Britain’s first black Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng had recourse to call out Mirror newspaper for depicting him as someone else in a publication on the website of the UK media outlet.
Reporting on the Chancellor’s mini-budget, the newspaper captioned an image of a criminally convicted Goldman Sachs banker, Elias Preko who also has Ghanaian origins as the chancellor.
Reacting to the blunder in a Twitter post, Kwasi Kwarteng who was last month appointed Chancellor of the UK government said “That isn’t me… @DailyMirror.”
His post was accompanied with a screenshot of the publication by Mirror with the wrong image captioned “Kwasi Kwarteng said he had to do ‘something different’ with mini-budget.”
The Mirror about some hours after the Chancellor’s post has reportedly issued a statement describing the situation as a “terrible error.”
“This morning a picture in a story about Kwasi Kwarteng was wrongly captioned on the Mirror website. This was a terrible error and we apologise to Mr Kwarteng and all our readers,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, the action of the Newspaper has prompted concerns of racism. The Chairman of the Hornsey and Wood Green Conservatives, Ben Obese-Jecty is said to have waded into the criticisms.
That isn’t me… @DailyMirror pic.twitter.com/rcxn4VjoNW
— Kwasi Kwarteng (@KwasiKwarteng) October 1, 2022
“Good to see the Daily Mirror kicking off its coverage of Black History Month with this they-all-look-the-same-don’t-they clanger.
“You’d think, given the coverage he’s received this week, that most people in the press would know what Kwasi Kwarteng looked like …” he is quoted in a report by The Guardian.
Back home in Ghana, the Vice President of IMANI Africa, Bright Simons has questioned whether the incident has any element of cognitive bias behind it.
“Is this an instance of the famous “they all look the same” bias? This is the cognitive bias where people in a dominant race struggle to distinguish people from other, usually minority, races. By the way, Africans struggle to tell Chinese folks apart too,” he stated in a Twitter post.
However, Mirror in its statement reacting to the incident said it “has a long history of working against racism and we will redouble our efforts on this.”
2/
Is this an instance of the famous "they all look the same" bias? This is the cognitive bias where people in a dominant race struggle to distinguish people from other, usually minority, races. By the way, Africans struggle to tell Chinese folks apart toohttps://t.co/TZHwf85ptv— Bright Simons (@BBSimons) October 1, 2022