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Ethics Continuing Education for Murdoch
by ·
Ethics continuing education seems all the more necessary in today’s world, what with the continuing saga of the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World tabloid scandal. Murdoch is one of the world’s richest people, lording over a corporate empire that includes lucrative businesses such as the News of the World paper. A long-time money-maker for him, this property has now become his greatest challenge yet, both personally as well as professionally.
What does any of that have to do with the need for ethics continuing education? Only that the entire sordid episode would never have existed had someone with a sense of ethics been at the helm. The matter was originally one of a lost young girl. What with all the demand for the latest information on the case, The News of the World resorted to drastic measures to out-snoop its competition. What Murdoch’s News of the World did was hack into the girl’s mobile voicemail account.
That was already against the law, but what makes this matter one involving ethics continuing education is on account of the destruction of evidence they engaged in by deleting voicemail messages to make room for new ones to listen in on! This created the impression to investigators that the girl was still alive, checking in and deleting old messages. Unfortunately, the girl had been long dead, and even more unfortunately for the News of the World, their hacking was soon found out.
Not even the royals and their prime minister were immune from Murdoch’s prying henchmen (and women)!
The upshot of it all is that a hundred year-old paper’s closed, wtih workers out of a job, while a grieving family feels toyed with, and the public’s trust in its police force (Scotland Yard had previously on two occasions denied any phone hacking at all by Murdoch’s company) shattered once more. Moreover, the tycoon has had the Sky Network acquisition fall through on account of intense concern over his control of the media!
