This has been long overdue: It’s About Time!
Kansas City Star apologizes for decades of racist coverage of Black people: ‘It is time that we own our history’
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.
“We are sorry,” wrote Fannin, the paper’s editor and president. He added: “It is time that we own our history.”
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.
“I think we were all surprised to the extent in which they didn’t do the right thing, the extent in which they were willing to go with the flow,” Fannin said to The Washington Post on Sunday night. “We had the power to posit a conversation and we didn’t do it.”
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….”
Excerpted from the Washington Post you may read the full article at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/21/kansascity-star-apology-black-people/
One of the most famous quotes about the press comes from a fictional 19th century Irish bartender named Mr. Dooley.
On October 7, 1893, Chicago Evening Post journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne introduced his readers to the character of Mr. Dooley in a newspaper column.
Dunne’s weekly column, which featured Dooley’s satirical sayings about the political and social issues of the day, became a syndicated feature for Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s Weekly.
Here is how Mr. Dooley’s famous journalism quote is usually remembered:
“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Today, newspapers across the country are apologizing for their history of failing to do just that re ‘owning’ their complicity as a societal and cultural entity responsible for, and guilty of, the perpetration, and perpetuation of institutional and systemic racism in America….
12/28/2020 @ 9:35 am
The change triggered by the Floyd murder is both more and less than expected. The most important thing about it is that in many critical circles its impact has not subsided, and these tend to be circles with significant influence on further general impact.
12/29/2020 @ 5:50 pm
Kosh,
I don’t suppose you remember this assessment of the media and all components of mass communication:
“From genesis to the nightly news, and all the commercials in between, the message that white people are superior and entitled is repeated incessantly….
It’s been going on for more than 900 years….”
Newspapers are just the beginning, the tip of the iceberg, of what must be acknowledgement and accountability on the part of every aspect and component of proprietary and public mass communication in this country….
Let’s hope that the impulse behind these apologies is as contagious as COVID19….
01/01/2021 @ 4:29 pm
The impulse has manifested in some interesting ways. Yesterday I happened to have Satellite music talk on for a few minutes and some guy was talking about his favorite songs of 2020. I didn’t have it on long, I heard some weird COVID thing involving Cardie B, but then the guy mentioned a song by a folk singer who does traditional Apalachin music, a guy from a small town in Kentucky by the name of Tyler Childers. He’s a big enough deal to have done a Tiny Desktop concert for NPR a couple of years ago. (I knew nothing about him.) Anyway, he released an album a couple of months ago entitled Long Violent History. It was mostly instrumental fiddle stuff but the very last song, which he tried not to announce was on the album at all just so it would surprise people, was the title song, Long Violent History. It is not a long song, I think a little over three minutes. I would advise checking it out.
This is a version with lyrics.
01/01/2021 @ 4:30 pm
Oh, and Happy New Year