List of Premature Obituaries - J

J

• Jiang Zemin: Amid internet rumors concerning his health, Hong Kong's Asia Television Limited reported him dead on its 6 pm evening news broadcast on July 6, 2011. The next day, China's Xinhua News Agency dismissed reports of Jiang's death as "pure rumor," prompting ATV to retract its earlier report.
• Pope John Paul II is the only known triple recipient:
  1. Immediately after the 1981 attempt on his life, despite heightened caution from CBS's embarrassing premature obituary of James Brady weeks earlier, CNN implied the Pope had died by repeatedly referring to him in the past tense.
  2. In 2003, by CNN again, this time in the CNN.com incident. The draft obituary, which had used the Queen Mother's as a template, noted the Pope's 'love of racing'.
  3. On the day of his official (and for real) death on April 2, 2005, Fox News confirmed he had died after it received incorrect reports from the Italian media that his ECG had gone flat.
• James Earl Jones: in 1998 the actor was mistakenly pronounced dead during a radio broadcast of a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game by play-by-play announcer Lanny Frattare; Frattare had confused him with James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King's assassin, who had recently died.
• Raid Juhi: in March 2005 the presiding judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein was incorrectly reported by NBC News to have been assassinated. The real victims were another trial judge, Barbweez Mahmood, and his son. NBC blamed incorrect information from US officials.
• Steve Jobs: On 27 August 2008 Bloomberg accidentally published a 17-page obituary. In a subsequent public appearance Jobs joked about the accident by displaying on screen during a keynote an imprecise quotation of Mark Twain (who was also the recipient of a premature obituary) reading "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated". Jobs died on 5 October 2011.