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Regretting the error, in Lexington
Posted on December 4, 2012 by snarly
Photo by Calvert McCann
Newspaper “regret the error” corrections can be amusing. Sometimes they’re more than that.
On July 4, 2004, The Herald-Leader newspaper in Lexington, KY ran a front-page correction: “It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.”
Is this too flippant? Is it actually an apology? I’d say no to the first, yes to the second. Even though this statement does not contain the words “sorry” or “apology.”
The statement was timed to both Independence Day and the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was accompanied by a 2000-word explanation of how the papers (back then there were two, The Herald and the Leader) deliberately chose to ignore or downplay the Civil Rights movement. It tells local stories the papers should have told then — like that of a lunch-counter sit-in protester being doused with ice-cold Coke and black movie theater patrons being jeered as they tried to buy tickets in the “whites only” section — as well as stories the papers had suppressed that showed that Lexington was actually making history:
“University of Kentucky historian Gerald L. Smith describe[s] two sit-ins at a local restaurant on Rose Street called the Varsity Village in July 1959 — well ahead of nationally publicized sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., the next year. On July 11, Smith says, five whites and five blacks sat down at the restaurant’s counter, despite the manager’s cursing. They stayed for two hours without being served and left about 1 p.m., each of them leaving a 25-cent tip.”
In addition to the correction and the new reporting, the Herald-Leader published a full page of photos of sit-ins and prayer marches taken by a then-janitor named Calvert McCann who documented what was happening, knowing his local paper of record would never run such pictures. At the time, almost any story that related to African-Americans was relegated to a column called “Colored Notes.”
The idea of printing an apology was first publicly voiced by John S. Carroll, a former editor at the Lexington Herald who went on to edit the Los Angeles Times and win several Pulitzers. In a speech on journalism ethics in 2004, Carroll recalled a colleague at the Herald back in 1991 joking about running a correction for not covering civil rights. The paper’s current staff took Carroll’s words to heart.
Why is this a decent apology? The terseness of the paper’s statement actually serves to point out the inadequacy of apologizing for truly heinous, terrible journalism. It makes you do a double-take, and that’s a good thing. Then the accompanying article brings in new reporting that should have been done at the time, publishes the important work of a local photographer who should have had his work published back then, and hammers home how the newspaper failed its readers and its community. The paper’s current staff talked to former staffers and civil rights leaders and names the top-level staffer who made the decision not to run these vital stories. “He didn’t like the idea of some of these rabble rousers coming in and causing trouble,” says the son of Fred Wachs, the paper’s general manager and publisher.
The one place I think the Herald-Leader’s mea culpa falls short is in running Fred Wachs, Jr.’s next statement about his father: “But he supported school desegregation, and they wanted it done without any problems, and I don’t think we had any problems here.” I’m not sure what that means. That there were no problems because of what his father did? That neglecting to report the news was actually good for Lexington? The paper should have cut or clarified the statement. If the quote was meant to subtly point out, without editorializing, that the current staff disagrees with Wachs and/or his son’s interpretation of his father’s decisions, that needs to be spelled out explicitly.
Carroll, for his part, was far more fierce and unequivocal: The publisher “didn’t want to give local blacks ideas,” Carroll told Loren Ghiglione of the web site Traveling with Twain. “He didn’t want them to be misbehaving and demonstrating and getting violent.” (See, Wachs, Jr.’s statement could be taken to mean his father blamed outside agitators. Carroll’s indicates that Wachs had issues with local citizens of color.) Carroll tipped his hat to his successors who actually ran the apology he’d joked about. ”I think I’d have been a bit uncomfortable attacking the work of our predecessors,” he told the New York Times. ”I wish I had done it while I was there.”
(Note: Smith, the University of Kentucky professor and historian who was one of the sources for the Herald-Leader’s apology, is now trying to raise funds to publish a Kentucky African-American encyclopedia, which should correct the historical record further.)
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