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. It is this heretofore highly profitable property that has now become his Achilles Heel.
What does any of that have to do with the need for ethics continuing education? Simply that some common decency would have helped prevent the scandal in the first place. It all started with a missing girl. As interest in her case grew, the tabloid sought to distinguish itself in the media scrum by gaining special insight into the circumstances surrounding her disappearance.
What Murdoch’s News of the World did was hack into the girl’s mobile voicemail account.
Right there that was wrong – but what truly makes this matter so important as an argument for ethics continuing education is that the newspaper went on to erase the messages left once the voicemail account filled up in order to listen in on new ones! 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.
Fast-forward to the present, where in the ensuing investigations it’s since come out that the News of the World had also hacked into the voicemail accounts of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and even Queen Elizabeth II herself!
And now the paper’s been shut down by Murdoch in an apparent effort to appease an outraged public and even more outraged lawmakers, who have compelled him to testify before Parliament. Murdoch has also had a ten-billion dollar business deal fall through on account of the scandal – a costly lesson in business ethics!