CBS News apologized Monday night for mistakenly showing viewers a photograph of the late U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) during a segment on Rep. John Lewis’ recent cancer diagnosis.
“Tonight on the 6:30 p.m. ET broadcast of the CBS Evening News, one photograph was misidentified as Congressman John Lewis. We have replaced the photo in all broadcasts and platforms. We deeply regret the error,” tweeted the CBS Evening News account after the program.
Replies to the apology used words like “unacceptable” to describe the mistake. One asked, “Seriously?”
Cummings, who was chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee as well as a Democratic target of President Donald Trump’s tweeted ire this summer, died in October at age 68. A 23-year veteran of the House of Representatives, he emerged as a key player in the impeachment inquiry into Trump.
In July, Trump lashed out at Cummings, calling his Baltimore district “rat and rodent infested” and a “very dangerous & filthy place” where “no human being would want to live.”
Cummings and Lewis have Trump attacks in common: Trump mocked the Georgia representative in 2017 for boycotting his inauguration and questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s election.
Of course, what Cummings and Lewis — a key figure in the civil rights movement who worked with Martin Luther King Jr. — also have in common is that they’re black, which prompted sarcastic, condemning tweets from users who “guess all African Americans still look alike… ”