The life of a dedicated nurse, the victim of a prank, was tragically lost in an apparent suicide. Jacintha Saldanha, reportedly from Shirva in Udipi, Karnataka, was the victim of a radio station prank call by two Australian DJs who she put through to another nurse in the Duchess of Cambridge’s London hospital room.
There could not have been a more innocent mistake than being taken in by a prank caller with a false accent early in the morning even if the duo were amateurish hams.
Media is known to pull out every trick to connect to their customer base but the act from Down Under is in no way as abominable as stealing data from a dead child’s phone, which was one of several transgressions that came up in the Lord Leveson inquiry in the UK with regard to unethical media hacking. Had they any inkling of how tragic the unintended consequences could be, if the prank did at all lead to the nurse’s death, even the most light-hearted pranksters may have hesitated.
The two DJs, suspended from the radio station, may be forgiven their silly intrusion, the humour of which did not escape the grandfather-to-be, the Prince of Wales, who joked with the press, saying, “How do you know I’m not a radio station?” Understandably, there has been outrage over the prank call, but the trick is not to be bracketed with the regular prying into the lives of the rich and famous resorted to by prurient tabloids and indefatigable paparazzi.