Not a great week for British tabloid journalism. A 167 year-old red-top bites the dust this weekend, I wonder out loud if the real world isn't actually a better place without the News of the World.
For those who haven't heard, the campaign for ethics in journalism took a giant leap backwards this week after further sickening allegations about how the paper employed phone-hacking as a method of information gathering. When it was discovered that journalists hacked the phones of the aggrieved family members of victims of terrorist attacks, and fallen soldiers the public decided it had had enough. The paper lost credibility with its readers and (much more importantly for its corporate ownership) its advertisers abandoned ship.
This (news)paper is quite well known for its effective, yet shady investigative journalism including the sting operation that cost England football manager, Sven Goran Erikson, his job. The Erickson case demonstrated the tabloid's reporters zest for getting to the 'truth' by using dishonesty.
But even as the News of the World dies, the paper's corporate owners, News International will survive. The company chairman, Rupert Murdoch may have to tread a bit of hot water for a while as the man at the helm of this mess, but he's not the one who will truly suffer. He'll get back to counting his money sometime soon after this scandal blows over. News Corporation still owns two of Britain's biggest titles, the Sun and the Times, (Hello, competition Bureau, are you there?) but if anyone believes that the unethical practices exposed at the News of the World aren't endemic throughout the organisation and the entire industry, stay tuned. You'll be hearing more about this shortly.
As for the 200 journalists losing their jobs today, I'm not shedding any tears for them. Ethics come from the human soul, not soulless corporations. Anyone asked to do anything against their conscience has clear options. One option is to say no. The reality is that the culture of journalism is inherently hyper-competitive. The race to get the story, to get there first, to get an exclusive to make the biggest splash that can change your career and change your life is heightened in an industry where it is incredibly hard to get a job and increasingly harder to keep it. Journalists develop a carnal survival instinct which is the explanation, but not an excuse, for using any means possible to get the big story. You can always blame the corporate culture afterwards, when everything goes wrong.
Believe it or not, trainee journalists spend a lot of time studying ethics. The issue of privacy, what you can and can't say about the private lives of public figures, is currently a hot topic in journalism schools. Hacking phones to get private info about private people is illegal, not to mention unethical and disgusting and completely unnecessary.
Does the public have the right, and the need, to know everything? The public appetite for 'news,' which is often nothing more than public gossip, is not only part of British tabloid culture, it's part of the national culture. The public is therefore not blameless in any of this. We are all affected by the in-your-face tabloid headline grabbing stories and we are under the influence of these very efficient commercially owned opinion makers. What to do? Well, for one thing, I hope in the future we will come to see the tabloid headlines as something like a car crash. We need to try much harder to look away
