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Comment by blondin | Hacker News Reader

the general news media was very impressive to me as well. i hardly knew the queen. but within hours were many articles and documentaries covering her lifetime. i had this sad nagging feeling that they had them ready for the moment. and things would have been different if the situation was not expected.

i learned so much about her in the following hours...

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Major news outlets usually have a pre-prepared article for deaths of notable figures and celebrities. Then they can just fill in remaining blanks and publish quickly. On occasion one of these pre-prepared articles gets accidentally leaked, or sometimes a news outlet mistakenly thinks somebody died and runs with it.

There is an SNL segment with Dana Carvey where he plays Tom Brokaw pre-taping all sorts of variations of Gerald Ford dying. (Dying at 83, 84, shot dead, overdose on crack, chopped by plane propeller, eaten by wolves, mauled by lion in convenience store.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tX6jdoruH8

Large news outlets generally have these sort of obituaries prepared for all relevant heads of state, famous actors or authors, etc.

That’s why occasionally they will declare someone dead who’s very much alive, because the publish flag on the article accidentally got set.

Believe it or not, this is the back story of the Nobel Prize. A Parisian newspaper published Alfred Nobel's obituary and, as he wasn't dead, he read it. It wasn't very flattering, to say the least; I believe it began something like: The merchant of Death is dead.

This experience made him take a deep look at his life and legacy, and he decided to will his fortune to the development of science, peace and literature.

While that is a nice story, there are apparently not many actual records supporting this. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43461/is-there-a...

TIL. Thanks. That notice Le Figaro was a great find, but not quite as dramatic.

Newspapers have obituaries ready years in advance.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/20...

Relevant Onion parody:

https://www.theonion.com/note-do-not-run-until-fucking-queen...

> LONDON—After 70[?] years as the ruling monarch of the United Kingdom and [CHECK HOW MANY COUNTRIES SHE’S IN CHARGE OF OR ELSE TWITTER PEDANTS WILL GET MAD] Queen Elizabeth died [PEACEFULLY OR PAINFULLY—COPY WHATEVER BBC OBIT SAYS] in [TK LOCATION] at the age of 89

Elizabeth Taylor outlived the major writer of her New York Times obituary: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/03/23/134797518...

I would expect them to have something done as they have had what 70 years plus to prepare for this eventuality. And it is not that the things change too much with her.

> the general news media was very impressive to me as well. i hardly knew the queen. but within hours were many articles and documentaries covering her lifetime

Such is the extent of the Angloamerican corporate propaganda that fills in the place of the state propaganda apparatus in non-capitalist systems.

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