An opinion piece by Peter Fitzsimons (former Wallaby forward) in todays Sydney Morning Herald. I dont agree with a lot of what he writes but he makes a good point here :
"It is a tragedy of unspeakable proportions that a nurse who put the prank call through to Princess Kate's ward should have taken her life. Just as it is an enormous tragedy when anyone, particularly a young person, takes their life.
But to all those - particularly the British media - who are firing vicious epithets at the two radio DJs who are the public face of that prank call, blaming them for the tragedy, please get a grip.
What, precisely, are they guilty of?
Making a prank call? Which DJ in the history of the world hasn't made prank calls? It is part of the genre, a practice beloved through the generations and around the world, including all over Britain.
Was there malice in this call, then? Please point it out. Please show us a shred of evidence that anywhere in the process of putting the call through, there might have been a mite of malice that it would genuinely hurt someone?
Perhaps then, they were guilty of criminal negligence, or even mere negligence.
Really? The test of negligence, as I remember from my garden-variety legal studies, was whether or not a ''reasonable man'' might have had any expectation that their actions would have resulted in the kind of tragedy we have seen.
I invite you to be the judge. Who could possibly have thought that a silly prank call like that - one of thousands of prank calls, no doubt, made by radio stations around the world on that day - would have led to the young woman taking her life? Can anyone point to a precedent where such an innocent call has resulted in such shocking consequences? I can't.
And for those who still make the case that the radio pair are guilty of a terrible crime, I point to the cheery reaction of Prince Charles himself, shortly after he was apprised of the call. Did he not, quite appropriately, have a little fun with it, on Thursday, when he asked the waiting media: ''How do you know I'm not a radio station?'' Mirth all around, led by the journalists.
For Charles appreciated the bleeding obvious. The call was simply irreverent. Not malicious. Not negligent. And certainly not criminally negligent.
While most of the rest of the media was outdoing itself with gushing about the impending royal birth, this radio station was simply, to use the colloquial expression, ''taking the piss''. That is part of the defining characteristics of successful radio DJs, and it certainly defines huge swathes of the Australian population when it comes to how to deal with English aristocracy.
I repeat: it is a shocking tragedy this young woman has taken her life. But is the real culprit a couple of DJs making a prank call?
Or does the fault lie somewhere in an English culture of such overblown hyperbole when it comes to anything to do with the royals that a young nurse could really think her life was no longer worth living because she had put a call through to a royal ward? You must know the answer.
I rest my case, while still offering my deepest sympathies to the family of the woman.
End.
Until the unfortunate death I am guessing most DJ's would have been jealous of the success of this prank and for a short period the two DJ's
were enjoying the fame it had brought them (even tweeting that Conan O'Brian had mentioned them). I had never heard of them before this incident.
Whilst not trying to lessen the tragedy those same DJ's who were probably jealous are now probably thankful it was not them who made the call.
It is the type of prank those such as Hamish and Andy (well known radio pranksters here) play all the time.
The radio station has cancelled all advertising for a while.
As Fitzsimons says the reaction was not predictable but I am guessing DJ's and their producers are going to be more careful, for a short while.
Brett
