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The British newspaper, News of the World, was done in by a scandal that a lot of people in the US might find hard to believe. First, because it is taken so seriously and, second, because it involved getting into the phone messages of families of war dead and the phone of a missing 13 year old girl, who was later found murdered.
The utter bad taste of the whole thing, clearly, was going into those particular phones. But, nosing into other people’s business, well that’s what reporters do all the time. Being in places, like the living room of someone who has recently learned of the death of a relative, is not wildly uncommon for a reporter, particularly one working for a newspaper. The continual goal is to get as close to the story as one can, with, of course, the permission and understanding of the people involved, not breaking and entering.
People in high stress situations often welcome reporters into their lives because they believe it adds to the memory of someone who has just died to have it covered in major media. Who wants to die and never be noted, not even noticed? Reporters, generally, are not supposed to force themselves on people, nor or they expected to stand outside someone’s window listening in on a family’s grief.
Most of the behavior shown of reporters in movies is either false or exaggerated. Newspapers and television stations want stories and they want details, but the main way of getting both is to ask. When people in private tragedies refuse, the normal course of things is to leave them alone or to see if information is available from other sources. Only when the issue involves public officials, misconduct in office and danger to the public by corporation action, like toxic pollution, do reporters resort to other tactics. Of course, at outrageous tabloid newspapers, the standards are different and usually much lower.
Phone hacking, itself, is not so egregious. It involved calling the cell phone number of someone and then calling that same number so that it would ring into the phone’s voice mail account. By tradition, several of the cell companies in England had default access codes of 1111 or 4444 to get into the voice mail. If the owner of the phone didn’t change those default codes, anyone could listen to voice messages.
This kind of thing is not on the order of wiretapping or hiding in a closet. There is a lot of information that is either public or semipublic these days and getting access to that information might or might not be against the law. It is up to all of us to safeguard what is left of our privacy.
Take Facebook, for example. People post all kinds of outrageous things
on Facebook and limit access to a few friends. Yet, if a journalist or law enforcement official wanted to get access, how hard would it be to contact a friend of the person and have them open the account? Not difficult at all, especially when there is a great deal of interest or attention on some event, like the Casey Anthony trial that just ended this past week.
The horrid steps taken by an outside News of the World investigator in the case of the missing child involved erasing some of the voice messages so that other messages could be left on the phone, in the hope of getting more information. This was way, way over any ethical line known to any decent reporter or human being. By using outsiders, News of the World probably hoped they could be protected from whatever the investigator did, yet still use the information. They were wrong.
So, in the wake of all of this, not only has the newspaper be closed, information has come out about buying of news stories from police officers by the newspaper. There is a lot more to be learned, including the cozy relationships between the newspaper and government officials. Closing the paper, so far, is taken none of the heat away from Murdoch and his company, News Corporation.
In this country, we have yet to go through any major scandal involving reporters and news sources. One clearly could occur, however. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell is married to the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and it is fair to ask if her news coverage was ever affected by her relationship to this once powerful man. Cokie Roberts, formerly of ABC News and still of NPR, is the daughter of a former Congresswoman whose father was also in Congress prior to being killed in a plane crash many years ago. Her ties to the established powers in DC is one reason she had a long career as a news analyst. (She is married to a former journalist.) American government officials and reporters often have ties that strain the bounds of objectivity. Yes, reporters and government officials do jump into bed with each other on occasion, and it is only a matter of time until one of those kinds of relationships causes major problems.
Most reporters in DC and elsewhere endeavor to keep their distance from news sources. Yet, at the top of journalistic pile, reporters become part of the same social circle as the people they cover, often showing up at the same parties and other major events. The White House Correspondent’s Dinner, held once a year, is an occasion where Hollywood, top government officials and reporters and editors pretend they are like one big happy family of the ruling elite. This has to be confusing to people around the nation.
It seems unlikely that a News of the World would happen here, mainly because we don’t have any major newspapers as down and dirty as that one was. Make no mistake, we have our own conflicts and scandals and it is only a matter of time until those chickens come home to roost.
Doug Terry, 7.11.11
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