Sydney-based 2DayFM radio
presenters Michael Christian, left, and Mel Greig speak during an interview
with Seven Network's current affairs program "Today Tonight" in Sydney on Monday. The 2DayFM announcers said the tragedy
had left them "shattered, gutted, heartbroken". (Reuters)
A woman died ... guilt must be assigned to someone.
That is the sad reality of the bizarre and tragic turn of events that has enveloped a hospital, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a radio station, two DJs and Jacintha Saldanha's family (right: daughter Lisha, husband Ben Barboza and son Junal).
The cries for blood and blame have rung from Britain to Australia and all ports in between. The British press, no slouches at intrusive tactics to spark circulation, instinctively went on the attack.
“It feels as through the British media are on a witch hunt,” Sandy Kaye, a spokeswoman for the parent company of 2Day FM, Southern Cross Austereo, told the
Daily Telegraph.
“It is quite easy to blame us … The Australian industry seems to sit quite
fairly behind us. ... It was only supposed to be a harmless prank.”
The grief-striken human faces -- Saldanha's family and, yes, even radio hosts Michael Christian and Mel Greig -- are the front cover to what seems to be a larger question about ethics.
To get an idea of the scope of this tragedy and its subsequent soul searching, we've gathered a sampling of the opinions and editorials from the British and Aussie press below. Then, we ask you the question: Who do you blame?
Mirror (UK):
"Oh, the crimes that are committed in this world by people who are just “having a bit of a laugh”.
The Aussie funsters who made their prank call to the hospital where Kate was recovering did not mean to hurt anyone.
They did not intend to drive the tricked nurse to suicide.
But they have blood on their hands and they will have to live with that for the rest of their lives.
Because every prank is laced with spite, and behind the mocking laughter of the clever ones there is real and virulent cruelty.
Sun (UK):
Nurse Jacintha Saldanha's grieving family and friends are entitle to be angry at the crass Australian radio hoaxers who apparently drove her to suicide.
And the station, with its history of offensive antics, cannot pretend it was
blind to the stunt’s folly.
Police have launched an inquiry. Some critics want the hoaxers charged with
manslaughter.
But the last thing we want is yet another witch hunt.
This sad story is a matter for a coroner's inquest, not mob justice.
Sam Leith in London Evening Standard:
What they did — with the approval and encouragement of their employers, and in the certain knowledge that it would amuse their
audience — was tasteless and intrusive.
But let’s not be idiots about this. ... The faintest self-examination, the faintest whiff of actual moral clarity would force us to recognise that the original transgression isn’t changed a jot, morally, by what came afterwards.
Anything else is a vicious mixture of sentimentality and bullying.
If we had considered it an outrage for which the DJs should have been tarred and feathered, threatened with death, slung out of their jobs and denounced from the front page of every newspaper in the Western world, we should have called it so at the time.
I don’t remember that happening. Do you? Truth told, I think we may have sniggered.
Daily Star (UK):
Whoever thought it was a good idea to prank call a hospital, trying to
get a sick pregnant woman on the phone by trickery, should be sacked.
That’s even without the tragic consequences of the
Australian radio station’s Duchess of Cambridge stunt which led to the
tragic death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha.
Radio boss Rhys Holleran doesn’t agree. “We’ve followed procedures,” he said. “We haven’t done anything illegal.”
For a start, many experts think they have broken the law. If he has followed procedures,
everyone who came up with those procedures needs to join the dole
queue.
Scumbag Holleran’s first orderof business should be to sign a hefty cheque to Jacintha’s family to help bring up her two kids. His second should be to disappear into the Outback for good.
Daily Express (UK):
... Despite international public outrage and a family's keen grief, management at the Australian station is digging in.
Rhys Holleran, head of Austereo which owns 2Day FM, said no one
could have "reasonably foreseen" the tragic outcome of this puerile
prank.
Incredibly ... regulator the Australian Communications and Media Authority had not launched an investigation despite a deluge of complaints and a clear breach of its code. It's hard to see how the show did not treat all those involved in a "highly demeaning or highly
exploitative manner."
Jenny McCartney takes a royals perspective in The Telegraph (UK):
We live in an age that devours trivia like manna, and its most zealous peddlers will trample on lives in order to seize it. The value is meaningless, but the price to individuals caught up in the chase is high.
