Stavros
07-05-2011, 09:46 PM
In the US the Casey Anthony trial, in the UK a 'phone hacking scandal' -in both cases an issue of 'responsible reporting' as well as the methods journalists use to get a story.
There are some profound issues here, and the not-so-profound claim by the journalists that it is what the public want to read, and if they didn't they would not buy the paper, or watch that report on tv, or queue up for hours to get into the courtroom.
There seems to be a standard practice after a murder where the media reports as much as it can, but where people either forget that what is being reported is an allegation or even an assumption and not fact, or that the dubious quality of the information is not emphasised enough -should assumptions even be news?
Typically, the character of the people involved will be 'news' -a young woman is murdered in Bristol, her landlord, who knew her boyfriend was away for the weekend, taught at the prestigious Clifton school -when he was teaching there he had a shock of hair that he had dyed blue (it has since gone grey). Apparently a weird eccntric (and therefore, surely a callous murderer?) and a gift for the tabloids -he was arrested, let go, and is suing the papers.
We have all been here before, its been going on for years. But technology is now blurring the boundaries, although in the UK it is still illegal to hack into someone's mobile phone. Rupert Murdoch's main Sunday Tabloid, the News of the World has been publishing 'sensational' stories since the 1960s if not before, it's famous for it. It appears their journalists -many of whom work on a freelance basis and have to get a story to get paid- hired private detectives to trace phone numbers so they could hack into the phones of murder victims and their families -and also the investigating police (!) -in one case the journalist even deleted messages on the phone of an abducted teenager which caused the family to think she was still alive even though she was lying dead in a ditch.
There has to be some limit to this -or is there? Are the public so determined to know if celebrity X is having sex with Celebrity Y they will tolerate this method? Does it even result in good journalism?
Are politicians and footballers and movie stars 'fair game' but not the public?
Is this about moral standards in journalism, or an as yet unresolved problem of applying the law in an age when communications technology has gone beyond what the law can control?
There are always missing facts in murder enquiries -we may never know exactly what happened when Meredith Kercher was murdered in Perugia, and it is these gaps the media tries to fill. Should we just accept that the 'whole truth, and nothing but the truth' is an elusive goal?
There are some profound issues here, and the not-so-profound claim by the journalists that it is what the public want to read, and if they didn't they would not buy the paper, or watch that report on tv, or queue up for hours to get into the courtroom.
There seems to be a standard practice after a murder where the media reports as much as it can, but where people either forget that what is being reported is an allegation or even an assumption and not fact, or that the dubious quality of the information is not emphasised enough -should assumptions even be news?
Typically, the character of the people involved will be 'news' -a young woman is murdered in Bristol, her landlord, who knew her boyfriend was away for the weekend, taught at the prestigious Clifton school -when he was teaching there he had a shock of hair that he had dyed blue (it has since gone grey). Apparently a weird eccntric (and therefore, surely a callous murderer?) and a gift for the tabloids -he was arrested, let go, and is suing the papers.
We have all been here before, its been going on for years. But technology is now blurring the boundaries, although in the UK it is still illegal to hack into someone's mobile phone. Rupert Murdoch's main Sunday Tabloid, the News of the World has been publishing 'sensational' stories since the 1960s if not before, it's famous for it. It appears their journalists -many of whom work on a freelance basis and have to get a story to get paid- hired private detectives to trace phone numbers so they could hack into the phones of murder victims and their families -and also the investigating police (!) -in one case the journalist even deleted messages on the phone of an abducted teenager which caused the family to think she was still alive even though she was lying dead in a ditch.
There has to be some limit to this -or is there? Are the public so determined to know if celebrity X is having sex with Celebrity Y they will tolerate this method? Does it even result in good journalism?
Are politicians and footballers and movie stars 'fair game' but not the public?
Is this about moral standards in journalism, or an as yet unresolved problem of applying the law in an age when communications technology has gone beyond what the law can control?
There are always missing facts in murder enquiries -we may never know exactly what happened when Meredith Kercher was murdered in Perugia, and it is these gaps the media tries to fill. Should we just accept that the 'whole truth, and nothing but the truth' is an elusive goal?