UK radio station apologises for accidentally announcing king’s death
A UK radio station, Radio Caroline, issued an apology after mistakenly announcing the death of King Charles due to a computer error. The incident occurred on May 19, prompting the station to activate its emergency protocol, which led to a temporary silence on air. Station manager Peter Moore expressed regret for any distress caused to listeners and the king.
- ▪Radio Caroline accidentally announced King Charles's death due to a computer error.
- ▪The erroneous announcement activated the station's emergency protocol, causing a temporary silence.
- ▪Station manager Peter Moore apologized for any distress caused to listeners and to HM the king.
6 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 18 hours. Coverage spans 3 points on the political spectrum — 1 lean left, 3 centre, 1 right.
- ▪ UK radio station mistakenly announces King Charles’ death and plays ‘God Save The King’ — NME
- ▪ UK radio station mistakenly announces King Charles’ death in on-air blunder — Page Six
- ▪ Radio station sorry after mistakenly announcing death of King Charles — Straits Times — World
- ▪ UK radio station mistakenly reports death of King Charles — South China Morning Post
- ▪ UK radio station apologises after mistakenly announcing King Charles’s death — The Independent
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — World |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/may/20/uk-radio-station-apologises-for-accidentally-announcing-kings-death |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 18:52:23 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T19:05:02.971Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T19:05:02.971Z |
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| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | o8VhzCqrr2LN · 6 stories |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Radio Caroline’s station manager Peter Moore apologised for any distress caused. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The GuardianView image in fullscreenRadio Caroline’s station manager Peter Moore apologised for any distress caused. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The GuardianRadioUK radio station apologises for accidentally announcing king’s deathAnnouncement made due to computer error at Radio Caroline’s main studio in EssexNadeem BadshahWed 20 May 2026 14.52 EDTLast modified on Wed 20 May 2026 14.53 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleA radio station has apologised for “any distress caused” after accidentally announcing that King Charles had died.The erroneous announcement was made on Tuesday afternoon due to a computer error at Radio Caroline’s main studio in Essex.Station manager Peter Moore…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — World.