Should prank callers to Duchess of Cambridge face more consequences?
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The two Australian radio personalities who made the prank phone call to a British hospital caring for the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge made tearful apologies Monday for making the call, which may have led to the suicide of a nurse who spoke to the pair.
Mel Greig and Michael Christian, both crying at times, told two Australian television shows Monday that their thoughts are with the family of Jacintha Saldanha, the 46-year-old nurse who put the prank call through to the ward where the duchess was.
Saldanha apparently committed suicide Friday.
“I’m very sorry and saddened for the family, and I can’t imagine what they’ve been going through,” Greig said on the program “Today Tonight.”
The pair have been taken off the air by their network, which has not said when they might return. “I don’t even want to think about going back on air, to be honest,” Greig said.
“I’m still trying to make sense of it all,” Christian said. “We’re shattered. We’re people, too.”
The prank has drawn public outrage, which has snowballed since the nurse’s death.
“This death is on your conscience,” reads one post on 2DayFM’s Facebook page. Several posters accused Greig and Christian of having “blood on your hands.”
What do you think? Should there be further consequences for the DJs, or the station they worked for, in the aftermath of the nurse’s apparent suicide?
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It’s a terrible tragedy, but I fail to see how additional consequences would accomplish any good.
I expect the entire community of radio prank callers have already learned a valuable lesson.
No. One prank call cannot be blamed for a suicide, she obviously had deeper issues that drove her to kill herself.
Considering this isn’t the first prank call these two have done that ended with undesirable results…they need to be off the air for a while…Sadly the psychiatrist commenting on here have no clue about what her mental state was or about other cultures…Does it really matter if it is one call or twenty? A woman is dead, a husband without his wife and two children without their mother…So yeah it’s no big deal!! Good hell get a clue..
Practical jokes aren’t funny. Their intent is to set up innocent victims for public humiliation and then laugh at them. It’s the worst kind of bullying.
In the United States putting that prank call through could have cost Jacintha Saldanha her job. I don’t know how these kinds of mistakes are handled in Great Britain, but I do know how they are handled in the United States.
And it’s not just the nurse who is victimized here, it’s also the patient who is held up for public humiliation and ridicule.
Mel Greig and Michael Christian need to be taken off air permanently. Their kind of humor is cruel and stupid. We don’t need more of this kind of garbage. We need less of it.