21
10
Ethics continuing education couldn’t be more important than now, given all this Murdoch phone-hacking business. One of the most monied of patriarchs worldwide, Murdoch makes billions from a diverse portfolio of properties and investments, one of which is the legendary News of the World tabloid. Highly profitable, it is this company that has become his own personal Sword of Damocles now.
What does any of that have to do with the need for ethics continuing education? Oh, just that simple kindergarten variety fair play would have avoided all the nonsense to begin with. In the begining, it was just an unfortuantely all-too-ordinary case of a girl gone missing. 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. Police resources had been squandered on a false lead, in effect.
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!
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!