All those “recreational outrage” threads that inhabit the Pit? This incident is a case of international recreational outrage, taken to some colossal extreme. Rational thought seems to have taken a backseat to raw emotions fuelled by projection, as if mythic archetypes are now standing in for the real people involved.
Lets not be hasty. Come now, it was just a prank call, something that happens probably hundreds of times a day. Nobody thinks that their call would lead to a suicide. Reasonably, they expected to be hung up on, or at the very least get an admonishment by the person who picked up the phone
Yogosoth, I would really question the need for any such pranks to be made. As was said in the first few posts, the victims of such pranks rarely find them particularly funny.
One point that has emerged is when the ABC (the Govt owned network) requested an interview with the DJ’s:
“The ABC also sought interviews with Greig and Christian, but was told the DJs were only talking to commercial TV to try and please commercial media partners.”
You’re not insensitive, just piling on where we are being directed to pile on; it appears that her being predisposed to off herself is now almost a fact.
Which is, kinda, contrary to all the good things I’ve heard so far as being really good at her job.
I’ll repeat again - how about other factors in this story? Royal family and/or hospital dudes? Why are these two poor donkeys in the centre of it all when it is more likely that different dynamic may have contributed to this? How about we find out how did she die? I might imagine it will be something from a medicine cabinet but let’s wait.
I really think that odds are, the hospital laid into both nurses, and hospital management is now writing open letters to 2dayFM in order to distract from their own part in it all. In any case, all of this will come out eventually.
No, it was a broadcast of a prank call that they knew would get major coverage and massively embarrass the people who let it through and likely ruin their careers. And no, they probably just expected to be able to ruin someone’s life and laugh at them about it without consequence, not an actual suicide. But they should have realized that suicide or other destructive behavior was a quite possible outcome of what they did.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was true.
The nurses didn’t set in motion these events, they have nothing to own.
But the dj/radio station needs to stop blaming; some pre existing condition the nurse may have had (not anyone’s business, and not relevant), the British press (the Brits weren’t running the audio tape, non stop, as shameless self promotion, even for hours after the suicide was reported), pretending it was impossible to predict any kind of fallout for the people they targeted, quit pretending that they weren’t really trying to breach security or access private medical information, and quit trying to stand behind “I don’t think we actually broke any laws here!”
That’s the damn height of weaseling, in my mind. If you want it to go away, nut up, like adults do.
Maybe just manage to get out a single, “I’m so sorry” without qualifying it with any one of the above, would be a real good place to start. Own that they were taking a risk with someone else’s career, but never imagined anything more than an employee scolding would be the out come.
If the station was still playing the prank on air, even after nurse was reported dead?
I think they did, but pre-programmed stuff and time-zones and all that.
In my elevator news feed this morning I read that the station is donating all of it’s ad income for the rest of the month to a fund for the family of the deceased nurse. Butt saving publicity stunt yes, but hopefully it will help a little.
Add me to the list of people who suspect that the hospital came down hard on both nurses and that contributed to the situation. I hope the inquest makes that clear so the family can get the assistance they need from both organizations.
Anyone who pulls pranks for a living needs to understand that there is always going to be a chance it’ll go horribly, tragically bad. This is the nature of stunts in general, right? That’s why I disagree with calling this outcome unforseeable.
This particular outcome may have been unforseeable, but it takes massive naivety and stupidity to think there was zero chance that someone would actually fall for the prank and do something wrong. Otherwise there’d be little point to doing the prank. So once you allow there this is a non-zero chance of someone being fooled, then you need to think about the potential fall-out that could result should someone be fooled.
Is there a chance this fallout could damage someone’s career and mental well-being? Since the privacy of English royalty is involved, I would say most certainly yes. The chance of that is high, actually.
Is there a chance the person experiencing the fallout could be emotional ill-equipped to handle this fallout appropriately? Yes, there is a chance. There are a lot of depressed and overly stressed people out there just barely holding on. Everytime you pull a prank on strangers, you risk targetting one of these people.
So I don’t get why the DJ’s should be that shocked and amazed that their actions happened to push someone over the edge this time. Pranks are always a gamble, and whenever you gamble, you should be prepared to lose.
