But they can be blamed for willingly overlooking the obvious negative consequences, easily predictable and foreseeable, if the prank succeeded. Someone was going to take some push back. They were after all, intending to blast it on the radio all day and did so. They had no way of knowing if the pushback was a scolding or a firing. If they have similar privacy laws governing medical files in Australia as elsewhere in the developed world, then how could they not have known that they could be causing someone to lose their professional certifications or licenses? They were willing to take that chance with someone else’s career to further their own.
They just thought that none of the push back would reach them. When you roll the dice with other peoples fates sometimes you lose instead. But yeah, you share some of the blame.
I have nothing but the deepest sympathies for them, truly. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes, even if this stunt slides off them, and they return to the air more popular and infamous than ever. They are still so young and they have a lot of years to live with this.
Here’s an opinion piece printed this morning from Mike Carlton, one of Australia’s top media commentators. The whole piece, which isn’t that long, is worth reading, but here are the final paragraphs:
The hospital is said to have been favored by the royals. I wonder if, in the future, this will change. To lose such prestigious patients would be a blow to their image.
“The station” and “the DJs” are not the same thing. The station has proven time and again that it is insensitive, unethical and will milk the grottiest, sleaziest scandal for all that it can. The only line they care about crossing is the legal one. If they can stay just on the right side of that, they don’t care about anything else. This is absolutely the behaviour I expect of 2dayFM and Austereo, home of vile Kyle Sandilands, the king of trash radio.
The DJs… Well, we don’t really know at this point. The media says they are devastated and receiving intense counselling. Honestly, I don’t see how anyone could be blasé about causing a suicide unless they were a genuine psychopath. I expect “devastated” doesn’t begin to cover it.
I read somewhere, and I don’t know how true it is, that they dialled an internal number which bypassed the switchboard. If true, it’s likely Jacintha Saldanha picked up the call thinking it had already passed through the switchboard and been verified. It’s so easy to see how such a very human mistake could be made.
Exactly. As I’ve been saying, the station management, who consistently lack sound judgement and good taste, should have decided not to air the recording once it was apparent that it went into unexpected (and ethically murky) territory. The DJs were merely on-air talent who found themselves in a situation they could not possibly have anticipated.
“Expectation” no; but it was certainly a reasonable thing to worry about. When you subject people to major public humiliation and the likely destruction of their career, some people are going to suicide over it.
And given their general behavior I expect that their reaction was “Ha, ha, the stupid bitch killed herself, that’s funny…uh, oh, what if someone blames us!”
Decent human beings don’t do what they do; so yeah, I suspect that they are either psychopaths or something close to it, and don’t feel even the tiniest guilt. More likely they are angry with her for hurting their careers.
Of course they could have “anticipated” it; they engineered it.
It’s the British Press (and possibly the Hospital) who humiliated her. You are projecting an awful lot of assumptions on the DJs that are completely unrealistic. It was just a dumb phone prank, like thousands of others that don’t end in suicide.
And some guy could shoot a gun up into the air lots of times without the bullet hitting anyone when it comes down; that doesn’t make him any less irresponsible for doing so. And this wasn’t just some random phone prank; it was broadcast, and on a subject very likely to get wide attention, which they certainly knew.
And just because they don’t end in suicide doesn’t mean they don’t end in major harm; if she’d just lost her job and not killed herself they’d have faced no penalty at all for their act of malice.
I guess I’m more republican than I think, or something. When the news of the death broke, I thought, “Welp, there goes the monarchy.” I guess not; apparently people would rather blame the radio station.
But my instinctive sense that the monarchy caused this may have something to it. If there was enough pressure on the nurse to kill herself over this, that’s probably royalism. And letting the call through against procedure, that was due to respect for the monarchy as well.
I agree with GuanoLad. Like I said, it would have been a complete non-event had the gutter press in the UK not converted this molehill into Mt. Everest.
But that’s a knowingly dangerous life-threatening act. Phone pranks, up till now, have been mortally harmless. The worst they could’ve realistically anticipated is a reprimand to the employee; but they didn’t even believe that it would get past the initial call. I have heard lots of similar prank radio calls to various Official Offices across the world (Government organisations, Hollywood offices, Lawyers, etc), and they never get past the first level, where with luck they have a casual amusing conversation with the receptionist for a couple of minutes. There’s no reason to believe they expected anything further than that this time, and the fact that it did is so unusual it was frequently replayed, as any other prank calls do. How could they have imagined a death would result from that?
Because suicide is the kind of thing you risk causing when you nationally humiliate someone and possibly destroy their career. I’m sure they knew they were likely to cause great harm and irrational behavior; I wouldn’t be surprised if part of their reasoning was that as a woman she was much less likely to show up in person and murder them in retaliation for ruining her life.
'What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about.
If I fulfill this path and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely. may the opposite of all this be my lot.’
Some people take this stuff seriously. Yes she only put a phone call through, but if she had not that would have been the end of it.
Listen to the call. The woman in question says barely three words and puts them through to a different Nurse. There is not a single ounce of humiliation there. Any humiliation that she received after the fact was nothing to do with the Radio Station.
The next time any of you guys open a door, stop, step back, and then go straight home. The door may fall off its hinges, make the walls unstable, cause the building to collapse, and kill ten thousand people. And it will be ALL YOUR FAULT FOR OPENING A DOOR THAT UNTIL THAT POINT HAD BEEN A HARMLESS ACT! Can you live with that guilt? Never open a door again.