Letters: Lack of trust in media ethics

Monday, January 31, 2011

Letters: Lack of trust in media ethics

Yes, the media need a new ethical map of the boundary between secrecy and trust, on the one hand, and transparency on the other. But Simon Jenkins (Comment, 28 January) misses an important point about the impact of corporate organisation on journalistic ethics. As long as media are owned by profit-maximising corporations, editors and journalists will be under intense pressure to invade privacy in order to run gossip and scandal, under a banner which fudges the distinction between what the mass public is interested in and what is in the public interest. The future of quality media can only be assured when owned either by a trust with a cross-subsidising cash cow (such as the Guardian's Scott Trust) or by a low-profit limited liability company. The latter makes profits, but has legal protection from shareholder demands for open-market profits.

Professor Robert Wade

London School of Economics

? Although it's very important to expose miscreants on the phone-hacking front (How TV star's suspicions were brushed aside, January 27), are you (and others) not missing the point? Given phone hacking is so widespread, is it not the mobile-phone operators who should be taken to task for allowing personal data to be so easily accessed?

Randy Banks

University of Essex

? An internet search on Cameron Murdoch delivers a useful reminder. As you reported on 24 October 2008, "David Cameron took free flights to meet Rupert Murdoch" to hold talks with the now would-be buyer of BSkyB. Cameron's family were also flown by the Murdochs to their holiday destination at that time. These flights by private Gulfstream jet were valued by the Independent at �34,000. Whether their lunch was free as well, we can only speculate, but it may well be that when it comes to BSkyB, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Suzanne Keene

London

? The number of people said to have had their telephones hacked into suggests we now have a market for hacking, where the media may not have instructed which person was to be attacked, but are quite willing to provide a market for hacked information. Would a journalist be able to protect the secrecy of their source, even if a criminal act?

John Flowers

Neath, West Glamorgan

? The next time the Murdochs criticise the level of the BBC licence fee or salaries, I hope they will be reminded of Andy Gray's reported salary of �1.7m.

Graham Sowter

Blackburn, Lancashire