(Credit: BBC/Facebook)
The BBC, the UK Evening Standard and Getty Images all mislabeled photos of black politicians.
According to the Guardian, the “chaotic series of events” began when the BBC misidentified Parliament member Marsha de Cordova as “Dawn Butler,” the name of another Parliament member. The Evening Standard wrote an article about the error but misused a photo of another Parliament member, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, as de Cordova. The Standard‘s photo fail was blamed on Getty Images, which had misidentified the women.
In its own story about the “caption mix-ups,” the BBC pointed to its tweeted apology.
“We sincerely apologise for this mistake. Sometimes we incorrectly identify MPs at the moment when they stand to speak. This error was immediately corrected on screen,” the BBC Parliament Twitter account wrote in response to Butler’s tweeted complaint. The BBC declined to comment further to iMediaEthics.
The Evening Standard tweeted an apology, which wrote: “@standardnews would like to apologise unreservedly for the image that featured Bell Ribeiro-Addy and not Marsha de Cordova. It had been wrongly captioned by one of our picture suppliers, Getty Images. We have apologised to both @MarshadeCordova and @BellRibeiroAddy this morning.”
At the bottom of the Standard‘s article, it states: “An earlier version of this story carried a photograph supplied by Getty Images, which it had incorrectly captioned as being Marsha de Cordova when it was Streatham MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy. The Evening Standard apologises unreservedly for the error.”
Getty Images told iMediaEthics:
“Getty Images sincerely apologises for incorrectly captioning the image of Bell Ribeiro-Addy. As soon as we were made aware of the error by the Evening Standard, we corrected the caption information on our website and in a notice sent to customers.
“Getty Images holds itself to a high standard of editorial integrity and has robust measures in place to ensure our content ingestion process reflects these standards. Although these errors are relatively rare, we, like all news agencies, regret when these measures fail to capture inaccuracies.
“We unreservedly apologise to Marsha de Cordova and Bell Ribeiro-Addy for any offense this may have caused.”
