K-C Star Issues Apology For Past Coverage of Blacks

In his Sunday column, Kansas City Star Editor Mike Fannin detailed the paper’s latest investigation into a trusted, local institution that had “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned” the Black community for decades.

But the powerful business in question, one that “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition,” hit close to home: It was the Star.

“We are sorry,” wrote Fannin, the paper’s editor and president. He added: “It is time that we own our history.”

The Washington Post reports The Star issued an apology on Sunday for the way the newspaper had previously covered the Black community for decades, including how Black people only made the paper in its early years if they were accused of a crime. The mea culpa was part of “The truth in Black and white,” a six-part series investigating past racist coverage from one of the Midwest’s most influential newspapers.

The apology comes at a moment in which newsrooms are confronting a racial reckoning regarding the coverage of minority communities and inequality among non-White colleagues at those institutions. Spurred by the racial justice protests over the summer, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times acknowledged in September that the newspaper had its own “blind spots,” vowing to recognize the biases in past coverage and not tolerate prejudice in the newsroom.

Ignited by public protests, American newsrooms are having their own racial reckoning

At The Washington Post, the paper’s unit of the Newspaper Guild labor union said in June that the outlet’s efforts in diversifying its newsroom “fell short,” calling on The Post to address disparities in hiring, promotion, pay, training and retention of minority employees. The staff of the paper’s newsroom is 71 percent White and the share of Black employees had gone down since 2015, according to demographic information released by The Post in July.

The Post announced over the summer a newsroom expansion of more than a dozen jobs to enhance coverage on the issue of race, including the hiring of Krissah Thompson as the paper’s first managing editor for diversity and inclusion.