for a conservative place like Kansas.

Does anyone else see the ridiculous irony here? I think it's symptomatic of lingering election-year hysteria, wherein the media obsessively divided the country into the Democrat-leaning "Blue states" of the coasts and the Republican-leaning "Red states" of the heartland. Hence, a Starbucks regional manager, nervous about his job as he stares at the big sea of Red around Kansas, might be inclined to think that Kansans can't handle liberal opinions.

Unfortunately, this kind of ignorance is not limited to corporate middle-management types. It also applies to many left-leaning people I've met in Blue states like California and New York -- otherwise intelligent folks who have convinced themselves (purely on the basis of political demographics) that Kansans are ultra-religious, pig-shagging fascists. Since when did "Blue versus Red" turn into "Us versus Them"?

In reality, "Red" places like Kansas are doing just fine by themselves -- and my friend Mike is a great example of this. A few years ago, Mike was working at the Wichita Eagle, the corporately owned local paper. Mike enjoyed the design work he did there, but became increasingly annoyed that the paper's editorial direction was being influenced not by the people who lived and worked in Wichita, but by Blue-state corporate market-watchers who were convinced that readers in the conservative heartland wanted inoffensive news that reflected their existing prejudices. Disgusted, Mike quit the Eagle two years ago, and has been helming an upstart independent newspaper ever since.

"I'd gotten tired of out-of-town corporate middle managers trying to tell the people of this city what they should be thinking," Mike wrote in an editorial about the Starbucks decision. "By 'reflecting local values' they'd turned on a feedback loop that breeds fear, ignorance and paranoia."

I suppose my reason for bringing this up is to remind both corporate paper-pushers and Blue-state liberals of a simple point: Don't judge what you don't know. Despite election demographics, political diversity thrives (and is tolerated) in the heartland. Hundreds of thousands of Kansans may have voted for Bush, but hundreds of thousands of Kansans voted for Kerry as well. To assume Kansans (or anyone else) can't tolerate a minority opinion is idiotic.

The next time I'm in Kansas, I think I'm going to give Starbucks a miss.