Making money out of other peoples grief has become common practice at some newspapers but the News Of The World appears to have sunk to the very bottom of the cesspit of journalism.
Chequebook journalism has grown and grown over recent years. Some media organizations have developed a reputation for searching out the dirt rather than finding a worthwhile story of real public interest and they have been happy to pay whatever it took to get those dirty stories. We all love a bit of gossip but things have clearly got completely out of any sort of control at the News Of The World.
It is reported that journalists and/or a private detective working for the NoW hacked into and listened in, to the recorded messages on Milly Dowlers phone after she went missing. Not content with just doing that they actually deleted some messages to make space for further messages to be recorded. This came at a time when her family were desperate for any news that might suggest she was safe and well somewhere so when they discovered her phone messages had been listened to and deleted they assumed she was alive and well and accessing her mobile phone. Unfortunately it was already too late and she had been murdered.
The NoW was responsible for raising the hopes of desperate family members at a time of enormous distress. We cannot begin to imagine what it must feel like for Milly Dowlers parents to be dragged through this whole sorry story yet again. They have surely suffered enough already.
For years the NoW has been claiming that there was a rogue reporter who went to far and hacked, of had hacked on his behalf, the phones of various people in the public eye. It was an unjustifiable intrusion on the private lives of those people affected but we were encouraged to belive it was not a big problem.
The story has developed over several years and we are discovering more and more of what appears to have been a culture of ‘Get a story at any cost’ at the NoW. It now turns out that it is not just politicians and celebrities who had their phones hacked. Now we can add to the list the parents of Milly Dowler, the parents of the two girls murdered by Ian Huntley in Soham. Now it seems that the families of victims of the 7/7 bomb attacks in London were also targeted.
Do these people at the NoW have no moral code whatsoever? It is simply staggering that anyone could do what they have done and think it was in any way legitimate or reasonable.
We don’t yet know who knew what was going on. We may never know the whole truth but there is no way the management of the newspaper at that time can claim it is nothing to do with them. It should never have happened yet they allowed a culture to exist where it could occur. They developed the culture that somehow led journalists to think that this sort of thing was what was required of them.
I have been disappointed to see ridulous sums of money offered and accepted for sordid stories of private bedroom antics which in the vast majority of cases are of no legitimate interest to anybody outside the circle of those involved. The standards of journalism in many newspapers seem to have been getting lower and lower for years now but these latest revelations must surely have hit the bottom and gone way beyond what anybody could possibly call acceptable behaviour.
I would urge all businesses that have advertising placed in the NoW to never advertise with it again until it proves it has changed it’s ways or the paper is sold off to a new owner who knows what a moral compass is.
I would urge everybody to resist whatever temptation they may feel to buy the NoW until it can demonstrate it has changed its ways of operating. They must demonstrate they will resist the appeal of having their palm crossed with silver in exchange for causing enormous hurt and pain to people who deserve to be treated with consideration and respect.
I would urge Rupert Murdoch to ask himself how he would feel if he had had a child murdered and then found out his phone had been hacked for juicy details to be placed on the front page of a newspaper. What action would he want to take after such behaviour. What would he want to do to change the way the newspaper acted in the future. He is in a position where he can do exactly that and he should.
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