Earth has its very real United Nations Security Council. The Halo games have their very fictitious United Nations Space Command. The former was founded in 1946 and is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security here on planet Earth and is currently struggling to quell the conflict in Syria. The latter was founded in 2163 and helped defeat fascist forces in the Interplanetary War on Mars and the Jovian Moons, not to mention created the mechanically and biologically augmented super soldiers known as Spartans.
You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to tell the two apart ... and yet ...
Britain's very earth-bound BBC News at One program found itself using the logo from the Halo games' Space Command in place of the U.N. logo. The Halo image played in the background as BBC's Sophie Raworth discussed Amnesty International's criticism of the U.N.'s handling of the conflict in Syria.
It's easy to see how it probably happened. A producer racing against deadline quickly searched for an image on the Internet and, bam, the BBC had itself a big ol' gaffe. Honestly, as a busy reporter under constant deadline pressures myself, I feel their pain. Still, you've gotta double check ... and then you have to triple check.
The BBC has, of course, apologized for the its mistake via Eurogamer.
BBC News makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all images broadcast, however very occasionally mistakes do happen. Unfortunately an incorrect logo was used during a segment on last week's News at One bulletin and we apologise to viewers for the mistake. The image was not broadcast in our later bulletins.
But the BBC isn't the only news organization to make the same mistake. As Venture Beat pointed out, it seems the CanAsianTimes is still using the Halo logo to illustrate a story from March about the U.N. Security Council's efforts to end the conflict in Syria.
Meanwhile, the incident brings to mind last year's debacle in which the British ITV channel showed footage of IRA militants using heavy machine guns supplied by Libya's Colonel Moammar Gadhafi to shoot down a helicopter. The problem was, it was actually footage from the video game "ArmA 2."
Not surprisingly, Youtube has preserved this painful news fail for all to see. Check it out:
— Via VentureBeat
Winda Benedetti writes about games for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things here on Twitter or join her in the stream here on Google+. And for more video game news and reviews be sure to check out the In-Game Facebook page right here.