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.”
The anchor, Cory Stark, apologized for his use of the term.
“The word should have never come out of my mouth, and it does not reflect who I am or what First Alert 4 represents,” Stark said in his on-air apology.
An outdated and fraught term used during legalized segregation in the US, “colored” has since been replaced by Black or African American.
As NPR notes, “colored … can be used as a noun, an adjective or a verb” and is “packed with history, prejudice and confusion when it’s used to describe someone’s complexion as an indication of race or ethnicity”.
The National Association of Black Journalists criticized the station over the incident, calling the term “outdated, offensive and racist”, and expressed concern that no one in the newsroom caught the mistake, which was broadcast on 26 February.
“Given that St Louis’s population is 43% Black, and the city is no stranger to racial strife, we would hope KMOV would be more sensitive in how it covers the Black community,” it said in a press release on the incident.
“While we understand that there have been multiple on-air apologies and KMOV management has met with local leaders, that is not enough.
“KMOV and Gray TV should retrain their employees on diversity, equity and inclusion issues while investing in recruiting and retaining Black employees on- and off-air.”
