Paper in K.C.: Sorry for bias
Coverage differed for Blacks, whites
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Kansas City Star’s top editor has apologized for past decades of racially biased coverage and the newspaper has posted a series of stories examining how it ignored the concerns and achievements of Black residents and helped keep Kansas City segregated.
The newspaper said a detailed examination of its past coverage and that of its longtime sister newspaper, the Kansas City Times, documented how they often wrote about Black residents only as criminals or people living in crime-plagued neighborhoods and ignored segregation in Kansas City, Mo., and its public schools.
“It is well past time for an apology, acknowledging, as we do so, that the sins of our past still reverberate today,” Star President and Editor Mike Fannin wrote.
In an essay titled “The Truth in Black and White,” Fannin said an investigation of thousands of pages of articles had shown that the paper, over decades, had denied the Black community dignity, justice and recognition.
“Before I say more, I feel it to be my moral obligation to express what is in the
hearts and minds of the leadership and staff of an organization that is nearly as old as the city it loves and covers: We are sorry,” Fannin wrote.
The Star’s apology and its lengthy series of stories, posted on its website Sunday, followed a Los Angeles Times editorial in September apologizing for past racially biased coverage. The Montgomery, Ala., Advertiser in 2018 apologized for “shameful” decades of coverage of lynchings, and National Geographic magazine apologized the same year for its past biased coverage.
Fannin wrote that The Star had reinforced segregation, “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations” of Black residents and for decades “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.”
The Kansas City Star’s investigation came out of internal discussions about how the paper should address racism in its past coverage. On Sunday, The Star published the result of those discussions: a six-part investigation by reporters who dug into the paper’s archives, dating to its founding in 1880, to compare coverage by The Star and its sister paper, The Kansas City Times, to coverage of the same events in local Black newspapers, The Kansas City Call and The Kansas City Sun.
Fannin said reporters were “frequently sickened” by what they found. In its 1977 coverage of a deadly flood, the newspapers fixated on the property damage at the Country Club Plaza, rather than on the lives of the 25 people who died, including eight Black residents.
Often, achievements and milestones of Black residents of Kansas City were overlooked, the editorial said, “as if Black people were invisible.” Charlie Parker, the saxophonist and cultural icon from Kansas City, did not receive a significant headline until his death in 1955, the paper said. Even then, his name was misspelled and his age was wrong.
Some readers and journalists said the apology was a meaningful step forward, even though more work needed to be done. Wesley Lowery, a CBS News reporter, tweeted Sunday, “I say this every time one of these critical self examinations happens: Every news organization should do that.”
In the editorial, Fannin said the positive changes the paper had already made to its coverage needed to accelerate, such as hiring a more diverse staff and quoting a wider spectrum of voices in articles.