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Comment by d1sxeyes | Hacker News Reader

Most of us knew in advance that she had died because we recognised parts of the protocol.

The big news anchors called in early and wearing black suits and TV schedules suspended until 6pm, road signage removed from the front gate at Balmoral and fences put up, parliament suspended, the whole Royal family travelling to Scotland…

plus a BBC journalist accidentally announcing it at 3pm on Twitter and then giving the most cagily worded retraction I’ve ever read: “I tweeted that there had been an announcement about the death of the Queen. This was incorrect, there has been no announcement, and so I have deleted the tweet. I apologise.”

Personally, I was pretty sure she was gone two to three hours before the formal announcement. Plenty of time to do quite a lot of Wikipedia updates and just click “Save” when the announcement finally breaks.

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Yeah the whole royal family going there en masse and simultaneously (even on the same plane in some cases) says to me she died sometime before the announcement so that the royals themselves got some semblance of a chance to deal with it and process it themselves privately first before it literally being the only thing in UK media for the next 20 days.

My bet is that not long after she met with the PM.

She had two birthdays (personal and official) so two dates of death doesn't seem so far fetched

More like 20 birthdays. Each of the dozens of territories she ruled over finds its own convenient time for a local celebration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Official_Birthday (also an example of a page in flux, with about half the references updated to refer to the king instead of a queen).

I read somewhere that the PM was informed of her death around 4:30pm.

At least from the official statements it mentions she died in the afternoon.

This. The moment Huw Edwards appeared wearing a black suit and tie it was obvious.

In most cases if a reporter (and their entire news organization!) knew something to be true but kept saying the opposite for hours, that would be malpractice.

What do you mean by "malpractice"? Pretty sure there's no guild of journalists that would expel you.

"Journalistic malpractice" is a common English phrase, I'm sure you can figure out what it means.

Well there’s these guys: https://cioj.org/

But no, even if malpractice was a thing, this wouldn’t be it.

News can be embargoed, particularly in the case of events surrounding the royal family.

In which case practice is appropriately to answer "no comment", not to say the opposite is true. Especially when it's obvious you're acting counter to what you're saying.

The whole thing has a cult quality to it, and it's a farce in a way even ordinary propaganda isn't - beyond embarrassment and into cringe, perhaps.

That’s why the wording of the “correction” is important. She doesn’t say the queen isn’t dead, she says there has been no announcement.

The protocol for news reporting around the death of the monarch is there for a reason: to make sure the news is authentic and to announce it to as many subjects as possible simultaneously. I don’t think it’s unusual for a news organisation to hold back from reporting something when there is a good reason. For example, troop movements, court cases, etc.

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