Following the tragic suicide of a British nurse, the victim of a cruel and unfunny practical joke by an Australian radio station 2DAYFM, what action can we expect from the Australian Communications and Media Authority which is supposed to regulate such matters? Following the most recent of many such breaches of license conditions, in May last year, ACMA warned 2DAY-FM that it could lose its license if such behavior continued. But ACMA has never cancelled a license, and clearly never will. So, we can expect another warning, or perhaps some meaningless, and unenforceable, license conditions.
ACMAs total failure contrasts with the success of the Facebook backlash against Alan Jones, which has cost him and his employers millions in lost advertising revenue, and greatly reduced his power and influence.
At this point, it’s clear that licensing has failed. Rather than continuing with this farce, we should auction the spectrum currently allocated to commercial radio, and let the winners do what they want with it, subject to the ordinary law of the land (which prohibits recording deceptive calls, though this law is never enforced against radio stations). As a community, we should continue to punish the corporations that sponsor the likes of Jones, Kyle Sandilands, and their latest imitators.
John Quiggin 
The legal position of the perpetrators might be fraught. It is not illegal to impersonate but it is illegal to impersonate with a view to committing a crime. Obtaining private data by false pretences (via impersonation) might be a crime.
I am no monarchist. However, the current position is that “… the sovereign is regarded as the legal personality of the Australian state, which is therefore referred to as Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Australia.” This raises the issue that impersonating the Queen (no matter how bad the impersonation) to obtain information or influence might be an offence.
Beg to differ.
You didn’t thin it funny but Chucky did!
such phone-calls have gone on for yonks so what.
suicides happen because such people are selfish and self centered and thus never take into account what other people think about their actions.
This incident is entirely different to the Jones episode.
Wow. Just wow. Disappointed you have dived into this craziness too, John.
So, David, you think we should be giving away radio spectrum to subsidise this kind of activity?
It is only craziness if people assert that there is a right or wrong, left or right, way of thinking about this incident. It is not clear to me that it is simply an isolated incident that can be safely ignored as a source of potential destabilising events in future.
We need to have a conversation – such complex times and so many issues that need to be talked about – and we don’t really have much evidence on which to base a rational response that tries to accommodate all of the different types of people who share the planet.
Wendy Harmer on RN this morning had some interesting insights.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/2day-fm-prank-wendy-harmer/4417766
The point she made that was important to me, was that this prank call contrary to those done by Wendy and her colleagues, did not reveal to the person being pranked, that this was the case.
Perhaps, just debriefing of ‘victim’s’ needs to be regulated?
I agree. This event is just an extention of the media’s trampling of rules, rights and responsibilities. The fact that it now appears that they have actually broken the law in recording a conversation without seeking permission, and then put it to air amplifies the failure of common decency. Not to mention the disrespect for the monarchy and all of those people who feel strongly for their heritage and take it seriously.
I’ve decided to mount my own little proctest on this class of privacy creep. From now on when people ring and announce that this conversation “might” be recorded for “training purposes”, the response will now be “call me back when you can say with certainty that the call will not be recorded”. The can do their “training” in private.
Whatever we do about distribution of spectrum, this whole hate campaign against “mel” and “Michael” is silly. They made a prank call. Even in tort, before one can show damage through a tort of trespass (nuisance) one must show a fairly clear causal chain between the trespass and the loss or damage. There is no clear causal chain between the act of the nurse-receptionist and the act of the prank caller.
It might well be that the prank call is in violation of elements of the statute law — the Listening Devices Act (NSW) , misuse of a carriage service (I think that’s under the Federal Crimes Act) but however this might be, these are minor matters in this case.
It should be noted that deception is not a crime per se. One is entitled to lie to people and to misrepresent oneself. It only becomes illegal/tortious when one relies on that to obtain some benefit to which one would not have a legal entitlement or a benefit at the expense of the person deceived. One would be hard pressed to show a benefit surrendered by the receiving parties surrendered as a consequence of the deceptive call. One might say that, at a couple of removes, 2DAYFM received a benefit (ratings, elevated advertising rates, custom) and thereafter the announcers get paid from these proceeeds, but the linkage is tenuous and would fall well short of the “obtain benefit through deception” standard. It’s really too remote, IMO.
So what has really happened here? A banal stunt on a radio station aimed at people who prefer to move rather than think has had a tragic consequence that the parties could not have reasonably foreseen. It might well be that this nurse’s employers were principally at fault — for not putting in place protocols for dealing with media, and not recognising her fragile mental state and putting her in a place where it might be tested.
