James Morrow

Radio daze

There are larger issues at stake here than punishing a silly prank

It is a bizarre world we live in where Julian Assange can be hailed as a hero for exposing military secrets and putting Western soldiers in danger, but a couple of dim-bulb radio presenters are all but run out of town on a rail for calling up a hospital and finding out the last time a pregnant woman puked. Yet here we are.

Without fear of hyperbole it can pretty safely be said that Mel Greig and Michael Christian, the two radio DJs who infamously rang King Edward VII Hospital pretending to be the Queen, Prince Charles and a pack of corgis, are never going to win a Walkley for investigative journalism. The same goes for all the other hosts, DJs and shock jocks who fill the commercial FM airwaves with gossip about B-list ‘celebrities’, goofy phone calls and thumping ‘music’ to simulate sex at house parties by.

But it must be said that the two have also been blamed, completely unfairly and wholly prematurely, for the death of a nurse in England who had the misfortune to transfer their telephone call when the pair rang up pretending to be the royals.

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