You probably haven’t been able to avoid the mass coverage in the media of the release of Microsoft’s Halo 3 video game.

But sometimes the mainstream media gets it wrong, like in this TV report from the BBC where it used footage from Sony’s Killzone 2 by mistake.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1O7kLxKVcU]

I’ve worked with the reporter on the story, Rory Cellan-Jones, and he is a good journalist. To his credit, Rory has apologised for the mistake, saying in his Facebook status that he is “is very, very sorry about the Halo 3 cock-up”.

The incident illustrates one of the issues the mainstream media is grappling with – in this case, how to report on video games when the last game most of the people in the newsroom probably played was Pong. Whereas in the past, these mistakes might have just slipped past largely unnoticed, the Internet has empowered the audience to hold journalists far more accountable than ever before.

Going on about using the wrong game footage might seem trivial, but it undermines the authority and credibility of a news organisation, particularly among younger audiences.

(Thanks to N4G for highlighting the video)

UPDATE Thursday 27 Sept: The BBC has now explained how Killzone 2 footage was mistakenly used in its Halo 3 report. Writing on the BBC Editors’ Blog, Rory Cellan-Jones explains that it was due to mislabelled footage:

After editing a story for the One O’Clock news which only featured Halo 3 material, a video editor and I were looking for some fresh shots for our Six O’Clock piece. He searched the Jupiter system and found something marked simply “lib(library) Halo 3″. That was the footage uploaded in August – which also included Killzone and we ended up choosing that, not realising it was the wrong game. Result – disaster, and one replicated in the Ten O’Clock version of the story.

Rory says he was impressed with the way the “eagle-eyed web generation” picked up on the error, adding, “Sorry – we’ll try to be more careful in future.”