The San Jose Mercury News has apologised for what it conceded was an “insensitive” headline after Simone Manuel won a historic swimming gold on Thursday night.
Manuel, a 20-year-old Stanford student, became the first African American woman to win an individual Olympic swimming gold after she tied a thrilling women’s 100m freestyle final with Canada’s Penny Oleksiak. A few minutes earlier, Michael Phelps had just clinched his 22nd Olympic gold after surging to victory in the men’s 200m individual medley final.
A big night for US swimming, to be sure. But the headline the Mercury News chose to celebrate Manuel’s achievement? “Phelps shares historic night with African American.”
"Michael Phelps wins gold and so does some black chick." Way to go, Merc! pic.twitter.com/pqWMCnDvGb
— Sean Keane (@seankeane) August 12, 2016
The headline was widely criticised on social media for omitting Manuel’s name completely – and yet at the same time including both parts of Phelps’s name.
Mercury News sportswriter Tim Kawakami wrote on Twitter: “Sorry to my tremendous co-workers, but I’ve never been as upset at a headline in my own publication as I was with that one.”
The Mercury News tweeted an apology shortly afterwards:
We apologize for an insensitive headline earlier on a story about Simone Manuel and Michael Phelps' medal wins. https://t.co/ykWvcddaKf
— Mercury News (@mercnews) August 12, 2016
It then added an apology at the top of the story, and changed the headline to “Stanford’s Simone Manuel and Michael Phelps make history.”
“The original headline on this story was insensitive and has been updated to acknowledge the historic gold medal wins by both Simone Manuel and Michael Phelps,” the Mercury News wrote. “We apologize for the original headline. The story has also been updated.”
