BBC Apologizes for Using a Clip of LeBron James for Kobe Bryant’s Obituary Announcement

The BBC has apologized for the mixup, which involved a clip of LA Lakers basketball star, LeBron James in the death announcement of late basketball star Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday.

The clip, which showed on BBC’s News At Ten programme on Sunday, showed James beating Kobe Bryant’s career points tally on screen.

Deeply unfortunate mix up from BBC. They got two big, Black men confused and featured Lebron James instead of late Kobe Bryant in this news segment. This only adds to our collective grief at this time. Has a correction and apology been issued yet? Shame. pic.twitter.com/jCUejPKWc4

— Nadine White (@Nadine_Writes) January 26, 2020

The editor of the BBC News at Ten, Paul Royall, tweeted about the incident and apologised for the “human error”.

He wrote:

In tonight’s coverage of the death of Kobe Bryant on #BBCNewsTen we mistakenly used pictures of LeBron James in one section of the report. We apologise for this human error which fell below our usual standards on the programme.

In tonight’s coverage of the death of Kobe Bryant on #BBCNewsTen we mistakenly used pictures of LeBron James in one section of the report. We apologise for this human error which fell below our usual standards on the programme.

— Paul Royall (@paulroyall) January 26, 2020

Newsreader Reeta Chakrabarti also ended the bulletin with an apology. She said:

In our coverage of the death of Kobe Bryant, in one section of the report, we mistakenly showed pictures of another basketball player, LeBron James. We do apologize for the error.