It’s dreadful that a woman has taken her life, but whoever is responsible, it is not the mindless spruiking duo at 2DAYFM. Indeed, they may well now be paying a dreadfully high costs for being painted as the bad guys here. I’m ready to stand corrected, but I doubt there’s a malicious bone in their bodies.
We probably do need to re-examine how spectrum is given out — not I hasten to add — as a consequence of this kind of caper, but more generally because public spectrum should clearly be associated with the provision of public goods, and it is not clear that the private operators are delivering benefits commensurate with their monopoly of the airwaves they have.
I agree with FB.
A dispassionate analysis of the suicide of the nurse will reveal that the trauma she suffered emanated with the feeding frenzy perpetrated by the British tabloid press, not an obscure radio station in faraway Australia.
If the British press thought that 2DAY were the culprits before the suicide of the nurse, why did they not harass the radio station rather than the nurse? What has happened since is a classic case of bait and switch.
BTW, for the life of me I cannot believe that anyone would believe the comically and probably deliberately inept impersonation of the royal personages (and corgis!). This hoax is similar to the Chasers’ OBL jape, which was clearly designed to fail, yet bizarrely succeeded in achieving an object that had never been sought.
“Banal” doesn’t preclude “Cruel”, “unfunny” and “irresponsible”. Any prank like this is basically malicious. Usually the consequences aren’t so bad, but I doubt that the recipients are often pleased.
The way these things work is that lots of people get away with bad behavior, until something goes badly wrong, as in this case. Those who pulled this particular stunt are suffering a lot, though obviously not nearly as much as the victim’s family.
But the real problem is with the business model of the radio station, which relies on a steady diet of this kind of thing. If we want to persist with content regulation at all, the license should be withdrawn. Since no-one has the stomach for that, let’s stop the pretence that there are any standards here, and let them bid for the spectrum instead of receiving it free.
@FB ” It might well be that this nurse’s employers were principally at fault — for not putting in place protocols for dealing with media,”
When you need this kind of blame-the-victim special pleading, you know that you’re pushing a weak case. In fact, my reading suggests that the protocols were in place, but the nurse (doing double duty as a night phone operator) was tricked into passing on the call anyway.
The issue of gaining revenue from the spectrum is separate from the prank call.
These calls can be funny and unfunny. Malicious seems to be a bit extreme to me.
John, if she was dealing with calls to the hospital then shoe should have been trained to deal with them. clearly she wasn’t.
PrQ:
No, it doesn’t but in this case no cruelty, intentional or unintentional was directed at either of the nurses, as far as I can tell. If there was any “cruelty” it was to the audience, who endured perhaps the lamest impression of the two foos at the peak of the royal family I’ve ever heard. Perhaps the Queen and Charles were offended by this parody, but that goes wityh thier position.
All satire — indeed, virtually all attempts at humour involving public figures is by definition “irresponsible”. Recently, in The Hamster Wheel the Chaser folks featured, a pre-written obituary for public figures such as Reinhart, Murdoch, Rudd, Turnbull and a few others. That was a lot more “cruel and irresponsible” than anything the 2DAYFM team managed, clearly directed at the figures involved, and also quite a bit funnier.
That’s true but irrelevant, surely? The 2DAYFM announcers seem to have been the proximal cause of this act — though this remains unclear — but they had no business assuming that a nurse receptionist would react in this way. People who have suffered far worse humiliation than to put through a phone call they should have dumped have managed to avoid taking their lives. Clearly, if it really was the case that this incident alone caused a women with a loving family and children to re-evaluate her life as unbearably futile then she was clearly someone in need of a good deal more support from her employer than she had recieved in the four years she’d been with them. The Daily Mail initially asserted that “the palace” was “privately furious” — and they were blaming the nurse receptionist for a ‘security breach”. Hours later of course, they’d changed tack and were casting blame elsewhere.
That’s mistaken on two counts. Firstly, I wasn’t “blaming the victim” (unless you are implying that the King Edward VII Hospital management team is a victim). I was attributing cause to a human resources and management policy failure. Secondly, there is no connection between claims about attribution and “having a weak case”. I can’t begin to imagine what would prompt you to say this.
I would argue strongly against blaming the victim in this case, however it is not as simple as blaming 2DayFM.
First, the callers are making a call overseas (although Britain have a similar culture to us it is not completely the same e.g. Monarchy’s existence); thus what we or any individual in Australia think as acceptable or not-acceptable, rude or entertainingt might not be so entertaining or acceptable in other places. It is not appropriate to think what we think as every day thing to be acceptable for people grown up in a different environment.
