The Hockey News apologizes after tweeting photo of white player to promote 'Diversity Issue'

The Hockey News tweeted Tuesday that it "wanted to go BIG" for the cover of its upcoming "2021 Diversity issue," and promptly received social media backlash after the cover featured a white guy as the subject.

The player featured on the cover shown in the tweet is Zdeno Chára, an unmistakably white man, and Twitter was very upset about it.  

"They just aren’t going to deal with any issues of diversity. Business as usual," one user commented.

It was later claimed in a subsequent tweet from The Hockey News that the initial tweet mistakenly labeled the issue of the magazine the "Diversity issue" and that it was in fact not the diversity issue of publication.

The Big Lead speculates that the publication's social media team was sent the wrong information, leading to the public relations disaster.

"Zdeno Chara became the cover story and someone sent the social media team misleading information. Now the magazine is stuck apologizing," The Big Lead wrote.

It was pointed out by one Twitter user that a sub-heading on the cover does mention a discussion on diversity, which may indicate that the cover was deliberately published to be a diversity themed issue.

"The issue is not themed” it literally had diversity all over the cover lol," another user pointed out.