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A Middle Eastern TV station has been forced to issue an apology after it featured Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe and other high-profile celebrities in a "gay list of shame" article.

Middle Eastern Broadcasting Center (MBC) surprised viewers when the list appeared as part of the Scoop With Raya segment on the broadcaster's website, MBC.com.

The incorrect news item referred to the 25-year-old British star as homosexual, Cameron Diaz as bisexual and also stated Elton John wore a wedding dress to marry his long-term partner David Furnish earlier this year.

The controversial piece targeted openly gay stars Ricky Martin, Jodie Foster, Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris, too.

Eagle-eyed readers took to social media to condemn the "inaccurate" and "disrespectful" article.

"It's easy to see why their moral compass appears to be broken," one critic said.

Another wrote: "What is shameful is that there are still people who think this is permissible and that being gay is less than."

MBC has since issued a statement, claiming the error was the work of a junior editor, who had failed to fact-check and plagiarised another article that originally appeared online.

"One of the junior editors of the website published an article offending some of the big Hollywood celebrity names, which by no means was reflective of the sites [sic] editorial policy nor point of view, without prior verification of the facts of the story plagiarised from another official site, ultimately offending a list of popular celebrities loved and followed in the Arab world," the apology reads.

"MBC.net apologises from its readers and the named celebrities, for the article that was published earlier on the scoop section of the site, www.mb.net/scoop, and that is clearly not related to neither [sic] the presenter of the show 'Scoop with Raya', Raya Abirached, nor the show itself."