It is the nightmare of many editors: sending an obituary into the world of someone who turns out not to be dead yet. French radio station Radio France Internationale succeeded in making that painful mistake a hundredfold on Monday. RFI put the obituaries of, among others, Queen Elizabeth II, actor Alain Delon, ex-Prime Minister Laurent Fabius or businessman Bernard Tapie, among others. “A technical problem,” the statement read.
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“Due to a technical problem, many obituaries were put online on our website on Monday,” said a statement from RFI. “The messages then automatically went online with the partners of RFI, including Yahoo! , MSN and Twitter ”, it says. “That all happened without the intervention of editors,” said the channel, explaining that just at that moment a switch was made to a new system for the website.
The messages were removed relatively quickly, but of course the damage had been done: they had been read by many people, including some of the celebrities declared dead. They reacted variously to the fumbling. Actress Line Renaud, 92 meanwhile, took it humorously. She posted a photo on Twitter with her dog Pirate and added the text “As you can see I’m fine”.
It becomes more painful when it comes to Bernard Tapie. The 77-year-old entrepreneur and former minister is seriously ill and has been declared dead several times in recent months. For example, Le Monde also once released a prepared obituary for the man. A French sports channel was sick in the same bed a few months ago.
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