US TV station apologizes after anchor calls minority homeowners ‘colored’

The KNOM building in St Louis, Missouri. The station now brands its newscasts as ‘First Alert 4’. Photograph: Raymond Boyd/Getty Images

A television station in St Louis has issued an apology after a white news anchor referred to minority homeowners as “colored” while introducing a segment on racial discrimination in the housing market.

“It was in an original script as ‘homeowners of color’ and was inadvertently changed and mistakenly read on air,” JD Sosnoff, the general manager of First Alert 4, formerly KMOV, Gray TV’s CBS affiliate, said in a statement to the St Louis Post-Dispatch. “We regret the error and apologized to our viewers.”