Newspaper where Hemingway started his career apologises for decades of racist coverage

Mike Fannin says The Kansas City Star ‘robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition’

The editor of The Kansas City Star has apologised for the newspaper’s past decades of racist coverage.

On Sunday, the Star published a series of stories examining how the newspaper ignored the concerns and achievements of Black residents in Kansas City, Missouri, throughout its history.

The newspaper, where author Ernest Hemingway started his writing career as a cub reporter, underwent the examination at the suggestion of reporter Mará Rose Williams.

The Star’s president and editor Mike Fannin said that Ms Williams’ suggestion combined with racial justice protests that took place in the summer, prompted the newspaper to analyse its coverage of Black residents from its founding in 1880.

During the examination, the Star, along with its sister paper, The Kansas City Times, found that its writers often wrote about Black residents in the city in disparaging ways, according to the Associated Press.

The newspaper discovered “decades of coverage that depicted Black Kansas Citians as criminals living in a crime-laden world,” according to Mr Fannin.

He said that reporters “felt shame at what was missing: the achievements, aspirations and milestones of an entire population routinely overlooked, as if Black people were invisible.”

Mr Fannin said that through its coverage, the Star had reinforced segregation and “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations” of the city’s Black residents, while robbing “an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.”

The examination found that the newspaper’s coverage improved during the Civil Rights Movement, as the Star hired more Black writers, but Mr Fannin acknowledged that the paper still continued to publish racist coverage.

He said that the Star still needs to make improvements, writing: “We need a more diverse staff. We need deeper community conversations to better focus our coverage.

“We need a spectrum of voices to represent our entire community. And we occasionally just need good advice.”

Mr Fannin added: “It is well past time for an apology, acknowledging, as we do so, that the sins of our past still reverberate today.”

The Star’s apology followed an editorial from the Los Angeles Times in September that apologised for its past racially biased coverage.

In 2018, the Montgomery Advertiser, in Alabama, apologised for its “shameful” decades of coverage of lynchings, while the National Geographic magazine also apologised for its past racist coverage later that year.