WASHINGTON: The editor of the Kansas City Star apologized Monday on behalf of the American daily newspaper for decades of racist and discriminatory coverage of the Black minority.

The police killing of Black man George Floyd in May, which sparked protests across the US, had forced the paper to grapple with its historic coverage, editor in chief Mike Fannin told CNN.

"We never put ourselves under the microscope to better understand how the Star had covered the Black community for years," he said.

Fannin on Sunday published a long editorial in which he called the influential Midwestern paper's history "the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong".