Ethics and the media

I'm quite surprised that no-one here has brought this subject up yet!

Just wanted to say that the coverage of the phone-hacking scandal is bringing up all sorts of attitudes that I am finding deeply depressing and worrying. On the Channel 4 news the other night was a former News of the World reporter and he sat there saying it was perfectly OK to hack into the phones of celebrities (who court publicity anyway) and to use such methods to entrap politicians and other public figures who are doing corrupt things as it's in the public interest.

Since when have two wrongs made a right? :confused: How can using criminal acts to sell newspapers (let's not kid ourselves that the motivation was ever anything but that) ever be justified and explained away?

This same chap then went on to say how heinous it was to hack into the phones of innocent people, especially the dead and the bereaved. Sorry, but to me it's shocking and criminal to hack into anyone's phones, or computers etc etc!

This is surely the same mind-set that says that stealing from the company you work for isn't stealing? I used to work with a group of people who regularly robbed the company of income and pocketed it themselves. This was called "doing the business". It was so wide-spread that no-one ever saw anything wrong with it. It's a sort of creeping moral rot and this seems to be what has happened with some (or most according to some commentators) of the British press.

I've found some commentaries that I have appreciated reading and here are the links:

[url]Phone hacking: Tabloid culture and the pornography of grief – Telegraph Blogs[/url]

How we're being seen across the pond::

The UK phone hacking scandal just brought down the Murdoch tabloid The News of the World. Is the UK press culture going to change?

While the US stereotype is of a staid and stodgy Britain, when it comes to the press we're the dull ones. Our tabloids may be competitive but the UK's are viciously so. They're also a little trashier. The homepage for The News of the World today, for instance, has no fewer than six beautiful women in bikinis or lingerie (yes I counted, glazing over at the paparazzi snapshot of England footballer Frank Lampard's bare bottom. The things I do for this job.) The homepage for The New York Post, Murdoch's flagship American tabloid, has no flesh at all.

Even when it comes to the so-called quality press, the self-imposed rules are little looser on that side of the pond. The line between fact and opinion is blurrier, and investigative reporters frequently go undercover there. While that happens sometimes in the US, it's generally frowned upon. When I trained as a reporter, I was told to never tell anything but the truth about my identity and my employer. The reason is that credibility is all we have, and once you've proven to be a liar, even in a good cause, you've put that credibility at risk.

But deception generates scoops.....

[url]UK phone hacking: Would the US press do this? - CSMonitor.com[/url]

And from a friend's blog with another amusing piece:

No sane newspaper would currently want to be even obliquely associated with The News of the World, given the current expose of some of its news-gathering habits. And the content of the Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper The Christian Science Monitor – with its motto “To injure no man, but to bless all mankind” – is quite possibly as far away as you can get from some of the materials on offer on an average Sunday in the sister paper of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun.

That was not, however, apparent to some of our American cousins who devised an ad campaign, a few decades back, to promote the Monitor in the UK on the side of black cabs with the slogan “Buy The Christian Science Monitor, read the news of the world!”
[url]Real “News of the World” Reporting Uncovered…! | Neither Myth Nor Miracle...[/url]

I'd be interested to hear others' views here.

Judy