... Kate seems a more robust, resilient personality than Diana, and her marriage to William is happier and less complicated than Diana’s was to Charles. Whether one is a royalist or not, it is possible to admire the way she consistently displays grace under pressure, but that is no argument for intensifying the pressure. One could understand if – amid their happiness over the pregnancy – Kate and William were already feeling besieged. The worst invasions of their privacy -- the long-lens photographs of Kate sunbathing topless in France, and this hoax hospital call -- have come from media sources outside Britain. As we have repeatedly seen, the boundaries of normal, respectful behaviour are invisible but powerful: break through them and the human consequences can be unpredictable and disastrous.
This most recent incident, one must hope, might come as an international
wake-up call to back off.
Bel Mooney writing on at Daily Mail (UK):
"His female co-host Mel Greig thought this (phone prank) would be 'awesome.' That, in turn, shows a very moder take on the word 'awe' -- which correctly implies respect as well as wonder. Never mind the ethics or legality of the broadcast, there was no respect for anybody's feeling in his sorry incident; no hint of decency or basic human compassion.
Now an innocent woman is dead, her family bereaved and bewildered, and the whole world knows the story -- the thoughtless joke doesn't seem funny at all, least of all to the shamed perpetrators.
To me, it never was. ... I saw the prank as another example of the casual, tacky, thoughtless cruelty that has infected popular culture like a plague -- on radio, on television and increasingly on Twitter and other social media outlets."
The Australian:
... The broader lesson here is about the consequences of a superficial news cycle and unthinking devotion to it. As if the prank
wasn't foolish enough, the British press, driven by the public's insatiable appetite for royal gossip, piled on to the story.
Rather tha dismiss it and move on, every angle was amplified and the hospital was
firmly in the media's sights. It was "an astonishing breach" of royal security; hospital management were "horrified" and palace staff were "furious." Prince Charles showed poise and common sense by simply passing it off with a joke. But in this age of digital outrage and trial by twitter too many tweet first and think later. The media cyclone is conjured up and does its damage very quickly before moving on. While fingers tap on smartphones to vote on whether the radio hosts should keep their jobs, the need for new laws or whether the duchess will have a boy or girl, a family and a hospital are left to grieve for one of
their own. The coroner will inquire and the London tabloids will look
for their next angle. Sadly, in this case, one woman's world has come to an end.
But if there is a salient warning for all of us it must be to keep perspective on what matters, reserve judgment, and not get stuck in frenzied and superficial moments.
Sydney Morning Herald:
The problem was, in trying to get the Duchess on air, which was their stated goal, the presenters blithely ignored the ramifications for those who would be their conduits -- the nurses whose job it was to protect and care for their patient. They lost sight of how humiliating and potentially damaging it might be for these people. Remember, the nurses were not the intended target; that is clear from a transcript of the call. The aim was to get an ill woman onto their radio station. For a laugh. But the humiliation fell on those who were conned. They were the victims of this prank, and at no stage were they given any opportunity to set things right.
... We all need to dig deep to find the basic ethical rules that
define proper human conduct. Sometimes the failure to follow the
unwritten, simple rules of decency and respect that guide us as
individuals in a community can have profound and tragic consequences.
Herald Sun (Australia):
The real culprits are not so much the 2Day FM jocks who duped
Jacintha Saldanha into believing she was speaking to the Queen and
Prince Charles, but the people who run the station.
... Radio executives know their ratings rely on the outrageous and, while they
would not want to see anyone driven to suicide, humiliation is a different matter.
This time, however, laws have been broken.
Of course, 2Day FM
says it tried to ring back to tell the unfortunate nurse she had been recorded and would it be all right to broadcast her embarrassment to the world, but this time no one answered the phone.
The station should be fined for breaking the law, not because of a prank involving
the Duchess of Cambridge that went dreadfully wrong.
A stronger message needs to be sent than blaming two radio hosts who (Monday) night spent a lot of time being sorry for themselves.
David Penberthy of The Telegraph (Australia):
Those who are jumping on the
bandwagon and directing their fury at a couple of giggly radio hosts
over the tragic but unforeseeable death of a troubled British nurse
should ask themselves a couple of questions.
The first is whether their rage is in any way approximate to the
actions of this pair, who if they had any idea of the consequences of
their light-hearted joke would clearly never have gone down that path.
The second is whether the extent of this rage -- more than 21,000 emails,
many of them hateful and violent, have now been sent to their radio
station -- is so over the top that it could even help generate the same
kind of psychological pressure which saw this poor nurse take her own
life.
... This case is just completely tragic and also completely bizarre. However
the orgy of abuse, posturing and cant it has unleashed is completely
unsurprising given the modern enthusiasm for joining the lynch mob."
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