I only use my powers for good you know – by good I mean amusing myself and my friends with the imitation.
ETA Spelling it out, because I have a feeling I have to, I’ve never prank called anyone. Jeez.
I can’t point to the exact year but sometime after the Janet Jackson thing the FCC tightened up the rules. 99.9% of the phony phone calls or pranks are scripted and just hack acting. And usually very easy to spot. The rules about it are so strict that it is basically impossible to do. The free wheeling days of radio in the US are over. Replaced by Prep Burger bullshit on every channel.
Even before the rule change most of it was fake anyway.
For my money the lion’s share of the blame goes to the hospital. What sort of organisation, when such a high-profile patient is in their care, exposes nursing staff to the risk of media intrusion? Have they not been watching the fucking news? The media are ruthless and it was surely inevitable someone was going to try and blag some confidential info and should have had trained staff screening all calls. They let Kate and William down and they let their staff down, badly.
The cause of death hasnt been actually officially stated yet. Going to be awfully embarassing for a lot of people if it turns out to be something entirely unrelated.
If it was suicide, she was Indian by background, by herself as working away from home, had a ‘nervous’ disposition, so there might be a few factors involved.
This wasnt really reasonable to foresee, but it was reasonable to foresee someone might lose their job over it or the like. Their claim it went further than expected is kind of cancelled out by them having it checked by managers and lawyers before releasing it - it wasn’t something that played out live, they got it, then released it anyway after lots of time to consider the possible consequences.
Otara
Oops. I didn’t mean to imply that it was. I should have said “This similar story has been confirmed by Snopes.”
Can’t argue with that, either - every hospital in North America has privacy rules that wouldn’t have let any of this happen (as far as I understand it), and they aren’t the hospital of choice of the royal family in England.
That was my thought.
She was nationally humiliated, humiliated in her workplace; possibly (I’d guess probably) losing her job or even career; suicide isn’t nearly as surprising as people seem to think it is. That isn’t all that unusual a response to a life suddenly in ruins.
I suspect the problem was more that no-one does try it on over there. If people were constantly trying to get access, they’d have been more ready for it.
Given the phone tapping scandals and the like, I suspect the media in the UK is avoiding anything in this kind of area to the point where people maybe got too complacent and didnt consider overseas efforts in the area.
Otara
The hospital staff completely fucked up–there’s just no getting around it. The station also fucked up by broadcasting confidential information (obtained through deception, no less).
But I don’t believe the station should be responsible for protecting people from themselves, especially when this error in judgement by the staff was such an amateurish mistake to make. It’s one of the most obvious and explicit rules in nursing that you don’t divulge patient information to just anyone, especially over the phone.
I’m pretty sure every hospital in Britain also has privacy rules that shouldn’t have allowed this to happen.
At first I was kind of startled by the attitude (in this thread and elsewhere) that the only reason the hospital could possibly have given the nurse a bollocking is because they’re brown-nosers trying to cover their own arses. A nurse blatantly violated patient confidentiality. Someone rings up out of the blue, asking for info about a patient, and you just blab it? Seriously? It doesn’t matter whether the patient is Kate Windsor or Jane Doe: that’s several million miles from OK. I would expect the nurse who gave out info to get a massive bollocking, at the absolute minimum.
I only learned from this thread that the one who’s dead was the other nurse. Who only handed over a phone. That’s just horrible. The poor woman.
No, the DJs couldn’t have expected this outcome, but a shitty thing to do is a shitty thing to do. It doesn’t matter if you call it a prank, it doesn’t matter if you find people who’ll laugh at it; it’s still shitty. And wasting the time of overworked nurses, and trying to invade the privacy of a sick woman, are both shitty things to do.
Maybe withholding judgement until all the facts come in makes me old fashioned, but has there been any information on the cause of her death that indicates suicide? All of the reports I’ve seen have said something similar to this one:
“I/we were only having a bit of fun” is the usual excuse for bullying, in my experience. Which is a variety of jerkish behavior, of course.
Tell me about it.
Spy magazine once pranked Edward J. Van Kloberg III, notorious lobbyist for foreign dictators. Another time they asked freshmen Congressmen about ethnic cleansing in Freedonia. Freedonia is the kingdom in which the Marx Brother’s classic Duck Soup takes place. All good targets.
Yeah, pranks can be used to fight the good fight, such as the fake calls used to expose Scott Walker or Sarah Palin (or the Acorn thing, if you’re a Republican)
“The death was not being treated as suspicious” on the face of it means “not murder”, but can also be well-known media shorthand for “suicide”. If it was an accident the reporters would likely find a way of getting that in there (“The deceased was found at their home after apparently slipping on a banana peel and falling down stairs”, for example).
FWIW, the ABC (the Australian one) are reporting Ms Saldanha’s death as “an apparent suicide”. Regardless of whether she killed herself or had a terrible accident, it’s still a tragic situation.
Nah we have plenty of pranksters over here. They have pulled their horns in lately though after this scandal which provided the springboard for Russel Brand’s Hollywood career. I quite like the guy but still feel I should apologise.
The latest I heard in the Australian press is the DJs who did this are feeling “fragile.”
Boo hoo. Just pretend the public is pranking you and take it.
Unless they are genuine psychopaths, they likely are feeling “fragile”. This is a life-shattering outcome. How do you ever get over feeling responsible for someone else’s death? Their stupid prank always had a good chance of getting someone fired, but I never thought it would end in anyone’s death. I doubt they did either.
This article gave a first hand account of how the reporter was affected by a suicide linked to her work. This must be what Mel and Michael are going through now, and every Christmas, and every day for the rest of their lives. The lynchmob needs to turn it down or we’ll have two more funerals before Christmas.
if only this were a tit for tat hoax approved by the Royals to get back at the pranksters.
There’s a huge difference between exposing someone who is defrauding people and trying to cause someone to get fired for shits and giggles. In the first case, the guy who was targeted by the show reporters was actually doing something wrong, and he was TARGETED specifically because he was defrauding the public. In the second case, the prankers were actually and actively trying to get someone in trouble, for the amusement of themselves and their listeners. They didn’t give a shit who they got into trouble. Sure, NOW they claim that they never intended it to go that far. But the fact is, what they did was similar to firing a gun in the city, in an area with a dense population. It’s entirely foreseeable that someone could get hurt, and hurt badly, because of the shooting/pranking. The article said that there was no pre-meditation. I disagree. At the very least, they intended to disrupt the functioning of a medical facility, and wouldnt it be funny if they had managed to get someone fired, as well?
I hope that those two DJs never know another moment’s peace.