What I’d like to know is how come we (and I mean the World) found out nurse’s name only AFTER she was dead?
Nobody (and I mean the World) including DJ’s knew her name so I call bullshit on the idea that she was so shamed she had to off her self.
A devout and married Catholic with two children goes off the cliff just like that?
Are you serious? Just because her named wasn’t published doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have felt horribly embarrassed and in fear of her job.
Please note, I do not believe that the radio station was operating out of any sense of public duty or other altruistic motive. However.
Lets say it wasn’t a radio station making this call for a prank but a caller with some nefarious purpose that getting the medical information on the Princess would have contributed to. Can we agree that there is a security issue with the hospital? I would also imagine that someone at the palace would have made exactly this argument or one similar involving the right to privacy of the Princess and their non adherance to policy having contributed to the situation.
So a reasonable assumption of the sequence of events is:
- Radio station makes stupid assed call
- Palace berates hospital
- Hospital berates nurses
- Nurse kills self
So sure the radio station shouldn’t have made the call but they had no reasonable expectation of success, the reason they had the clip is because two separate nurses ignored security procedures and fell for a not even very good imitation of the Queen.
Certainly the fact that it was the Queen they were claiming to be would have an impact on their actions but surely the nurses working on the ward where the Princess was should have been given a security refresher. Idiot media stunts are not unexpected with celebrity patients and I would hope that they would handle it better than this incident shows, particularly since stalkers are also an issue with celebrities.
I think unless they can show that the nurses were trained in dealing with the security required for a celebrity patient that the hospital holds at least as much responsibility as the nurses for the information leak and that they also hold a significant share of the responsibility with the radio station for the impact to the Princess and the nurse.
Am I serious as opposed to you who really believe that she was embarrassed to the point of killing herself?
Let’s just agree that I find the whole idea of her being “ashamed’ so much so that she kills her self utterly disrespectful. It is a fully media construct that has no basis in reality whatsoever. Unless, as I mentioned earlier, medical records point to a pre-existing condition and pressure factors from royal family and/or hospital.
Agreed. I don’t think the world would lose anything if stupid pranks like this stopped.
I don’t completely disagree with you; I agree that there is a chance that a prank will be pulled on someone who is ill-equipped to handle it, and I agree that pranks are stupid and can end any day now, but I think the chances of pulling a prank on someone who will kill themselves over it are very small. Still, thinking about that, a small chance of someone killing themselves over a stupid, useless prank is not great; better to not prank at all.
Okay, I’ve changed my mind; I still believe that there was no reasonable expectation that the prank would have ended in suicide, but there was actually a small but real chance that it would, and that should have prevented the pranking, since it was completely useless and there was no reason for it to go ahead. A person’s life is worth more than a tiny bit of “entertainment.”
I’m still amazed that “pranks kill” meme is being so fervently supported with no evidence.
So, can someone cite a previous example where a person was pranked and then committed suicide?
Tyler Clementi, maybe?
Then there was the case of the young man who killed himself after being on the Sally Jessy Raphael show and being surprised with the crush that another young man had on him*. Not exactly a prank, but it demonstrates how you don’t know how someone is going to react to something.
*I think I got that right - it was quite a few years ago.
Yes, I believe that is possible. We live in a world where impressionable people commit suicide for being bullied, so why should we be incredulous about suicide caused by a prank?
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, something very similar happened to me. It caused a mini-scandal (it felt massive to me, though) that resulted in nationwide press and my name was published. Not going to go into any details about it, but it’s a story that my great grandchildren might end up memorizing. Just like hers will.
The days after that happened were hellish for me, because I felt embarrassed and scared. If I’d been clinically depressed and struggling with low self-esteem, I very well might have been unable to cope with that stress. Fortunately, my mental health was such that within a week, I was capable of laughing about the incident.
Not everyone can recover like this, though, and I can totally see how suicide would seem like an option to someone tottering on the edge.
Are the pranksters responsible for her fragility? No. But they should have known there was a chance their prank could have hurt a fragile person. Just like a sky-diver should be aware there is a chance their parachute is defective.