Kate Middleton Pregnancy Watch: narcissistic Mel and Michael weep on camera for baby Jacintha Windsor
KATE Middleton pregnancy watch: Day 8 of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy – Royal baby named after Jacintha Saldanha; Mel Greig and Michael Christian weep on the telly:
The front pages
Sick:
The Sun: “Pregnant Kate has sickness relapse”
Daily Telegraph: “Setback for Duchess as he condition takes turn for the worse”
Blame:
Daily Mirror: “Royal Hoax Suicide – FURY OF NURSE’S HUSBAND – He’s angry at hospital over Jacintha’s death”
i: “Kate hoax nurse daughter pay tribute to mother”
Daily Star: “Prank DJs’ witch hunt”
Daily Express: “British Police may quiz prank DJs after nurse’s ‘suicide'”
The Guardian: “DJs may face Met over nurse death. London police make contact with Australia over hoax call investigation”
Reasons:
Daily Mail: “Hoaxed Nurse Died of Shame”
Save Our Careers
BBC: “Duchess hoax: Australian presenters ‘gutted and heartbroken'”
Mel Greig and Michael Christian wept as they said “not a minute goes by where we don’t think about her family”.
They chose to do this on the telly, on Australian TV shows Today Tonight and A Current Affair programme (note to Aussie telly bosses: get better names for your shows). Is televised regret the same as private remorse?
Highlights are:
Michael Christian: “When we thought about making a call it was going to go for 30 seconds we were going to be hung up on, and that was it. As innocent as that.'”
Mel Greig: “We thought a hundred people before us would’ve tried it. We thought it was such a silly idea and the accents were terrible and not for a second did we expect to speak to Kate let alone have a conversation with anyone at the hospital. We wanted to be hung up on.”
On hearing of the nurse’s death:
MG: “It was the worst phone call I’ve ever had in my life.”
MC: “Shattered, gutted, heartbroken and obviously you know. Our deepest sympathies are with the family and the friends.”
MG: “There’s not a minute that goes by where we don’t think about her family and what they must be going through, and the thought that we may have played a part in that is gut-wrenching.”
MC: “Prank calls are made every day, on every radio station in every country, around the world and they have been for a long time and no-one could’ve imagined this to happen.”
MG: “Unfortunately I remember that moment very well because I haven’t stopped thinking about it since it happened and I remember my first question was ‘Was she a mother?'”
MG: “The accents were terrible. You know it was designed to be stupid. We were never meant to get that far from the little corgis barking in the background – we obviously wanted it to be a joke. If we played any involvement in her death then we’re very sorry for that. And time will only tell.”
From mea culpa and shattered to “if”.
MG: “There’s nothing that can make me feel worse than what I feel right now. And for what I feel for the family. We’re so sorry that this has happened to them.”
And you said so on the telly. ‘Cos that’s entertainment.
Sky News has a few more quotes. The DJs words come over as horrible self-serving and narcissistic:
MG: “I have thought about this a million times in my head, that I just wanted to reach out to them and just give them a big hug and say sorry. I hope they [Jacintha Saldanha’s family] are OK, I really do.”
MC: “I just hope that they get the love, the support, the care that they need. I hope they are OK, I really do.”
Ugh!
MG : “It doesn’t seem real because you just couldn’t foresee something like that happening from a prank call.”
Not real?
MC: “I don’t think that anyone could have predicted what coud’ve happened. It was just a tragic set of circumstances that I don’t think anyone could have thought that we’d be here…The call to begin with wasn’t about speaking to Kate…”It wasn’t about trying to get a scoop or anything. The call was just – I mean we’d assumed that we’d be hung up on and that’d be that.”
MG: “We just wanted to be hung up on. We wanted to be hung up on with our silly voices and wanted a 20-second segment to air of us doing stupid voices.”
Blame the hospital for not hanging up?
Mel and Michael then hugged and wept. The very real story of woman who died become another routine mourn porn dumb show.
Who to blame?
Daily Star: “KATE PRANK DJS ‘WITCH HUNT'”
Australia’s 2DayFM came under fire after a prank call by its DJs preceded the apparent suicide of hospital nurse Jacintha Saldanha.
But the station hit back yesterday, and even pointed the finger at the hospital for accepting the call. Spokesman Sandy Kaye said: “The backlash is just ferocious.
“Australia seems to be much more balanced. In the UK it’s like they’re on a witch hunt. It’s intense and what’s incredible to me is it’s so much easier for the British media to have us as the target. They haven’t once looked at the hospital.”
News.Com.AU: “Right Royal Hypocrites: Telling it like it is, or witch hunt?”
Chris Paine writes:
Derryn Hinch, the self-anointed human headline, says the reaction has been hypocritical…”Most of the British press was saying: how could this be? Once the poor woman, then they all turned on the Aussies. She was just the receptionist who took the initial call. It’s terrible, it’s tragic, but I do feel a bit for the two radio people. Their only crime was going too far. Their mistake was not owning up once they got through to the second nurse. For the Poms now though, this is just shooting fish in a bucket.”
