Any hope senior New Limited executives might have harboured that fallout from the phone hacking scandal might be quarantined in the UK seems to be fading. The Nation, an openly progressive weekly, has republished a 2008 report in which a former executive of Fox News, which is openly conservative, alleged that the network engaged in phone hacking.
This comes after the FBI last week announced it was launching an investigation. The investigation was prompted by allegations by a New York City police officer, who claimed he was offered payment to hack into the phone records of victims of the 9/11 attacks, and/or their families.
One fascinating contribution to the debate was made last week by disgraced media mogul, Conrad Black, who once owned The Age. Writing in the Financial Times, Black compared Murdoch to another “great bad man”, Napoleon. Black paints a vivid and ambivalent picture of a powerful man, but lays the blame elsewhere: “The fault is the British establishment’s and it must not be seduced and intimidated, so profoundly and durably, again.”
In this video of a Wheeler Centre event from February 2010, a panel of journalists, chaired by former editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, discuss the importance of ethics to the business of journalism.
