Some media outlets reported the Leicester City helicopter crash like it was a transfer story – and that is inexcusable

Place yourself, for a moment, in the head of a close family member, distant relative or friend of Claude Puel, the Leicester City manager. It is Saturday evening. You have been out with friends for dinner, or are watching a film curled up on the sofa. You have, by now, started to hear the concerning news that the helicopter belonging to Leicester owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha took off from the centre of the King Power Stadium pitch, as it does every home game, and just as it flew above the stands, span out of control and plummeted into the car park, bursting into flames and killing all those inside.

At 11.30pm, roughly three hours after the crash, the BBC, on its 24-hour rolling news channel BBC News, was reporting that Leicester’s manager might have been on board. “If it’s confirmed that the chairman and I now understand reports the manager might have been on board what does that suggest for the future of the club?” a news anchor in the studio asked the on-scene reporter.

Claude Puel was not dead

A 14-second clip was cut of the video and uploaded on social media, which was viewed more than half-a-million times within 12 hours. It was a spark which spread the news through the internet like wildfire. People were discussing how tragic it was. Others said how irresponsible it was if this was not true.

But Puel wasn’t on board. Puel was fine. It wasn’t true.

On Sunday morning, Nice-Matin, a French regional daily newspaper, confirmed that, despite the BBC’s speculation, Puel was alive. Later that day, Puel spoke to Radio France. “It’s a tragedy for the club,” he said. “I think very strongly about the victims and their families, and I wanted to reassure everyone who cares about me, I’m terribly sad but I’m fine.”

Is the public’s thirst for details of death so unquenchable and the media — and by this I include traditional and social — so obsessed with breaking the names of the dead that a little patience and accuracy are forgotten?

Speculative language

What kind of language is “understand” and “might” for reporting on the possibility of somebody meeting their death in a ball of flames? That sort of language is OK for an inconsequential transfer story, but somebody’s death? They’re either alive or dead.

Are we really so obsessed with breaking the story of someone’s tragic death that a touch of careful consideration becomes irrelevant?

“It was a complex, fast-moving situation and conflicting reports were coming in,” a BBC spokesman told me. “We were clear when information had been confirmed — and when it hadn’t.”

Which begs the question, why were they reporting information about people’s deaths which they had not confirmed? When Britain’s public broadcaster, funded by the public and not as reliant on clicks as the rest, is so desperate for attention, what hope is there for anyone else?

Gary Lineker’s professionalism

On the one hand, there was Gary Lineker, the former Leicester striker, carefully navigating a challenging news story about his beloved club while presenting Match of the Day, on air while the events unfolded, a show he described as “the most difficult” he ever hosted, on the other a professional news anchor wildly and irresponsibly speculating.

Apple News is the only major news aggregation app to use humans as editors rather than machine algorithms, and its editor in chief Lauren Kern, a prominent American journalist, prioritises accuracy ahead of speed. They now have 90 million regular readers, which she puts down to trust gained from human curation, allowing it to keep out fake news and inaccurate stories or posts from traditionally trustworthy sources.

Her team often find that information reported either directly on social media or through media outlets soon after a major story breaks tends to be wrong, but spreads like a virus through Twitter, Facebook and Google nonetheless.

A little patience

Later on Sunday, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha’s daughter, Voramas, was next to be pronounced dead. Only, she wasn’t dead, either. She was as fine as one could be after discovering their 60-year-old father has been killed.

The story of her death spread everywhere. So new stories had to be written on news websites with headlines indicating she was, in fact, not dead. In places, the “not” was written in caps, just to be clear that although they had said she was dead, she was actually NOT dead.

Are the clicks and the viewing figures worth it? Are the numbers and statistics more important than human feeling and emotion? Death has no patience with its victims — the least we could do is have a little on their behalf.