Pie!
In a previous post here, Kevin Macnish looked at the ethics of the phone hacking scandal as it broke, and the waves of revelations which had resulted in the announcement that the News of the World was to close. Since then we’ve had the resignation of Rebecca Brooks, Steve Coogan taking down journalist Paul McMullen on Newsnight, James Murdoch protesting his ignorance while his dad cops a pie to the face, Lord Leveson looking understandably bewildered by the existence of Heat Magazine, and the Guardian apparently admitting that the allegation that News of the World journalists deleted messages from Milly Dowler’s phone – for many the most appalling of the initial allegations – was probably not accurate. This ongoing cavalcade of shock and whimsy is, ironically, the kind of thing the tabloids love. Moral outrage, celebs galore, pies in the face; if they didn’t happen also to be the villains of the piece, this would be the perfect tabloid story. It’s all so distracting that it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Well, it’s not actually, because that’s been endlessly debated too, but never mind. That there was a failure of ethics, a breakdown of integrity, is not really in doubt. There are however some broader ethical questions raised by all this. Here are three of them.
How, in a broader sense, did it happen?
One of the big questions for the empirical side of business ethics is around organisational structures and cultures and how they can be made to be more resistant to ethical breaches. At the IDEA CETL, we have recently completed a research project looking at techniques and approaches for promoting integrity in organisations (coming soon). Aside from questions of governance, are there things that the News of the World could have done to strengthen their ethical culture? One of the strongest results we obtained in our research was about the importance of ‘tone from the top’ in terms of its interaction with other factors. Essentially, it makes little difference how good your disciplinary procedures, ethics training and code of conduct are if your leaders aren’t demonstrating integrity in their own behaviour. Tempting cheap shots aside, even if we were to charitably accept that Murdochs senior and junior would both have been horrified to know phone hacking was taking place, we could still ask how active they were in communicating this attitude to their editors and, through them, to the highly pressured individual journalists who were writing the stories. These journalists might have assumed, perhaps understandably, that shady practices were tacitly accepted if they led to good stories. Aligning an organisation’s true values with its stated values means both stating clearly and demonstrating that particular forms of behaviour are unacceptable.
What does this say about professional journalism?
Probably the main reason journalists are so highly pressured is that the mainstream print media is in steady decline and has been for years. While the financial crisis appears to have exacerbated this, readers’ gradual movement towards online sources of news is probably a bigger long-term factor. Defenders of print media often cite professionalism as a major reason to prefer the old model over, say, independent bloggers. As a purely theoretical argument, this makes perfect sense: bloggers unlike journalists are unaccountable, unregulated, sometimes even completely anonymous, and don’t necessarily go through any form of professional training. Unfortunately, the professionalism defence is vulnerable to inconvenient real-world events such as the phone-hacking scandal. If this is professionalism, you might think, perhaps we’d be better off with the amateurs. This puts the print media in an apparent double-bind. On the one hand, professionalism is a bulwark against declining sales and a way of distinguishing themselves from online sources. On the other hand, those very factors make it harder to stay out of areas which are lucrative but ethically murky, in the name of professionalism.
A lot of the ethical theory of professionalism is generated by a supposed relation between professions and the public interest. In journalism, the public interest is often cited as a justification for apparently shady, or even illegal practices. Unfortunately phone hacking seems to have run the gamut from cases where a fairly robust public interest argument could be made (e.g. politicians), through cases where the argument is less clear (e.g. ‘hypocritical’ celebrities) to cases where there really is no argument (e.g. murder victims). If the public interest is what journalism is really all about, then many journalists need to get better at working out what it is and actually being motivated by it.
What should we do about it?
There are several potential elements to this question. As usual following a crisis, there have been plenty of calls for tighter regulation of the industry, and replies to the effect that greater regulation threatens to undermine the freedom of the press. If phone hacking were the only problem, then it might be right to worry about overreaction. However, it may be that this particular scandal is merely symptomatic of a journalistic culture which is willing to bend ethical standards to breaking point in pursuit of stories that have very little to do with the public interest. If so, it may be that greater regulation is needed. However, this does not entail that other approaches will not be effective, or are unnecessary. Legislation and regulation can never cover every possible eventuality, especially where inherently judgement-based notions like the public interest are involved. As well as being subject to regulation, journalists will need to be trained to interpret and apply that regulation, to be empowered to make ethical calls even when this means turning down a juicy story, and to be inculcated within a robust notion of professionalism which emphasises individual judgement while setting clear ethical boundaries.
