Legendary Emporia Gazette editor William Allen White stands watch in the Kansas Statehouse through this one-ton limestone statue. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
Of the four white limestone statues of notable Kansans that stand in the Statehouse rotunda, half are journalists.
One is Topeka publisher and politician Arthur Capper. The other is legendary Emporia newspaperman William Allen White.
The presence of these towering icons inside the Statehouse sends a powerful message: Journalists will hold legislators to account. We are watching what they do and telling our readers, viewers and listeners about it. These statues serve as an implicit rebuke to Republican Speaker Dan Hawkins’ petty decision to bar the news media from the House floor.
If those statues of White and Capper could come alive today, they would step off their pedestals, head into Hawkins’ office and raise holy hell.
What do you mean by banning the press? the one-ton monoliths would thunder at the speaker. How could you treat the people’s eyes and ears in the Statehouse with such contempt?
I won’t speculate about how Hawkins might respond if confronted by two sentient limestone figures.
In the real world, however, defenders of the ban cited legislators’ need for an open and accessible workspace. Hawkins’ spokeswoman cited issues with “congestion” in a call with Kansas Reflector editor Sherman Smith.
To which I respond: hogwash.
Journalists have had access to the House floor for more than a century. In past decades, many more reporters worked at the Statehouse than today. This supposed congestion never presented any problem before, so the chance that it suddenly became one seems vanishingly slight to me. I know many of the skilled men and women who make up the Statehouse press corps. They are more than willing to give lawmakers all the space they need.
When the ban was announced in an email to journalists, no explanation was offered. Only after Smith’s story was published did he receive the courtesy of a nonsensical explanation. Indeed, his story about the ban — citing repeated and vituperative lies from Hawkins about Kansas news media — offers abundant evidence that the move was motivated by animus.
One might also recall the speaker didn’t even bring a resolution condemning the unconstitutional raid on the Marion County Record newspaper to a vote.
Senate spokesman Mike Pirner explains to Statehouse reporters John Hanna and Martin Hawver they can’t sit at the table for reporters on the Senate floor during the 2022 session. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)
The same was true three years ago, when Senate President Ty Masterson barred reporters from his chamber’s floor. At the time it was explained that this was because so many people wanted to cover the Legislature. Such a justification not only defies plausibility, but sails past it to hitherto unacknowledged vistas of bunkum.
Others might protest that the news media no longer simply reports the news as it is, but instead pushes a political agenda. This is untrue, and such critics ignore history.
White ran for governor on an anti-Ku Klux Klan platform. Capper ran for governor and won, then served 30 years in the U.S. Senate. These men spoke loudly in heated political discussions of the day. We too easily forget that the press in White and Capper’s time was far more partisan, far more biased, far more intent on specific policy outcomes, then the press of 2025.
What these men would tell us today is, I believe, precisely what I am telling you through this column. The news media exists to serve the public. We exist to serve 3 million Kansans. They can’t drive to Topeka on a whim or watch hour after hour of streamed YouTube videos.
Regardless of what Hawkins told Smith, journalists do not put ourselves above everyday Kansans. We cover the Statehouse because we serve them.
His contempt for us is contempt for them.
Neither White nor Capper will be stepping down from his pedestal anytime soon. They have headed off to the great newsroom in the sky, where deadlines can be pushed back infinitely. However, their words and their deeds and their actions endure. We know that White and Capper stood for responsive and open government. They stood for exact principles that Hawkins, and Masterson before him, have tried to smother.
“You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger,” White wrote in one of his best-known editorials, “To an Anxious Friend.” “No one questions it in calm days, because it is not needed. And the reverse is true also; only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital to justice.”
Hawkins and Masterson have spurned the news media and the First Amendment. In so doing, they have spurned the history and heritage of Kansas.
You cannot claim to honor these men in your very rotunda while spitting on those who fulfill their noble mission today.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.