OBITICIDE: DEATH BY MEDIA
ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL and surprisingly common forms of media error is the report that a living person is dead. It’s so frequent that I coined my own term to describe it. I call it “obiticide.” Death by media error.
Obiticide is a damaging and embarrassing error for both the victim and the perpetrator. It calls into question the very processes by which news is gathered and disseminated. Surely standard procedures would call for confirmation from the family or a funeral home before noting someone’s passing. What about employing a quick search of the archives before pronouncing someone long gone? Unfortunately, the press has no such thing as an enforced, universal standard for fact checking. This, along with the desire to be the first media outlet to report a prominent passing, greatly contributes to obiticide. If one outlet reports someone’s demise, it’s as good as gold for the rest; if editors are certain in their own minds that a particular person has passed on, they have few reservations about inserting the word “late” before the name in a story.
Many newspapers require that anyone who submits a paid obituary supply the name of the funeral home or a family contact that can verify the death. This reveals a sober truth: When it comes to obituaries, the factual standards applied by the business side of a newspaper are sometimes higher than they are on the editorial side of the firewall. This contradicts what most journalists and readers or viewers believe. And while some victims of obiticide get a laugh out of it, they also shake their heads, wondering how such a glaring mistake could have snaked its way through the editing process without being caught. Others spend the rest of their lives on earth battling the perception that they are gone, irrelevant.
Until a case of obiticide is solved, the victim resides in a netherworld where he or she lives and breathes the same as before, but, in the public eye, has ceased to exist. Some cases are never fully resolved, leaving the victim to suffer through frequent encounters that begin with “I thought you were dead!” For the famous in particular, media death, however fleeting, is a fate far worse than true expiration.
Highly visible people—politicians, actors, musicians, criminals—are today the most frequent victims of obiticide. But even before the emergence of newspapers, death reports were a major news item: “The most newsworthy event in many lives is, alas, their end,” wrote Mitchell Stephens in A History of News. “Before the advent of the formal newspaper obituary, epitaphs in prose or verse were the most common form of printed personal news.” As an early example of obiticide, he notes that “in October 1525 criers in Paris announced that King Francis I of France had died in captivity, though he too was alive and would live for another twenty-one years.”
Today’s media puts a premium on the timely distribution of a well-prepared obituary. To make this possible, news organizations archive (“can”) obituary files for use when someone notable passes on; they may even keep them current. A January 2006 report by Editor & Publisher said that the Associated Press alone has more than 1,000 canned obits on hand, with other major wires and newspapers maintaining similarly stocked databases. The New York Times, which had only 150 on hand in 2001, claimed more than 1,200 by early 2006. Editor & Publisher noted that “major papers continue to stockpile advance obits more than ever, while also devoting more writers to the dedications. Growing interest by readers in biographical pieces, along with an increased effort to present them more as stories than public notices, also adds to the renewed effort to stay one step ahead of death.”
The AP makes sure to regularly update the content of its literary morgue, adding each new accomplishment or scandal as the person’s life progresses. In the meantime, the predeceased carry on with their lives, rarely giving a second thought to the idea that somewhere in a newsroom a lone reporter is dutifully planning for their demise. This early preparation has many times resulted in a case of obiticide, leaving the press scrambling to explain its error, and resurrect the deceased. Sometimes, however, an instance of obiticide can have surprising, even positive consequences. This is the exception. The usual result is that someone living has been shunted into an early, erroneous grave.
In 1888, a French newspaper ran an obituary for Alfred Nobel, the Swedish physicist who invented dynamite in 1866. The headline declared, “The Merchant of Death Is Dead!” The obit described how Nobel had become a rich man by inventing something that enabled people to kill one another in mass numbers. Shame on him and good riddance, was the tone.
That same year, Alfred’s brother Ludvig had died while staying in Cannes, France. In an example of laissez-faire fact checking, the French newspaper (and the others that followed) confused him with Alfred, who was also in France at the time. The news spread quickly, even crossing the Atlantic. The New York Times of April 16, 1888, noted his recent passing in a more charitable tone. A front-page article in the May 24, 1888, edition of the Decatur Daily Republican (which was a reprint of an article in the New York Sun) reported, “The world has lost one of its greatest experimental chemists by the death of Alfred Nobel.” That obit also made special mention of the success of Alfred’s brother Ludvig in the petroleum industry. The April 22 edition of the Atlanta Constitution made do with a short, pithy note on page 12 that read, “Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, died the other day. He was a very quiet man, but his invention has made considerable noise in the world.”
