Blaming DJs for nurse’s death simplistic and vindictive

[danmand]

Blaming DJs for nurse’s death simplistic and vindictive

Published on Monday December 10, 2012


By Ken GallingerEthics Columnist

Q: There has been lots of talk about the prank pulled by two Australian DJs that resulted in the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha. Every newspaper article, every commentary I’ve seen blames the DJs for the death. Considering that Saldanha overreacted and killed herself, is it ethical to blame the DJs?

A: No. In fact, to do so is far more cruel than the stunt itself.

When bad things happen, there’s a deep human need for explanation: “How could such an innocent action produce such a bad conclusion?” And often that need for explanation leads, too quickly, to demonization of anyone unfortunate enough to be connected; a patient dies in the ER, and attending nurses often bear the brunt of the family’s wrath.

Related: Aussie DJs tearfully apologize

Mel Greig and Michael Christian were not innocent bystanders. They perpetrated a hoax, and while not entirely innocent, it wasn’t especially cruel, either. It should be remembered that much of the world, including the media, found it hilarious at the time. So the question that needs to be asked is this: Was there any reasonable way to anticipate that their actions would lead to such a sad conclusion?

When a driver climbs behind the wheel drunk, there are several consequences that can reasonably be predicted. She might get home safely; but she might be stopped by the cops and lose her licence, or, worse, be involved in an accident leading to the death of herself or others. Those are all reasonable possibilities, and if they ensue a drunk driver is ethically responsible. The fact that she was not thinking clearly when she left the party does not absolve her; she knew she would be driving when she took that last drink.

But that’s not the case with Greig and Christian. It was reasonable to expect, as they apparently did, that their call wouldn’t get past security — after all, we are talking about the most famous pregnancy in the world. And when their call did get through, it was reasonable to expect the conversation would lead to upset, anger and even condemnation. They should have known that broadcasting the medical information they were receiving was wrong — and they are to blame for bad judgment in putting the call on the air.

Blame, however, is a proportional thing, and it’s important to get the proportions right. Two morning DJs were doing their job in a way that has become not only accepted but expected; has anyone listened to morning radio in Toronto? It’s not long since Howard Stern was the boor-du-jour in this city. Greig and Christian crowded the line of good taste, and they crossed the line of confidentiality with respect to the Duchess of Cambridge’s condition. For those infractions, guilty as charged.

But did they cause the death of Jacintha Saldanha? Absolutely not.

We have no idea of all the factors — familial, cultural, social, personal, professional — that led to Saldanha’s death. Suicides are complicated, and there’s usually more than enough blame to go around. Greig and Christian will wear their share of guilt, but pinning the death solely, or even primarily, on two people who couldn’t possibly have foreseen this outcome is not just simplistic — it’s vindictive.

If either of them were next to commit suicide, who would we blame then?

 

[msog87]

fuck these dj's . instead of defending themselves saying they did nothing wrong they are bending over and taking it doing the politically correct thing they have no integrity.

 

[Rockslinger]

We have no idea of all the factors — familial, cultural, social, personal, professional — that led to Saldanha’s death.

1) Her name was never mad public prior to her "suicide".
2) The hospital said they never reprimanded her.
3) The Royal Family said they never filed a complaint.

 

[blackrock13]

Did we need another thread on this? Oh, we didn't have one from DM. Carry on.

 

[rld]

Did we need another thread on this? Oh, we didn't have one from DM. Carry on.

He just wants to isolate the editorial he likes from the ongoing discussion. Maybe posting 20 editorials that go the other way might cause him to delete this thread and reduce the clutter.

But we do know for certain that if you ask him to delete the thread he will do it. Even if you never really asked him.

 

[Aardvark154]

Mel Greig and Michael Christian were not innocent bystanders. They perpetrated a hoax, and while not entirely innocent, it wasn’t especially cruel, either. It should be remembered that much of the world, including the media, found it hilarious at the time.

Plenty of other people did not and do not see it that way at all.

They should have known that broadcasting the medical information they were receiving was wrong — and they are to blame for bad judgment in putting the call on air. . . Greig and Christian crowded the line of good taste, and they crossed the line of confidentiality with respect to the Duchess of Cambridge’s condition. For those infractions, guilty as charged.

