In one of the early stories the male idiot is reported as saying to the female something to the effect of; ‘somebody gave me a phone number, do you think we ought to try it.’

This suggests to me that they had somehow gotten hold of a number that took them directly to the private rooms, bypassing the switchboard. The fact that a nurse took the call reinforces that view.

It is inconceivable that a hospital has a trained nurse working on the switchboard.

To me it seems that this was obtaining medical records by fraud or deceit. While this may not be criminal, combined with the publishing of such information, I suggest that a case for civil damages ought to be possible.

To suggest that there was no malice, no intention to cause harm would be a very difficult position to defend.

The presenters are making the plea ‘that they only made the phone call’. They are no less culpable than is the company that they work for.

Such public pranksters should be aware that one of the worst things you can do to a person is to cause them to feel a sense of public shame. There are arguments being made that this nurse should not have felt bad enough to be suicidal - in other words she should have been able to take what they called a joke. But this incident involved the public knowledge that this nurse had subjected her country's Royal Family to a serious invasion of their privacy, and there's no way that such a reportedly responsible person could not feel shame for having let herself be so easily duped. And I've found that more people commit suicide for reasons that involve undeserved yet seemingly un-reparable shame than for almost any other cause.

It occurs to me that the broadcast of the prank call by an Australian radio station is unlikely to have caused great distress to the nurse if it had not been reported by other media -in particular, the English media. I read it on the iPhone version of The (English) Independent the same morning as it was reported on the ABC. Don't the reporting media have any responsibility in this?

"Clause six states that before the words of an identifiable person are broadcast, that person’s consent must be obtained. The key issue here is whether the person is identifiable. This is likely to turn on the question: identifiable to whom? The clause does not say “identifiable to the listener”. It is broader than that. The question is, how broad?"
Perhaps the word you are after is ambiguous rather than broad. According to the station they were unable to identify the person, the listener was unable to identify the person, the media was unable to identify the person until the Police released the information. The identity of the 2nd nurse is still not in the public sphere.

Careful you don't make interpretations that would have unintended consequences. Investigative reporting commonly broadcast switchboard operators - do they get their permission every time? They commonly broadcast denials or refusal to talk made over the phone - do they get permission for that also?

For me the very worst piece of media bullying I saw this year was an ABC journalist harassing someone pushing supermarket trolleys in Canberra with the bizarre accusation he was a criminal king-pin. Doubtless he did help friends and family in Iraq come to Australia, oh my. But since that brave ABC journalist chased him out of the country has there been any diminution of boat traffic to Australia? More likely that ABC informant (a former grass for the US in Iraq) felt he was impinging on his commercial interests in some minor way and wanted him taken out. I don't remember any of the great and the good or the experts of ethics denouncing that ugly piece of bullying.

Anyone who defends any of the actions 2Day FM regarding the suicide of Jacintha Saldanha or thinks suicide was over the top for the nurse, I hope you face a similar mistake that the nurse made. And then the world sees the mistake illuminate by two people making fun of you who have the power of media. Enjoy going to the pub to see your friends and the drive home to your family that includes two teen age children. Loss of face to Asian people is more important than loss of face is to pasty white people. To err is human. To make fun of other people's errors is done by bullies and brutes. To prank people into making errors and then laugh at them in the media has no place in decent society.

It was always going to be a dumb idea. Driven by ratings and the fact that your average DJ is not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, good management practices are required to ensure things like this are nipped in the bud before they become disasters.

For example, a manager or program supervisor with half a brain who says "You did what? You tried to lie your way into a hospital ward where a very ill, but highly admired by the public, famous pregnant woman was under 24 hour care? Err....no....dumb idea, don't do that again. And we're not broadcasting it."

All the warning signs were there that it was not a smart thing to broadcast (let alone legal to do so anyway) but 2Day FM managers lacked any insight or oversight and the rest is history. While the DJs share the blame for carrying out the act, I hope that someone above the DJs really gets held to account for it.

The post-incident response is another thing all together. They seem to be content just pouring petrol on the fire. Their response will be taught the world over as an exercise in how *not* to manage a tragic screwup.