Radio Caroline has been found to have breached Ofcom rules when it accidentally announced that the King had died.
The Essex broadcaster apologised in May after the messages were played on The Barry Marsh Show, one of which said “we have suspended our normal programmes until further notice as a mark of respect following the passing of His Majesty King Charles III”.
The messages were followed by the national anthem and around 16 minutes of silence before the presenter apologised for the error.
He said: “I’ve just been informed that we’ve played in error some information a little earlier. I didn’t hear this myself, but it is incorrect, it’s a technical issue, and of course we apologise.”
An Ofcom ruling said a member of staff carrying out maintenance on the studio computer accessed the pre-recorded sound files and played them out of curiosity, unaware it would lead to the audio being broadcast live.
Once they realised what had happened, they stopped the files and “panicked and left the premises”.
The media regulator said it had received two complaints about the broadcast, and said it had breached rules 5.1, requiring that news is reported accurately and impartially, and 5.2, requiring that mistakes in news are acknowledged and corrected on air quickly.
An Ofcom statement read: “We considered this to have been a very significant inaccuracy about an issue of particular public importance.
“As outlined above, Radio Caroline did not broadcast an apology and clarification until approximately 30 minutes after the inaccurate announcements were first broadcast.
“We noted that the Licensee was monitoring the output around the time of the incident and that an engineer was already aware of the issue, but that it took some time to understand what had occurred and reinstate the scheduled programme, with that being exacerbated by the circumstances of the presenter streaming the programme remotely.”
The station said the files that contained the messages were accompanied by “a set of strict instructions to presenters and managers” to follow before playing them, but that a member of staff played them out of curiosity.
Radio Caroline said that they “took the matter very seriously”, and that they had acted “as soon as possible”.
The station said the staff member who played the files had been “reprimanded” and had “apologised”, and that in order to prevent a recurrence of this issue, Radio Caroline had removed the relevant files from the desktop on the studio computer.
It also said that its presenters and support staff had been reminded of the relevant procedures.
This article was updated on the day of publication. It originally stated that the presenter had ‘panicked and left the premises’ but that was inaccurate – it was a staff member and not the presenter who did this.
