It was with immense joy, and a touch of feeling stupid, that I recently discovered that the basic Foxtel subscription included the BBC World News channel. Not sure how it had remained hidden for so long but maybe skimming past 'BBC Wld', as it is shortened to, in the Foxtel menu, I'd assumed it was yet another wildlife channel. Dumb, yes. But a pleasant surprise nonetheless.
Newswise on Foxtel there's not a lot of choice. Sky News is a disappointment with its almost half-hourly blocks of sports news (and nearly as many crosses to 'business news') - there's a myriad of stand-alone sports channels as there is, there is no need to have it take up what precious little news time we are given. Fox News itself isn't even funny to watch now that the election is long gone. And, the CNN we get served up here may be a little more sane than the nonsense now broadcast in its name in the US but has little relevance to the average Australian viewer - man cannot survive on Anderson Cooper alone.
So, in the midst of royal baby mania, BBC World News seemed like a sanctuary of sanity as it recently prioritised stories about Syria, Egypt and renewed troubles in Northern Ireland. Even Fox News' hosts had been dribbling with excitement about the news of Prince William and his WAG's pregnancy news. Memo to Fox: the British royals are direct descendants of the ones your country fought to gain independence from, y'know that led to the Bill Of Rights and Constitution you always bang on about. Sheesh.
But then came the tragedy. And the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha is tragic. But the way the death has been reported has been nothing short of horrendous. And the BBC World News was right in there with the worst of them.
Reporting that the nurse who took the now-infamous prank call from a pair of Australian radio show presenters is now dead is news. [By the way, please stop calling them DJ's.] But it is not newsworthy enough that for three days it has dominated all news media. Even the BBC were running it at the top of every hour on Saturday, at one point expanding it to a nearly ten-minute-long story.
The 'pitchfork and torch' brigade hit our screens as fast as they hit social media. While thankfully no news pundit accused the radio pair of having 'blood on their hands' as some social media users reportedly wrote on Facebook, the news reports were getting heavy-handed.
BBC dragged in a royal correspondent and also quoted from a letter by a hospital representative using terms such as "truly appalling" and "extremely foolish" in regards to the 'prank'. Then our 'radio regulator' was called into question being described as "spineless" and "toothless". And so it went on.
Oddly enough, some of the more righteous opinions voiced about this 'prank call' have come from the same media groups that were the basis of the just-concluded Leveson inquiry (the biggest media inquiry in British history).
Now don't get me wrong, I find commercial FM prank calls as boring as the next guy – but I assume they are governed by the same regulations as journalism and that they can't be broadcast without permission. So if procedures weren't followed then they have wronged. But the presenters, as unoriginal and insipid as they may be, cannot be blamed for this very unfortunate death.
And, I'm sorry, but I've been known to laugh at prank call routines in the past, hell, I've loved the TV show Crank Yankers, so I can hardly get on my high horse about prank calls being immoral. Seriously, prank calls are less a problem of local radio than its obsession with British royals. I find it hard to believe that all this moral indignation being expressed on the news about this poor nurse's death and the morality of prank calls would still be headlines today if it were not connected to this inane obsession with British royalty.
Can I be the only one who does not care about the impending arrival of a 'royal baby'? Really, the royals are one peg down from the Kardashians when it comes to newsworthiness – at least Kim Kardashian dates someone with real talent and has earned an 'honest living' by fronting a TV show.
Sure, the royals do some good for charity, but there are enough celebrities out there willing to step into those fundraising shoes if ever we were lucky enough to have the royals step down. (And perhaps if we just kicked them out of their palaces and cut their handouts, there'd be a lot more money to go round to those charities).
Would this prank call even have happened if the media wasn't so obsessed with the royals? Would the person who answered the phone have felt so much pressure afterwards if the media hadn't fed on the 'prank call' story so feverishly? These aren't questions that can be answered here but they are questions that should be being asked before we go accusing two generic broadcasters of murder.
And yes, the BBC is right to mention that Australia's radio regulation body (the Australian Communications & Media Authority) may be regarded as toothless by some – but there have been far greater reasons to bring ACMA into question before this and yet this is the first we hear about it on a global scale.
This issue has been reported on - and possibly now over-analysed (this piece as example) - it's time for headlines about the tragedies in Syria and Mali. And may we be able to find a news outlet not obsessed with updates on the 'royal pregnancy'.
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