BBC Journalist Mistakenly Tweets That Queen Elizabeth Is Dead; Newsroom Chaos Ensues

It’s Wednesday morning and you’re going to the hospital for your annual checkup. You look down at your phone, scroll through Twitter, and wonder if you should post that picture of your favorite corgi. That’s when you see it. You’ve apparently been admitted to hospital — and, a few minutes later, you are reported to be dead. It’s news to you, but if the BBC says it, surely it’s true.

Also, in this situation you are the Queen.

Obituaries for high profile people are written and prepared in advance. Yesterday the BBC were apparently running a “low key rehearsal” for how to handle such a news event, when broadcast journalist Ahmen Khawaja released a series of since-deleted tweets to close to 8000 of her followers.

First, a strangely specific one about the Queen being treated at hospital (she wasn’t; it was a check-up):

And then: “Queen Elizabrth [sic] has died”:

Then this. (It’s still incorrect.)

Look, mistakes happen. Some days you accidentally shampoo your hair twice; sometimes a typo makes its way into a headline on Facebook; and other times you incorrectly report that the Head of the Commonwealth and Supreme Governor of the Church of England has died.

Understandably, reporters jumped into action, despite the tweets being speedily deleted. One piece on CNN Money states that, “The erroneous reports were never aired by any television network or printed by any web site. But there was palpable chaos inside newsrooms.” The Queen is on BBC’s obituary list as a Category 1, which means that in the case of her death, an automatic interruption of normal broadcasts will happen.

Fortunately reports never made it to television or articles, although CNN did tweet the news of “her death”, before having to rectify it:

Affiliates, please disregard our previous tweet about Queen Elizabeth. It was sent in error.

— CNN Newsource (@CNNNewsource) June 3, 2015

There is a long and embarrassing history of obituaries being released prematurely — there is even an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to this. The premature reporting of a death notice can have consequences outside of awkwardness. Marcus Garvey reportedly died as a direct result of reading his own obituary.

False death reports have happened before; the weird thing about this one is how the BBC can’t seem to get its story straight.

Khawaja herself tweeted that it was all a prank, and then promptly deleted this explanation.

In an official statement however, the BBC had a different explanation: “Tweets were mistakenly sent from the account of a BBC journalist saying that a member of the royal family had been taken ill,” they said, before explaining that the mistake happened in the course of “a technical rehearsal for an obituary”.

Was it a prank? Was it a mistake? Was it a global conspiracy? The whole thing just gets more and more baffling the deeper in you get. According to The Guardian, the BBC “is undertaking an investigation as part of its disciplinary procedures.”

Until then, you can watch the full press conference here:

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Feature image by Max Mumby for Indigo/Getty.