ESPN has issued an apology for playing a video of the Twin Towers during a New York Knicks game against Miami Heat.
“We mistakenly used an old stock image and we apologize,” Ben Cafardo, ESPN’s senior director of communications, said in an email statement to Awful Announcing.
The clip was highlighted by Twitter user @khaled74: “Pay attention at the end. How old is this footage ABC is using?! Wtf is goin on here?!” they tweeted.
The game ended with a 108-101 Miami victory. During halftime, the Statue of Liberty is visible in the foreground and, at the very bottom of the screen, the tops of the Twin Towers. The World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapsed shortly after planes flew into them on September 11, 2001.
On Twitter. viewers joked that whoever used the outdated stock footage would be fired from their job. Others were evidently upset.
“I noticed this with some aerial footage during Spurs games where there’s buildings in the shot that aren’t there, or a building that is there isn’t in the shot. But no building in San Antonio, save for the Alamo, is as famous as the Twin Towers. How do you miss this?” one viewer tweeted.
