Johanna Fawkes Research

Suzanne Moore has written an interesting piece about the political/police/media nexus exposed in recent weeks: Suzanne Moore on spin She echoes thoughts I’ve been having over the past amazing fortnight.:

• everyone is calling for new/better ethics. No one has the faintest idea what might constitute such ethics – what approach do they recommend? Utilitarian, deontological, virtue-based? The level of discussion remains painfully abstract. Professional ethics have offered no brake on the behaviour of journalists or police involved in these stories.
• The focus is shifting from the actions of individuals to collective issues, the culture of a news room or multinational. This ties with my research that shows most professional ethics blames individuals and avoids collective responsibility wherever possible. Today’s Observer reports the Catholic Church’s legal attempt to deny responsibility for priests’ abuse on the technical grounds that they are not Church employees.
• The person who embodies the ethical conflicts in the NOTW story is Paul McMullen, the former deputy features editor who was shredded by Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan, Paxo and anyone else who lined up in a TV studio – to which he kept turning up in a series of attempts both to exonerate and blame himself. Sometimes his defence was ‘ we were after the truth’, evoking the archetypal journalist as truth seeker and public defender. When people gawped at such a justification of phone hacking, he offered the other old card ‘ just entertainment’, a line I remember from old Fleet Street days when I would attack my mother’s Daily Express colleagues. He seemed anguished though, someone knowing the inadequacy of his position and thus illustrating the terrible damage done to those who follow organisational ethical norms but violate something deeper, more personal.