The backlash over an Australian radio prank which lead to the suicide of British Nurse Jacintha Saldanha is growing by the minute. How is it we ended up with such a dramatic action and reaction? Radio stations have done prank calls forever.
Here’s what the radio station failed to notice.
The entire planet is on a wake up call at the moment. It’s what all the spiritual people are speaking of as marked on the Mayan Calendar as December 21 2012.
Being an extraordinary shift in the way we live, think and understand life to be, it’s not all going to happen on that one day.
In fact, if anything is going to happen on that one day it will only be because of the focus we ourselves are putting on it.
However, this is a major shift and we are already in the process of it happening.
How it is affecting the populace is something Media need to start urgently paying attention to and changing the way they work to fit the new paradigm.
What’s changing?
The Age of Accountability
All over the news you’ll see people of all levels of society. Bankers, celebrities, politicians, sports people, business people or even those in simple clerical roles being caught out and charged for their past actions. For fraud, conspiracy, their prejudices, actions and words. Have you noticed that?
We are beginning an era where all dirty laundry is to be aired, for everything and everyone to come out of the closet and expose who they really are. There will be no hiding.
As the world turns it’s attention in this direction, it’s grown an insatiable appetite for the Truth.
They want the Truth. They want to know what’s really going on behind closed doors. Who’s taking advantage of them. Who’s lying, cheating and stealing.
While the world is in that kind of mood, Radio stations who have previously relied on prank calls to unsuspecting members of the public will find this is no longer entertaining to their audience. It’s just not funny any more.
We sit here listening to DJs laughing at the expense of others and mildly disapprove but, in the larger scheme of things, we almost needed something as dramatic as a suicide to slap people in the face, make them stand up and say “enough”.
We still like to laugh and have fun just not at the expense of others.
This will alter who we find funny in the comedy circuit too. Comedians will need to do a double check of their material. If they get laughs at the expense of others they will find their audience diminishing.
It will affect the Advertising industry. All those ads using “artistic licence” that we, again, mildly disapprove of, will begin to lose impact. Your audience doesn’t want you to bend the truth and hype up what doesn’t deserve hype. Don’t boldly tell us Marshmallows are 99% fat free when in little letters on the back it admits they are more than 70% sugar.
Advertising and their clients may take longer to hook in with this new way of thinking but Radio stations and their pranks have to wake up right now before there are any more victims, be they the receivers of the prank calls or the DJs themselves.