Posted on 12/07/2012 1:17:56 PM PST by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
Once upon a time I was an aspiring media professional. My very first foray into the business was as summer newspaper intern with The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Near the end of my internship, I was given an assignment that haunts me to this very day.
I was told to go out to a Cleveland suburb where a shooter was reportedly spraying bullets in a residential neighborhood.
When I arrived at scene, police had cordoned off the block where the shooter – a troubled 17 year-old kid – was holed up in his house. After what seemed like hours, but probably were more like minutes, a SWAT team stormed the house.
I expected an exchange of gunfire, but there was none. Then paramedics were summoned to the house, where they removed the lifeless body of the kid, who, it turned out, had turned the gun on himself.
It shook me to my very core. Not the least because the deceased was only two years younger than I was.
But as I learned in J-school, I had to get to story; I had to interview witnesses.
So I approached the young man’s family, which had huddled behind the police cordon, along with neighbors that had been evacuated.
They were near hysterical. But, still, I asked them if they had anything to say to the newspaper.
They looked right through me. And I didn’t blame them. Because I intruded upon them at a time when they should have been left alone with their grief.
I was reminded of that experience when heard the tragic story of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who worked at King Edward VII Hospital in London, where expected mum Kate Middleton was treated this week.
Jacintha was so traumatized by a hoax played on her by two oh-so-clever Australian radio jocks – who pretended to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles calling for Kate – that she killed herself yesterday.
My heart breaks for the deceased nurse and her family.
The tragedy confirms to me what I have learned during a media career of more than two decades: Many of those who work in print, digital, radio and television are closer to the prince of this world than to Christ.
Their God-lessness informs their approach to mass communication. If they can put something in print, or over the airwaves, that creates buzz, that attracts readers or listeners or viewers, they’re good to go with it.
Even if it causes a poor nurse so much despair, she finds her life no longer worth living.
Bull. First, she fails to do her job properly of ensuring client privacy, then she kills herself to save the embarrassment. By blaming others for her personal failure, you are justifying her suicide.
We are seeing it as citizens in a constitutional republic. She a subject in a monarchy. She probably felt great shame to be a party to the pranking of a royal highness. Here, we were raised with all men are created equal; there, she was likely raised to adore the royalty.
As a different example, look at how the people of Thailand are devoted to their beloved king. If this prank had happened there, I could see the same thing happening.
-PJ
I outgrew the “morons in the morning” theme decades ago.
Nobody alive on this planet can tell with certainty what were the true reasons for the suicide.
By blaming others for her personal failure [...]
If a prankster tricks you to enter a cage with hungry lions, will you be content to blame yourself for being unable to fend them off? Maybe it's your fault that you don't carry bear spray on a daily basis?
If another prankster calls you pretending to be a doctor and says that your only child had a car accident and died a moment ago, will you blame yourself for the heart attack that follows?
If yet another prankster SWATs your house and the police shoots you, will you blame yourself for ... for what?
There are certain things that sane, moral people just don't do. This was a mean prank.
“The suicide in the movie Dead Poets Society, however, made no sense because a character who clearly WAS sane shot himself because his father wouldn’t let him be in a play. The character was NOT distraught and took time to decide to kill himself, meaning he was not impulsive.”
It was more than that...he had been under the thumb of his father his whole life, and he had finally found what *he* wanted to do (go into theater). His father told him that, no, he was going to fulfill his father’s wishes and become a doctor...basically shoved his own will down his son’s throat. So I’d say there was a whole miasma of issues going on in the kid’s head...”distraught” isn’t always obvious.
“Did Radio DJs Kill Kate Middleton’s Nurse? “
No. It was either global warming or Bush. She isn’t responsible for her own actions. Everyone else is.
Please. The average Brit doesn’t bow and scrape to royalty. A couple of years ago, some shock jock radio station asked a caller (a soldier) whether he would shag the queen, he replied ‘yes, but only if she wore the crown’.
Even in George III’s time cartoonists like James Gilray and the Cruikshanks were crudely portraying the Royals as fat, oafish buffoons and using scatalogical humour to back their point up.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRgeorgeIV2.jpg
I just can’t see being so despondent over a prank call that you commit suicide.
If her mental state was so fragile, something else would have been her breaking point, even if the prank hadn’t happened.
Such a tragedy.
Agreed. Some people can’t handle being dragged through the muck and targeted by the msm. After watching Princess Di spin out of control, I’m not so sure the palace gray suits didn’t pay her a visit.
I know someone who was innocent but after a year of nothing progressing on the criminal case and the msm spreading lies, he ended his life. The rabid msm still couldn’t let it go and posted his obit with his arrest picture. They are disgusting scum. They wouldn’t issue an apology even after many, many people demanded they do so.
No these DJs did not kill her or contribute to her death.
It was a harmless prank and no one was harmed and no critical information about the royals was released to the public.
The question is whether someone in the hospital or British security or wherever jumped down this woman’s throat for this minor incident and made a mountain out of a molehill. They know who they are and they are more to blame than anybody.
Whatever. This will have a chilling affect on pranks like this.
respectfully you are 100% wrong.
look up the principle of “eggshell skull” in the law.
it DOES NOT MATTER that she had mental issues. that is the law.
THEY CAUSED THE TRIGGER. They are liable.
There is 100% foreseeability in a negative consequence. Somebody would be fired, somebody will have a black mark on their career. The fact she was ill is of no matter.
(think having someone fake arrested and the victim having a heart attack.)
You take your victim, and the ensuring consequences, as you find them.
They killed her. period.
This is like yelling fire in a croweded theater as a joke.
I hope they and their radio station are criminally and civily sued.
I agree but I doubt anything happens but a ratings boost
This is exactly like those cases where a kid is bullied and commits suicide.
They riuned her job, made her the laughingstock of the UK, she probably could not live with being hated by everyone.
the DJ’s are liable. Her issues are irrelevant.
civily:
duty - breach - causation - damage
The dj’s failed all prongs under the case law.
criminally:
guilty mind and guilty act
that is crystal clear here under the case law.
Southern Cross Austereo, the company that owns 2Day FM station says that DJ Mel Greig and Michael Christian are ‘deeply saddened’ by the news of Jacintha Saldanha’s death and are taking themselves off the air ‘until further notice.’ Read on for their full statement!
DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian of Sydney’s 2Day FM station, who claimed to be Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles during a prank call to Kate Middleton’s hospital room on December 4, have released a statement after Jacintha Saldanha, the mother of two who transferred the call, was found dead on Dec. 6.
http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/12/07/kate-middleton-prank-callers-statement-nurse-suicide/
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