Second, the British have their things for the Monarchy. Anyone that thinks the nurse did not get pressure from her community are kinding themselves. It might be a bit simple to think the nurse is overreacting or have mental illness (not objecting she has).
Last, we do have to realise that 2DayFM was making a prank call (an act of lying), recording it, and broadcasted on air. This act by itself although not criminal, it should not be something 2DayFM or us (or maybe it’s just me) to treat it as a social norm. I do not, however, simply blame 2DayFM for this tragedy. Ignorance or being inconsiderate for others is a common act of humans.
Another relevant analogy is given by the initiation games played in university colleges, workplaces, army units etc with St Johns College at Sydney as the most recent example. The arguments above map 1-1 into those of critics and defenders of the long-standing practices there.
Perhaps the prank was irresponsible. Personally, I thought it was quite funny at the time, although clearly the tragic suicide put an end to any humour in the matter.
I think the underlying cause of the tragedy is the absurd sense of importance surrounding the “royal” family, such that the nurse in question found herself to be in such a compromised, untenable situation. Perhaps the quick application of Madame Guillotine to a few “royal” necks could sort it out once and for all.
Here is what I wrote about this at 8am on Saturday morning, just after the story of the death broke:
I’m told that the call was not broadcast live, but was run past lawyers and whoever passes for someone responsible at that radio station before it was put to air.
So maybe people could lay off the young and stupid DJs, and focus on the radio station management.
BTW, when I was young, I would have thought it was pretty cool to pull off a prank like that. So its a bit hard for me to be too hard on them.
There is a difference between theatrical impersonation aimed at an audience and deceptive impersonation designed to “prank” people and obtain amusement (often derisive) at their expensive. Members of the public vary greatly in their ability to either shrug off or be deeply upset by being held up to ridicule and public view in this fashion. Modern media including the internet can be very powerful in making an obscure and innocuous person a target of widespead amusement or derision.
Those irresponsible and thoughtless people in the media who think this kind of thing is just a big joke have now been given a salutary and well-deserved lesson. Careless and reckless use of the mass media can harm lives. It’s about time it was reined back. It has nothing to do with the serious uses of the media for public information and accountability. It’s frivolous, unfunny and unnecessary. Light and specious “entertainment” of this type deserves no protection. The privacy rights and right to be unmolested by ridicule does deserve protection. Media and internet ridicule and bullying of children is rightly condemned. Equally such activity against adults should be condemned. As I said, not all adults are equally robust in the ability to shrug off such matters.
@Tim Macknay
Very much so …
There are standards here, but thay are double standards.
Radio stations are able to protect themselves from the public and do with their 5 second delay in the event that a live interviewee says something unfunny that would affect the station’s ratings. Generally public participation in live radio is direct dialed to the participant who therefore has awareness of the vulnerability, or the stiuation is setup through a “friend” who then has a moderation role to play.
In this case the access was indirect and took advantage of the special nature of the caring (read trusting) environment that the intended target was in. This meant that there were multiple victims of the prank, and this was highlighted in content of the prank, “I can’t believe that we actually got through….” ie the protectors were incompetent.
The station had the responsibility to reveal the prank to the victim and obtain a publication release. This, as I understand it, was not done. So the station is protected via various mechanisms, but the victims not.
I saw David Marr talking about his interview with Tony Abbott for a book. Abbott gave Marr a number of responses to questions and demanded that they not be made public. Despite Abbott’s many betrayals of public trust Marr complied. Most importantly Abbott expected that Mar would protect his confidence due to the risk of professional ostracision if the trust was not honoured. This is Prof Quiggins point. These stations operate with impunity as their is no fear of consequence for questionable behaviour or cost from loss of situation, which he postulates can be correct with a periodic commercial contest for the right to transmit.
@John Brookes “focus on the radio station”
You mean, as in the OP
As regards blaming the hospital isn’t the tragedy bad enough without scapegoating some unfortunate HR person as well. How about some personal responsibility starting with Max Moore Wilton who’s in charge of the whole deplorable show
John ,
you clearly are not thinking straight.
If the nurse in question has been given the right training no-one would have ever heard of the prank call because she would have dealt with it.
I agree with Jonathan Holmes, without the suicide, it would be viewed as a humorous ( or attempted) episode. This was clearly seen by Chucky over the week-end.
you are being far too self-righteous.