Hmm seems to me that argument has been made in several other threads here on TERB.

But did they cause the death of Jacintha Saldanha? Absolutely not.

But what Mr./Dr./The Reverend Ken Gallinger skirts around are the differences between caused , contributed to, and bear responsibility for.

 

[rld]

Apparently this ethics guy disagrees with Dan's ethics guy:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/10/opinion/weinstein-royal-hoax/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

 

[Aardvark154]

While "Bel" Mooney is not a professional ethicist what she wrote bears repeating:

"A victim of today's culture of casual cruelty


Of course, no harm was intended. Of course, it was just meant to be a harmless prank. But surely there is an important lesson for us all in the very sad affair of the hoax Aussie phone call.

The consequences for everybody involved – from the distressed royal couple, to the shocked and hounded Australian DJs, and most of all to the tragic nurse Jacintha Saldanha and her family – are a reminder that every thoughtless prank has a victim and that nobody can predict how a vulnerable individual will react to what somebody else thinks of as ‘a bit of fun’.

Cheeky, high-spirited Australian DJ Michael Christian thought it a great wheeze to try to talk to the Duchess of Cambridge’s medical team on the telephone, even though he knew she had been taken into hospital suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum early in her pregnancy.

The first sign of unthinking cruelty comes right there. His female co-host Mel Greig thought this would be ‘awesome’. That, in turn, shows a very modern take on the word ‘awe’ – which correctly implies respect as well as wonder. Never mind the ethics or legality of the broadcast, there was no respect for anybody’s feelings in this sorry incident; no hint of decency or basic human compassion.

Now that an innocent woman is dead, her family bereaved and bewildered, and the whole world knows the story – the thoughtless joke doesn’t seem funny at all, least of all to the shamed perpetrators.

To me, it never was. From the moment I heard their silly, adolescent giggles and the poor nurses’ polite replies, I saw the prank as another example of the casual, tacky, thoughtless cruelty that has infected popular culture like a plague – on radio, on television and increasingly on Twitter and other social media outlets.

Had Jacintha Saldanha not succumbed to shame and misery (and we have no way of knowing what else was happening in her life) I would always despise the notion that it’s acceptable to call a hospital to invade the privacy of any patient, let alone an expectant young mother in distress. What on Earth have we come to?

Let’s be very clear. The King Edward VII Hospital should have had a protocol so securely in place it would have been impossible for this to happen.

The fact that Jacintha Saldanha was not a native English speaker would have made it less likely that she would pick up the hopeless accents used by Greig and Christian, but in any case there should always be a system of checks and balances, and all the more so when the patient is high-profile.

It is true, also, that the two DJs – who have now gone into hiding after being subjected to a barrage of vilification just as nasty as their original stunt – couldn’t possibly have predicted that their trick would lead to the death of a good woman who felt (no matter how irrationally) responsible for letting her hospital and colleagues down. Call them callow, stupid, irreverent, if you like, but they were not wicked.

Yet while this tragedy was not foreseeable, it was avoidable. For surely an incident like this has been waiting to happen.

The Victorians paid to gawp at people with deformities and disabilities; in our day TV turned the freak show into an even more popular form of entertainment, taking cruelty and mockery right into people’s sitting rooms, whether through hidden camera shows that made the likes of Jeremy Beadle and Dom Joly into household names or in the routine humiliations meted out to (often mentally fragile) contestants on Big Brother or I’m A Celebrity.

That very familiarity means that broadcasters have felt the need to be ever more sensational, to court controversy, to ‘up the ante’ all the time, regardless of the potential consequences.

Those two DJs were willing and able to indulge in the bullying of an unsuspecting victim because exploiting the naivety of innocent victims is now the accepted dialect of light entertainment right across the world.

Before you blame the crass taste of Aussie presenters, remember it was only weeks ago that ITV set up a stunt on I’m a Celebrity in which the actress Charlie Brooks was left weeping after she was denied the right to see her seven-year-old daughter for failing to win a jungle challenge, as the little girl hid behind a set door.

The truth is, we have become so inured to a culture of hard-edged cleverness that it wouldn’t have occurred to Mel Greig or Michael Christian to stop, to think for a moment – and feel shamed – any more than it occurred to ITV that it was wrong to exploit a seven-year-old’s distress to chase ratings.

