not-so mild ethical crisis

Yesterday I did my first death knock and I didn't even realise it.
I feel dirty. And not in a funny, somewhat humourous kind of way as is usually the case.

You can read the story of what happened here on the lovely Adam's blog because I can't be bothered writing out what's already been so aptly written.

Put simply, I working at the mean, nasty, unethical station yesterday as the lowly work experience girl/whipping girl. I was listening to 'the other station' on the way in there. They said a high profile prisoner at Casuarina Prison had committed suicide. I get into work. The presenter says 'David Birnie topped himself.' Hmm... That's nice.

So as could be expected, we ran with it that morning and ran with it and ran with it.

And you guessed it, we ran with it. In fact if we were running in David Birnie suicide memorial marathon, we would have won by a country mile.

We broke the story at 8am because 'everyone knew and if they didn't know now, they'd know eventually. Besides, our source was credible enough'. I doubt there was any concern for family, friends and victims of Birnie who would prefer to find out via the conventional channels. Police confirmed it at about 9.30am. The other stations broke the story then.

Talkback callers, guests and other panelists would not stop going on about it. Callers and guests were saying that they were glad he was dead - I don't have a problem with that - you can't defame the dead. We had the cop who raided the Birnie house (who is now in close contact with a Birnie survivor) in 1986 talk on air, we had the aunt of Catherine Birnie by marriage call in. That was ok. Those two had called into this three-ring circus of their own free will. Until the producer decided to pump the aunt for details on her great-neices - Catherine Birnie's daughters. She only had a last name and an approximate suburb to go by. So had the White Pages online printed out for me and I had to go through and call each and every one of the numbers with that last name until I hit the lucky people we were after. Such is the life of the work experience girl, doing the dirty work. Unfortunately for Birnie's daughters, they didn't have a silent number (they might be considering it now)so we got in contact with them. The producer spent the next twenty minutes trying to convince one of Birnie's poor daughters who clearly didn't want to be in the media spotlight to go on air. They didn't even know why we were wanting them to go on air until the producer told them that Birnie was dead.

The producer begged, stole and borrowed to convince the daughter to go on air on the proviso that we wouldn't give her number to any other media outlets. So she went on air and sounded very nervous and overwhelmed - like she didn't want to be on air at all. After that went to air, we had all the TV stations (bar the ABC for obvious reasons) calling us and pretending that they were our best friends just so they could bother this poor family again.

We got off air and everyone was congratulating themselves. Incidentally, the ex-cop won talkback caller of the week, the aunt won talkback caller of the day.

I feel sick.