Media analyst Jim Macnamara agrees the reaction from the British press has been hypocritical and extreme. “They seem to be doing the same thing or worse than what others are doing,” Professor Macnamara, from the University of Technology in Sydney, told news.com.au. “I’d appeal for a more balanced view, to step back and say ‘what can we all learn from this?’. It’s not productive to be pointing fingers. I don’t think it’s fair to point fingers individually at the two radio DJs. Even if you disagree with their actions, one can’t help but feel some sympathy for the situation they’re in.”
Sun Times: “No way was prank call to nurse criminal”
So many of those calls are just deadly. But until a couple of Australian DJs duped a nurse at a London hospital and that nurse committed suicide a few days later, that term was never literally applied to a prank phone call.
Blame the DJs
NY Daily News: “Family of nurse Jacintha Saldanha who killed herself blame prank deejays for death”
One of Jacintha Saldanha’s best friends told the Daily News the tragic nurse’s relatives blame the two Aussie shock jocks who duped her into transferring their call to a nurse who revealed details of Kate Middleton’s morning sickness. “Because of them only it happened. That’s what we think,” the friend told The News. “We want an investigation about what happened to my friend.”
The pal is not named. Why not?
Blame the hospital
Daily Mirror: “Royal prank hoax nurse suicide tragedy: Husband’s fury at DJs and hospital bosses over Jacintha’s death”
Benedict Barboza is “seething with the DJs whose call duped Jacintha, 46. And he has slammed hospital chiefs for the way they handled the aftermath of the prank call about Duchess Kate. Speaking from the family home yesterday, close friend Stephen Almeida told how Benedict was stressed and incensed.”
So. Mr Barboza is not speaking to the Mirror.
Stephen said: “He’s very angry about all the proceedings, not only about the DJs but all the handling of the situation in the hospital. He feels very angry about the hospital management. He’s been full of stress about the whole thing. It’s not a very nice time.”
Might it be an idea to leave an innocent man “full of stress” alone?
Solicitors Bircham Dyson Bell, acting for the hospital, said last night: “No disciplinary action of any kind had been taken or was contemplated in respect of Ms Saldanha. On the contrary, the hospital regarded her as having been the victim of a hoax and that she was blameless in the matter. She was being supported by the hospital and was regarded as a highly skilled and valuable member of the hospital’s nursing team.”
Translation: “PLEASE Do Not Sue Us. Pleeeeeeaseeeeee.”
IbnLIVE: “UK prank call: Tried contacting hospital before airing nurse’s interview, claims radio station”
“It is absolutely true to say that we did attempt to contact those people on multiple occasions. We rang them up to discuss what we had recorded,” said Southern Cross Austereo Chief Executive Rhys Holleran.
Jacintha Windsor
OneIndia: “Kate can name her child after gracious Jacintha”
Gracious?
A neighbour, known as Maxine, said: ‘She was a lovely woman, just so smiley and bubbly. ‘We used to joke with her that she was a nurse for the queen, she was just so nice.” Jacintha’s driving instructor Jeff Sellick was quoted by the Daily Mail that he was in ‘complete shock’ at her death.
So. What killed her?
Daily Express: “NURSE ‘DIED OF SHAME’ AFTER HOAX, SAYS VICTIM’S BROTHER”
The brother of the tragic nurse who killed herself after the royal hospital hoax spoke last night about how ashamed she would have been at her mistake. Jacintha Saldanha’s brother Naveen said last night that she would have been “devastated” for accidentally helping a colleague to breach medical confidentiality rules over the Duchess of Cambridge.
“She would have felt much shame about the incident,” he was reported as saying, adding that his devoutly Catholic sister was a “proper and righteous person”.
Sydney Morning Herald: “Call a catalyst but other factors could have contributed”
Letter 1: “Leaving aside the stupidity of the call, I wonder what sort of grilling and castigation this poor woman was subjected to by the hospital administrators and whoever else.”
Letter 2: “There is no possible way the obvious emotional fragility of this nurse could be foreseen, let alone her action of committing suicide. A realistic appraisal of the situation is the hospital elders were embarrassed and needed a scapegoat. As their actions will no doubt be kept in-house, one can but imagine the discipline meted out to the nurse in question not to mention the ridicule of her work colleagues.”
Letter 3: “We know nothing about this woman’s mental health, but can be sure the hoax was not the cause of her suicidal ideation, but unfortunately likely to have been the ”final straw” that broke her will to live. There was no way that anyone could have predicted this tragic outcome.”
Such are the facts.
Posted: 10th, December 2012 | In: Key Posts, Royal Family Comments (5) | TrackBack | Permalink