When the news reached Alfred in Paris, he was not pleased. Not only did he have to read his own often negative premature obituaries, but he was also in mourning for his brother. Alfred Nobel the famous physicist was alive and well, albeit in a rage. Ludvig, a successful oil entrepreneur, was dead. Erik Bergengren wrote in Alfred Nobel: The Man and His Work, “The world press, which for some reason confused the oil magnate Ludvig with the dynamite king Alfred, blossomed out in obituaries.”
Nobel was not a man to let the errant obituary pass without doing something about it. Rather than simply pursue a correction or letter to the editor, many biographers report that he decided to create a legacy that would overshadow his controversial invention. Kenne Fant wrote in Alfred Nobel: A Biography that Nobel dedicated his fortune “to a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast aspersions.” Nobel created awards for the people who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses.”
This was, of course, the Nobel Prize. But as is often the case, this tale, though frequently retold in books, by the media, and in inspirational talks, is not completely true.
“We have found several obituaries [from 1888] where Alfred’s brother Ludvig is mistaken for Alfred,” explained Olov Amelin, a senior curator at the Nobel Museum in Sweden, in an e-mail to me. “It would be interesting to find the first mention of the obituary being one reason for Alfred Nobel’s decision to form a Prize, but so far I have only found rather late statements that this should be the case. So far we have to conclude that this is only one among many rumors that tend to grow around famous historical persons.”
Completing this inauspicious Nobel circle 117 years later was the flawed report of the death of Harold Pinter, on October 13, 2005—the very day he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pinter, who was already suffering from lung cancer, had hit his head, and one UK television station managed to turn that into his demise. Certainly, he was one Nobel winner with whom Alfred Nobel would have a felt a special kinship.
Nobel is not the only prominent figure whose premature death report precipitated a reaction of historical proportions. In early June of 1897, Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was hiding away in London, still mourning the death of his eldest daughter, Susy, and working to make a dent in his considerable debt. (Some ill-conceived business ventures had drained coffers that had once overflowed with proceeds from his successful writing and speaking.)
Now he worked diligently, joylessly, to churn out new work for publication. Meanwhile, Clemens’s wife, brokenhearted by the death of her daughter, was growing increasingly frail. Just a couple of months earlier, Clemens had written this line in his notebook:
OF THE DEMONSTRABLY WISE there are but two; those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.
Then, amid this melancholy, came a knock at the door. Clemens opened it to find Frank Marshall White, a young correspondent from the New York Journal. In his hand were two telegrams from his stateside editor. It seems word had spread that Clemens, then 61 years old, was gravely ill. Perhaps even dead. The editor had instructed his man via cablegram: “If Mark Twain dying in poverty, in London, send 500 words.” Displaying the cold calculation of a true newspaperman, he followed with a second: “If Mark Twain has died in poverty send 1,000 words.”
Although Twain was under considerable financial and emotional stress, he was not sick. But his cousin James Ross Clemens had been. A doctor who worked in London, James Ross had recently paid his famous cousin a visit and fallen ill while he was at his home. London newspapers, learning that a man by the name of Clemens had fallen ill at the address belonging to Twain, reported that the famous writer was ailing. (Like the Nobel error, this shoddy reporting could have been prevented had someone chosen to dispatch a correspondent to the home of the great man.) And that was enough for the next day’s edition. Earlier in the year, rumors of Clemens’s desperate financial situation had reached American shores. Now came word that he was dying. Or was already dead.
Clemens looked at the cablegrams. The paper had made a mistake, and now he was faced with commenting on his pending, if erroneous, demise. First he explained the error to the reporter, noting that his cousin was now fully recovered. Then he let loose with one of his more famous, and more misquoted, lines: “The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Twain walked away, his reputation for verbal pyrotechnics intact. And the reporter had his quote. The mistake was quickly eclipsed by Clemens’s retort. As Ron Powers, Clemens’s biographer, noted, “Within a day or so people around the world were repeating the key line . . . to one another, and realizing how long it had been since they’d had a jolt of Mark Twain’s humor (if ‘humor’ it was). The remark . . . restored him to international attention.”
After sending the reporter off, Mark Twain likely closed his door and sat down to ponder whether his death was indeed only worth 1,000 words. In the end, the media’s error gave the world one of Clemens’s most quoted lines. Some errors, though inexcusable, end up paying dividends.
Copyright 2007 Craig Silverman
An excerpt of Jeff Jarvis’ excellent foreword is also online here.
