Journalism in Britain has been rocked by a hacking scandal that is bound to reverberate to the newspaper industry across the world. Hacking the personal voicemail of celebrities – film stars, footballers and politicians – is unethical and reprehensible. But breaking into the voicemail of a murdered teenager, as the News of the World is alleged to have done, and of victims of terrorism is unpardonable.
News of the World, which was the bestselling Sunday newspaper in the world, has now bowed out, disgracefully, leaving behind a legacy that has done harm to the newspaper industry just when it is struggling to keep its head above water in the whirlwind-speed expansion of the social media networks. In the wake of the huge storm the hacking revelations stirred across Britain, Rupert Murdoch had little choice but to close the newspaper and has now also had to drop his bid for control of BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster.
The dust has not settled yet as very serious accusations keep flying in several directions. The conduct of the police is also in the line of fire and misdeeds will no doubt come into the open in the inquiry that has been opened into the scandal.
Chequebook journalism is not something new and, as The Times of London, also owned by News International, has said, “some of the great journalistic exposés in history were achieved using methods that could now be, and sometimes were at the time, challenged by the police or taken to court”.
It mentioned, for instance, the Pentagon papers; the obtaining, as part of the Washington Post’s heroic Watergate investigation, of the personal details of members of staff of the Campaign to Re-Elect President Nixon; the information on the Belgrano provided by the civil servant Clive Ponting. More recently, there has been the running story in The Daily Telegraph about the MPs’ expenses claims that did so much harm to the image of politicians in general. And, to cap it all, still very much in the news is the WikiLeaks story, which has raised so many serious implications to matters over confidentiality and security.
The News of the World has chosen to take the brunt of the public’s outrage and pay the price by folding but who can tell how many more newspapers, in Britain and elsewhere, have also resorted to the same kind of unethical and reprehensible practices similar to those surfacing today? In the opinion of the man in the street, the limit as to what is acceptable in a free democratic country has been overstepped. However, while the public’s anger is quite understood, the role of a free press in a democratic country should not be underestimated.
Not all newspapers resort to unethical practices in the course of their work to inform, educate and entertain. It is therefore a mistake to tar every newspaper with the same brush for there are many others in countries all over the world that do guard their integrity with all their might without in any way shirking their duty to expose, in the national interest, wrongdoing and corruption.
The hacking scandal does no good to the newspaper industry. It is only by strictly following well-established ethical standards, preferably through self-regulation, that it can win back the trust and confidence it is losing through the resort to unacceptable practices by wayward newspapers. The choice as to which newspapers deserve support lies in the readers’ own hands.