John Brookes, the DJ’s equally had time to rethink the advisabilty of the prank, and could still have commercialised it in the form of an annecdote rather than a full replay. They are not off the hook, they have to feel the pain and learn from this tragedy otherwise they will ratchet up the stupidity even further. Lets think what could they move onto…perhap posing as parents and calling kids in cancer wards and joke about how little life they have left, someone would think that was funny, wouldn’t they…?
Before I was born my father and uncle set off for the movies in Strathfield. Along the way a cyclist crested a hill on the wrond side of the road and colided with a car. Father and uncle both of whom had war service comforted the dying man covering him with my fathers jacket. No longer interested in the movies they headed home and had the “wouldn’t it be funny if” thought, so my uncle was holding my fathers blood soaked jacket when my surprised pregnant mother answered the door. That prank was funny for about a milli second.
Not everything is funny. But that is not the point here.
@John Brookes
I agree with both you and Fran, John.
I also heard the story that the “prank” had been recorded and approved for broadcast by a higher authority at the station; so the station manager’s hypercritical “the announcers have been stood down until further notice” spin is just as worthy of condemnation and a slap over the wrist with a wet bus ticket by ACMA.
I wonder if the nurse was officially reprimanded by the hospital or offered counselling by one of the staff psychologists. Maybe we should be blaming the generals rather than the foot soldiers for the loss of the battle?
Nottrampis,
I didn’t think the prank was at all funny. And that was before hearing of the suicide. Now the station management don’t think that it was funny since hearing that it was most likely illegal.
The pro and the con sides have already come out on this issue and stated the main points.
To be as unbiased as possible, it was a freak incident and 999 times out of 1,000 nothing would have happened and it would have been laughed off. Personally I abhor juvenile humour like that – it’s really being obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious – but until more information comes out and the sensationalism dies down one can’t really make a critical decision re: free speech vs speech limitations/spectrum redistribution etc.
Tim Macknay,
There was a time not that far back when impersonationg a monarch would result in a short period in high rise accomodation and a basketed head. That is the other option to your postulation.
PrQ:
It surely wouldn’t be “some unfortunate HR person” (possibly in this case someone called Hazel Borthwick, the HR Chief and Anne Jenkins – Quality and Risk Manager). It ought to be the whole HR department along with whoever is doing OH&S and who counts as the site manager at King Edward VII hospital. According to their website:
King Edward VII’s Hospital Sister Agnes operates to the very highest standards … The Hospital runs rigorous audit programmes to ensure the highest standards of care are maintained in all areas. Our satisfaction surveys consistently rank us as one of the best hospitals in the UK.
They have a Clinical Governance Committee (formed in 1999) reflecting the varying components of clinical governance. These include assessment of clinical outomes and risks, complaints management, audit, training and patient interests. The membership comprises consultants from medicine and surgery, the Medical Director, the Chairman of the Medical Audit Committee, the Chief Executive, Matron and senior nursing staff, an external medical advisor and a patient representative.
This is the place I’d start asking questions about what went awry.
So some people think it wasn’t funny. That isn’t the point as some thought it was, including the heir to the throne, before the suicide.
Put me clearly in the Mike Carlton camp in this situation.
I don’t listen to the station but in the end an inexperienced nurse is not the fault of the
Station but the hospital.
Again the suicide was clearly not the fault of the station.
FB,
Your missing the essential point that the station failed get a publication release from the victims. Taking photos in broad daylight and public spaces is one thing, but invading a persons bedroom (hospital room in this case) is another thing altogether. If you listen carefully to how pranks are set up the victim usually is aware at some time during that event that they are involved in a “situation” and have the opportunity to deny the publication.
Contrary to the claim that this is only not funny because some of the victims are “royals”, there is an expectation that “royals” are fair game for any form of humiliation, and with impunity.
@BilB
I’m not quite sure what you mean, BilB.
So, to sum up, Fran and trampis, Moore-Wilton, Holleran, and the shareholders of Austereo get to keep their publicly-subsidised profits, while Hazel Borthwick and Anne Jenkins, women of whom you know nothing, deserve to be driven out of their jobs for failing to anticipate that Aussie radio listeners would have some good clean fun with their nursing staff (or, as it appears, setting up preventive procedures that failed).
Isn’t one suicide enough for you?
oh dear,
if there is one thing you should have learnt then it is putting the b.lame of suicide onto anyone either directly or indirectly is rather silly.
I am wondering why you wish to dismiss the lack of training of the nurse.
Afterall as I previously stated if she had been provided with that we wouldn’t have a prank call.
