U.K. and Australia: Trading blame for a nurse’s suicide

A British nurse is dead thanks to “those smirking Aussies,” said Tony Parsons in the Daily Mirror (U.K.). Mel Greig and Michael Christian, two Australian DJs working for 2DayFM in Sydney, thought it would be hilarious to phone the London hospital where Prince William’s wife, Kate, was recuperating from severe morning sickness and pretend to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles inquiring after her health. Their accents were atrocious, but nurse Jacintha Saldanha, born in India, didn’t notice, and put the call through. Once the ruse was discovered, the humiliated Saldanha, a mother of two, apparently took her own life. While Greig and Christian did not intend to drive anyone to suicide, there was “real and virulent cruelty” in their stupid hoax. “They have blood on their hands.”

Accusing the DJs is grossly unfair, said Peter FitzSimmons in The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). How on earth could they have known that an innocent phone call would have such a shocking result? No one can truly know what drove the poor nurse to take her life—there were probably other factors. But if in fact it was the call alone, then blame “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.”

I don’t blame the DJs—but I don’t sympathize with them, either, said Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail (U.K.). I was willing to cut the two some slack until they made this tragedy all about them, weeping on TV talk shows and whining about how mean people are being to them on Twitter. “Turning their public apology into a self-indulgent, self-justifying sobfest” is “utterly nauseating.” Their radio careers may be over, but unlike the Saldanha family, “they haven’t endured a genuine human tragedy.”

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It’s true that the Sydney radio scene is all too prone to juvenile stunts, said Katharine Murphy in The Age (Australia). And yes, the editors who allowed the piece to air probably breached Australian radio regulations by failing to obtain the consent of Saldanha and the nurse in Kate’s room, who gave the DJs Kate’s private medical information. But criticism of our journalistic standards is a bit rich coming from the British media, which have just been caught in two massive scandals: widespread phone-hacking by tabloid reporters and the BBC’s tolerance of a grotesque TV host who molested teenage girls. They’re now sneering at “the uncouth colonials” to convince themselves that there are journalists “more obnoxious and atrocious and craven than them.”

At least we British have learned some restraint when it comes to the royals, said Jenny McCartney in The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.). The worst invasions of the royal couple’s privacy have come from outside the U.K.—this prank call from Australia and the photos of Kate sunbathing topless in France. The “feverish interest” that foreign media have in Kate is ominous. “We saw it before with Diana.” Let this latest tragedy be “an international wake-up call to back off.”