Unethical journalistic behaviour is something that diminishes all of us

In the week that's in it, without a hint of scandal in the government, the church, the banks, the judiciary (God forbid), soccer (no bungs), planning, I suppose it is inescapable that we in the press (journos, hacks, scribblers) should take a look into our own souls. Or to have somebody else at least have a good look into our chest cavaties to see if we have a heart, never mind a soul. The media is the latest sector of society to come under the microscope and it doesn't take long for a lot of creepy crawlies to show themselves. May I offer a few quotations to help the reader reach some understanding of what we are and what other people think of us. Just imagine, I've got to almost 100 words and haven't mentioned the News of the World yet. There, I've done it. Got it off the chest without getting to page 3. "Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description" (Anna Quindlen); "Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive" (G K Chesterton); "Generally speaking, the best people nowadays go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the s**ts into law" (Auberon Waugh); "Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers won't object to" (Helen Swaffer); "I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers" (Gandhi); "The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability" (Nicholas Tomalin, formerly Sunday Times); "If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim'" (Lyndon B Johnson); "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper" (Thomas Jefferson); "I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets" (Napoleon); "Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation" (George Bernard Shaw); "To make informed decisions, free men and women require honest and reliable news about events affecting their countries and their lives" (Rupert Murdoch, 2009). You almost missed the last one, didn't you? That was THE Rupert Murdoch of News of the World fame, whose underlings hacked a few thousand mobile phones, including those of murdered children and their families, and the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Should we be surprised at the depths to which some people in journalism have sunk in their quest to fill front pages? Of course not. Many newspaper readers love this kind of thing - the exposure of the philandering 'celebrity', the pretence of comforting the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable, the giving of a blind eye to the hypocrisy of a newspaper which defends all freedoms, but is often misogynist in the extreme. You may have been one of the 133,256 purchasers, or 529,000 readers, of the News of the World in the Republic. And do you stand back in horror that your tuppenceworth funded the trawling of voicemails of the victims of tragedies? The NOTW was in the business of sleaze. We all knew that. Their sort of journalism has nothing to do with ethics or decent and humane behaviour. It is to do with the insatiable appetite for profits - at all costs. Could it happen here? Of course it could. Elements of the media in the Republic have been guilty of gross invasions of privacy, the 'exposure' and harassment of people who have made ordinary human mistakes, the 'exposure' and harassment of people who have made no mistake at all (think of the woman who happened to be in Liam Lawlor's car when it crashed in Moscow, and when both their names were wrongly dragged through the muck), the photographing of a victim of drowning in the Liffey, and the sensationalising of crime (frightening the hell out of everyone while blithely ignoring the fact that rates in many categories of crime are going down). Newspapers and private radio stations cannot operate without making profits. That is a hard fact of business life. But it is how those profits are made that is important in a free and democratic society, and the NOTW has diminished all of us with its criminality and unethical behaviour. Whether the tens of thousands who buy other News International publications on a weekly basis might reconsider their purchase of another of Mr Murdoch's papers by way of making a protest over what his company has been up to is something that remains to be seen.