@nottrampis
Umm, you and Fran appear to be blaming someone, just not the right person(s).
Also, I wonder if either of you has ever worked in an organization that puts on lots of training courses. Do you really think a nurse with a demanding job and a family is going to pay a lot of attention to a course on telephone policy?
I skive my way through lots of compulsory training courses (fire safety, OSHA and certainly telephone policy) with a (low-probability) potential of tragedy as a result. If someone ever set fire to my building, it appears I can count on you to defend the arsonist, and blame the training section.
Remember the Golden Rule or the ethic of reciprocity which states;
“One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”
Nobody would like to be “pranked” in a way which might open them up to mass ridicule and/or censure or dismissal from their employer.
Application of the Golden Rule also requires the sensitivity to understand that “action X might not bother me but it might well bother some other persons”.
Having said that, the young DJs at the heart of this issue should be provided with all the support and counselling required. The management and ownership chain certainly need to be held accountable. They should pay for staff counselling and pay damages and compensation to the family of the victim. I would be pleased to see the victim’s family win punitive and exemplary damages from the station owners.
PrQ:
Pardon? I feel sure that I made clear that the distribution of spectrum rights was an entirely separate issue — unconnected with these events. See my last paragraph in #7. You do sound rather invested here.
Again, excuse me? For a start, I avoid speaking about ‘just desert’ as a matter of policy. It’s much too metaphysical for me. In the end, management failures lie with the board of the hospital, and remedies, if inadequacies are revealed, need to be made at line manager level. I see no obvious reason why Ms Borthwick and Ms jenkins couldn’t be part of the solution, assuming there was a presenting problem.
It’s most unlike you PrQ, to start doing petitio principii. To the best of my knowledge, the precise etiology of the tragic death of this nurse remains unclear. perhaps the hospital is to blame, or perhaps it isn’t. It’s utterly premature to start speculating on what I would think apt in the case of the senior management team there. I am somewhat perplexed that you seem ready, on the basis of no information at all, to give the hospital a free pass on this. That you say virtually nothing on the culture of celebrity which was almost certainly the biggest single factor in predisposing both the prank and the interest the matter raised in the utterly feral UK media, is even more unusual.
Again, this is most unusual. If I didn’t know better I’d say that Freelander had hacked your ID. Self-evidently, I don’t advocate suicide and as I’ve made clear, believe a very solicitous and respectful attitude should inform human resource management policies attached to those with mental health issues. I’m also wondering why the mental health status of the 2DAYFM doesn’t appear to loom large on your list of concerns. They are probably feeling rather dreadful — and unlike the nurse-receptionsist, really are being bullied personally by everyone who thinks expressions of high dudgeon automatically make you a better person. This was a juvenile attempt at humour, played for the amusement of people of undeveloped consciousness. There was no malice directed at the nurses as far as I can tell. It’s particularly hard to understand how the dealing of the announcers could have caused such pain to the receptionist and thus how the announcers, even if they’d been a hell of a lot sharper than they appear to be, could have foreseen it. Yet you seem to be implying that they (and by extension their employers) have done the equivalent of pushing a commuter into the path of a moving train for a prank. I don’t agree that this is the substance of their act.
I hesitate to speculate on how you’ve have come to utter the above commentary but I think I will leave it there because you seem rather to have lost perspective and to be in some distress and I don’t at all wish to add to it.
@John Quiggin
Merely as you’ve asked, I am a teacher, so yes, all the time. It’s grossly offensive that you would imply that I would side with an arsonist, but it does afford a view on the relationship that you see as existing between the event above and the tragic death of the nurse.
Now that really is it for me on this matter in this place.
PS: Am I in the mod bin now? If so, on what basis?
oops
the 2DAYFM announcers doesn’t
The station management are now saying that they do have proceedures for obtaining publication release. They say that the 2 presenters followed proceedures. They say that they attempted a number of times to get in touch with “those people” but were unable to achieve this.
Removing the redaction.
The presenters obtained access to a member of the royal family through deception. They did this in accordance to the outlined proceedures. The station management attempted to contact the royal family in order to get clearence for publication as they are required to under their proceedures. Management were not able to repeat the deception and gain access to the royal family. The management decided to make public the recording.
This suggests that the station management ignored their own proceedures, or the proceedures are entirely optional and ineffective, as is the ACMA.
That is how I heard it and interpreted the management’s version just now.
