Firstly, I’m a compassionate person and so I have every sympathy
with the poor woman involved and the effect of her death on those close to her.
That isn’t a contrived statement; I really do. When a physically healthy person
commits suicide it tells you that their state of mind is about as low as it
can get. Their world has turned so dark and painful that they can’t bear
to live in it any longer. I know; I’ve been there once in my life. And that’s
why I have every sympathy with all suicides. But we have to take a broader view
of this.
The woman made an honest mistake. According to the hospital,
she wasn’t disciplined; she was offered support. In those circumstances you’d
expect any person in normal mental health to be embarrassed, or a little
fearful of having harmed her future job prospects, or maybe even depressed. But
suicidal? There has to be more to this than is so far being made public.
The hoax callers played an irreverent practical joke,
effectively on the ‘untouchable’ nature of the British Royal Family. It was
actually quite a good joke. No one could have foreseen this outcome, yet now
they’re being pilloried as heartless beings who played – as one Minister put it
– a ‘cruel prank.’ Cruel? What was cruel about it? It was a bit of fun, and an
intrinsically harmless bit of fun at that. It’s neither fair nor rational to
turn all the fire on these two broadcasters and cast them in the mould of ‘heartless
killers of an innocent woman,’ which is what’s happening.
The fact is, we’ve all played jokes on people. It’s what
humans do. If nobody ever played a joke because they feared the possibility of
some unforeseeable and utterly remote outcome, the world would be a poorer
place.
4 comments:
I think people need to grasp just how huge the Internet is, and how one tiny incident can become international news. This poor nurse was the focus of entirely unwarranted ridicule, not from the Royal family, or from the hospital, but from our nasty little gossip-stained fingers poking at it to get our shoddy little news fix.
It was as ugly as that incident over here in the USA with the over-tanned woman. I think she dealt with that with some courage, in the face of public opinion.
And practical jokes? Nasty, mean, uncharitable and entirely selfish. The laughter is for the aggressor, not the victim. No, it's not human to play practical jokes on people.
It's shitty,
Merry Christmas.
But there are practical jokes and practical jokes. In the event of an aggressor trying to appear clever at the expense of an innocent victim, I would agree. But this wasn't that kind of joke. Of course the DJs hoped to gain kudos from it, but the joke wasn't aimed at hurting an innocent victim as it was with, say, the Andrew Sachs case a few years ago. It seems to me that it had two threads:
1. To express irreverence towards the institution of royalty. There's nothing new about that. Royalty begs to be treated with irreverence, and it frequently gets what it asks for.
2. To expose a flaw in the protocols for making enquiry.
Of course the broadcasters should have realised that somebody might make a mistake and get into a bit of trouble over it, but testing somebody's competence isn't the same as deliberately targeting them for no other reason than personal gain. And that's why I still say it's irrational and unreasonable to hold the two DJs entirely responsible for the poor woman's death.
I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that she might have lost her job because of the call. She didn't, but it ought to have been a consideration on the part of the callers. A nurse losing the job she'd trained for, over a slack practical joke, is not 'a bit of trouble'.
As for turning the fire on them, this notoriety is what they handed out to Jacintha. Perhaps it's the fairest punishment for their thoughtlessness? They aren't the victims here. A bit of sympathetic therapy, and they're done. They could even write a book.
If jokers are not entirely responsible for the result of their actions, then everyone's responsibility for their actions is diminished. What positive outcome from this did they expect, apart from their allotted 15 minutes?
But the point I’m making, Beverley, is that it’s unreasonable and unrealistic to cast these two broadcasters in the role of killers. Never in their wildest imaginations could they have been expected to foresee that the person who took their call would commit suicide, and if she hadn’t, all this would be seen as a minor embarrassment to the hospital and be forgotten by now.
The fact is, life is a mass of overlapping threads of cause and effect, and often those threads are so stretched and tenuous that they have to be discounted. The alternative is that we all go through life doing as little as possible for fear of becoming the prime mover in a million misdemeanours.
Post a Comment