‘Who was the adult in the room’
HOW COULD it go so wrong?
One woman dead, believed to have committed suicide. A global media frenzy. Two DJs accused of having ‘‘blood on their hands’’. And a radio network under siege – again.
It all started with a prank phone call: a staple of FM stations around the world. Thousands of these calls are made each year. Never has one ended so badly.
Social media went into overdrive, with users blaming 2Day FM hosts Michael Christian and Mel Greig for the death of Jacintha Saldanha. There were suggestions that the nurse – humiliated by the prank and the international media coverage it attracted – was driven to suicide by the ordeal.
To some, it’s another disgusting chapter from what they see as a grubby industry. The industry that aired the nowinfamous liedetector segment, in which a 14-yearold girl revealed she had been raped.
The industry that broadcast Kyle Sandilands calling a young journalist a ‘‘fat slag’’ and threatening to ‘‘hunt her down’’.
But is FM radio culture really to blame?
Australian presenters make hundreds of these calls each year – but before they broadcast them, they must get the subject’s permission.
It’s a little murkier if the prank victim is overseas.
Fairfax Media spoke to former Austereo presenters who said that, in these instances, company policy does not require the subject’s consent.
At a press conference yesterday, Southern Cross Austereo CEO Rhys Holleran refused to specify if permission was sought from the nurse before the segment aired.
Comedian Wil Anderson, a former presenter on Austereo’s Triple M network, said he felt sorry for Christian and Greig.
‘‘Firstly, I have sympathy for the nurse and her family because this is a terrible tragedy,’’ he said. ‘‘But I also have a fair degree of sympathy for these kids.
‘‘At an Austereo meeting, the number one thing is often, ‘Which prank or gotcha calls are we going to do today?’ Personally, I hate prank calls and I didn’t do them because I feel uncomfortable when everyone is laughing at one person – and that person doesn’t know why. In this case, the first alarm bell should have been calling a pregnant woman who was sick in hospital, with a chance she could have lost her baby. That’s when the grown-ups in the room should have said, ‘ Do we want to go ahead with this?’.’’
Anderson said the presenters would never have expected their silly accents and claim to be royals would be believed by the hospital.
‘‘I assume this didn’t go live to air, so at some point, an adult should have said, ‘We’re not going to play this’,’’ he said. ‘‘These are kids who are trying to make a name in an industry where Kyle Sandilands gets all the attention. It’s a culture where you’re told, ‘Make some noise, be talked about, get in the papers’.
‘‘You’re not instructed to be talked about in a positive way; they just want you to be talked about. Is the culture of radio to blame? Possibly. But people make thousands of these prank calls each year and they usually result in good material. These kids have done something that I find distasteful but it’s something that many other presenters have done without any negative consequences.
‘‘It all comes back to, ‘Who’s the adult in the room?’ After the surprise of actually getting through to the hospital, it’s the job of the adults to decide whether it goes to air.’’
At the press conference, Holleran said that Christian and Greig, whom he had spoken to earlier, were ‘‘completely shattered’’.
He said the hosts and the company had mutually decided they would not return to air until further notice ‘‘out of respect’’.
‘‘[This is] a tragic event that