@Ikonoclast
While agreeing with your comment, this situation is a bit more complicated than consideration for others. Like I have pointed out, what seems alright or not depend on the social norm of the community. Since prank call radio is not illegal and actually commercial, the DJs and the station may think that these type of things are perfectly fine to do.
On the other side, the DJs or the station have certainly not thought of the consequence of the nurse when this call breaks public due to the “royal family”. Consideration to at least hang up, not recording it or not broadcast it can be made, even if the call was transferred.
Although I personally favour the victim, the DJs and the station in this case simply lacks consideration for others and are ignorant due to social norm (or perceived social norm) but don’t necessary have bad intentions.
@FB This is the latest in a string of similar stunts pulled by 2Day/Austereo, with no regard for the victims. A tragedy was inevitable sooner or later. The fact that those who played this particular prank are likely to suffer, while the likes of Sandiland continue to prosper, only makes matters worse.
As you say, you’ve chosen not to address this issue, the subject of the post. Rather you’ve cast around for someone else to blame for the particular tragedy that took place, then resorted to the same kind of amoral management-speak we’ve had from Austereo.
I can’t believe I’m reading this stuff – I don’t think I’m the only one who’s invested here.
I know that Wendy Harmer likes to draw a line between good and bad stunts but I can’t really see the difference, they are all invariably childish and lacking in any real value. They aren’t really in good humor as the joke is invariably at someone’s else’s expense. All this money paid to supersized egos to run the equivalent of schoolboy fart jokes, a waste of a good medium.
As regards the unforeseeability of bad consequences, it should have been obvious that someone could lose their job over giving unauthorised access to a seriously ill patient, whether or not a famous one. Fran has helpfully verified this point, naming those she thinks should go, while still insisting that both the presenters and their employers are in the clear.
” All this money paid to supersized egos to run the equivalent of schoolboy fart jokes, a waste of a good medium”
comment of the week.
@John Quiggin
oh for pity’s sake …
PrQ said:
It emerges that the management of 2DAY attempted five times to get permission to play the prank. However, they failed. Nevertheless management gave the two DJs permission to proceed with broadcasting the prank.
At least that mitigates in a major way the culpability of the DJs.
However, so far as the management were concerned, their culpability in breaching broadcast regulations and perhaps a raft of laws has increased.
It is a pity that it took the death of a person to stir authorities to do their duty.
I’ll step back a bit, Fran. You’ve also been a sensible commentator in general, but I’m at a total loss to understand your eagerness to defend 2DAY-FM, a station with a long history of appalling behavior, to the point of throwing accusations at named individuals of whom neither of us know anything. You may be motivated by concern for the presenters, but since the post didn’t mention them except in the most minor and indirect way, and since you repeatedly ignored my attempts to shift the focus back to the radio station as a whole, I find it hard to credit this.
If you say you don’t want hospital employees to lose their jobs, I’ll accept that, but it’s obvious to me that jobs are going to be lost over this, and in the absence of any explicit statement from you to the contrary (I took your comments about deserts to be handwashing, rather than an explicit denial), I don’t think I was verballing you to make the inference.
I never found pranks and practical jokes to be in anyway funny. They involve laughing at people, not with them. Some people do not remember the manners their mother taught them.
As for the foreseeability of the tragedy, subjecting a private citizen to global humiliation would test their robustness.
• Plenty of experienced public figures became fragile because of public humiliations.
• A number of people in high stress jobs are always more fragile.
• Plenty of people have been driven into the care of their doctors by Facebook humiliations and cyber bullying.
Survivor guilt can lead to tragedies. The hero of the hour, who dived repeatedly into raging waters or ran time and again into a burning building, can be overcome with guilt because some could not be saved.
The gutter press has a long history. They should not be regulated because that would legitimise them. They can say the regulator did not object.
Codes of the ethics are worse. Ever heard of industry capture?
I went to an ethics in field research course once. The national code was written by psychologists and sociologists. The whole point of the code was to give them cover for risky research and deception (as long as their professional mates on an ethics committee approved). It never occurred to the presenter that those field audits and correspondence studies that are so popular now waste the time of the people who fill them out.
Cut it out john,
You think it wasn’t funny and I agree. We are the same vintage so I can tell you I would have thought it funny 40 years ago.
Pranks calls are as old as that so your theory of inevitable tragedy is nonsense.
As for training in dealing with the public. Each company I have worked for has had it.
I repeat if the nurse had sufficient training no-one would have known of the call.
This is something you and others have repeatedly ignored.
I maybe wrong but the only people who were ‘cruel’ in this instance were Fleet st and their response which for some inexplicable reason you have neglected.