At least Charlie Brooks must have signed a consent form at some stage. Not so Jacintha Saldanha. Why then did the radio station’s lawyers allow the tapes to be broadcast? For the very same reason that the BBC turned a blind eye to the crude phone call made by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to Andrew Sachs, sniggering about his granddaughter’s sex life. Because no single executive had the taste, judgment or maturity to realise that this was totally unacceptable behaviour. Nobody, from the immature broadcasters to the worldly men and women in charge, had the wisdom or decency to say: ‘Hang on, this isn’t funny, it’s wrong.’

Thus casual cruelty is dished up as prime-time entertainment with as much callous indifference as the Romans showed to the Christians and lions fighting to the death in their arenas.

What’s more, it’s getting worse, as new media challenges the old for an audience. Sometimes Twitter seems as brutal as a bearpit, as trolls seek out their prey to persecute. And unlike the mainstream media, the internet has given bullies the cloak of anonymity to hide behind.

No wonder Michael Christian and Mel Greig rushed in to pull a stunt which actually resulted in a vulnerable woman, hitherto proud of her professional standards, being the brunt of hilarity all around the world. In a crowded market, they wanted to stand out; to make a name for themselves. And oh, how they bragged about their little coup over the ensuing days, until horror intruded on their glee.

The public must take its share of blame too. For how many of those people who have tweeted their outrage, accusing the pair of having ‘blood on their hands’ (and worse) had a good laugh when they first heard the ludicrous faux-Brit accents?

It is simply not enough to shrug the shoulders and say: ‘Well, no one could have seen it ending in suicide.’

The Law of Unintended Consequences is known to sociologists and economists and used as a warning that (to quote one definition) ‘an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes’. Yes, indeed.

In this dreadful story the ‘intervention’ was just another example of the shameless rush to sensationalism that has trivialised modern broadcasting in all its forms – that amoral belief that ‘anything goes’ which disguises the humiliation of others as light-hearted fun.

The ‘complex system’ is the human personality, which is always unpredictable, always vulnerable. And the terrible ‘undesirable outcome’ was the unnecessary death of an innocent woman, who would almost certainly be alive today if those who should have known better had shown restraint."


p.s. she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph (London), Ken Gallinger wrote in The Toronto Star.

 

[danmand]

Apparently this ethics guy disagrees with Dan's ethics guy:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/10/opinion/weinstein-royal-hoax/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

shocking!!!

 

[Stoo]

Nicely put Aardvark...

 

[oldjones]

Th Gallinger piece was entirely unpersuasive, and certainly unhelpful in trying to navigate the ethical thickets. The drunk driver analogy was particularly stupid, as well as mis-stating the responsibilities of a drinker who drives. In his terms, since the DJs can be pardoned because they expected to be stopped by security, a driver is entitled to veer out onto the road any time a cop isn't there to stop her. In fact, for the driver and the DJ's starting down a path they know is fraught, the proper thought is not, 'what can I get away with?', but 'if the worst happens, how will I feel?' You ask that before you decide to drive not taxi to the bar, not after you had your last drink. You decide how you'll cope with tricking an innocent into betraying their honour and sacred trust before you pin a whole live show on your duplicitousness. The DJ's were precisely like the Titanic's designers saying, it'll never get that bad. True enough. For them. They stayed ashore and risked the lives of others.

The death itself has nothing to do with the ethics of the prank. It showed a wanton misjudgement, and unconcern for the unpredictable effect one's chosen conduct might have for others who had no such choices. Any time you plot to—supposedly—amuse others by embarrassing and manipulating the innocent and the unwitting there is no excuse for your callous disregard of elementary decency, and nothing can repair the public exhibition of your shallow-mindedness. An dramatic incident like this just turns up the lights to full. Like the kids who thought it was just harmless fun to call Amanda Todd names, one hopes the DJs never pass a day without telling themselves they should have thought about it more. It's why we have consciences; I hope they do.

 

[Aardvark154]

Nicely worded OldJones.

 

[Rockslinger]

Apparently, the lady left a suicide note for her family.

P.S. Should also mention that the Australian radio station will donate $500,000 to her trust fund.