EW.com’s Reports Of Lena Horne’s Death Greatly Exaggerated

We’ve already enjoyed a hearty laugh at Variety’s expense for confounding the two crazy Tracys. A slightly gaucher gaffe, however, comes to us via EW.com, who accidentally went live with Lena Horne’s pre-written obit.

Horne, who thanks to their crack reportage we now know was a “torch singer/actress whose recording career spanned 70 years” and who “died today at age TK in location TK from cause TK,” is—as far as we can tell—alive and well.

While we suppose it pays in today’s lightning-speed electronic media environment to have all your potential celebrity obits lined up in a row, the flip-side of this kind of diligence is horrifying oversights like this one, living on in perpetuity thanks to the magic of the internets.

Is there a word for this kind of mistake? Typo seems somehow insufficient. Let’s call it a deatho!

Shoulda been your accidentally published obit, Heigl.

• EW Online’s Lena Horne Obit ‘Oops!’ [LAist]