A Kentucky newspaper fired two staffers on Thursday for adding a sentence into Thursday’s edition that said local police officers get into the profession “because they have a desire to shoot minorities.”

“No reasonable excuse exists for the horrible mistake that occurred Thursday in The News-Enterprise,” editor Ben Sheroan wrote in an editorial for the Elizabethtown paper, which also ran a retraction of the original article.

“As a result, the two people involved were fired,” he wrote.

Reporting on a statement by Hardin County Sheriff John Ward, the article was supposed to paraphrase him saying that people join law enforcement “because they have a desire to serve the community.”

Ward told local station WLKY that he reached out to Sheroan after he saw the “minorities” line.

Media blogger Jim Romenesko reported that the sentence was a “prank” by one copy staffer that was left uncorrected by another.

“One wrote the ‘shoot minorities’ line on the page proof as a joke and the second – in charge of the front page – put it in the story,” Romenesko reported. “One worked at the paper for about six years, the other less than a year.”

Sheroan alluded to those responsible in his apology.

“A function and process designed to rid the news pages of error instead added a terrible one that altered the reporter’s original sentence,” he wrote. “No reasonable excuse can exist.”



(image via Jim Romensko)

h/t Romensko