By Michael IrelandSenior Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
THE VATICAN (ANS) -- The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano
has weighed in on the News of the World hacking scandal, saying it shows the urgent need for ethics both in the media industry and in general culture, according to an online article by Edward Pentin at www.Catholicherald.co.uk .
Pentin says that in an editorial for tomorrow’s edition, the newspaper suggested that the victims of the phone tapping scandal were not just those directly affected but also the general public and the communication industry itself.
Pentin writes: “Public opinion suffered because it was ‘deprived of truth in the information to which it was entitled,’ the newspaper said. But it added the industry was also a victim ‘because it takes away the prestige and credibility of journalism which is essential to free and democratic societies.’”
“This incident confirms the need and urgency, underscored by the Pope in his message for 42nd World Day of Social Communications, to require greater ethical consideration in the media, which cannot only submit to the dictates of economic and political strategies,” read the editorial, penned by Spanish media specialist, Fr José María Gil Tamayo.
Pentin says Tamayo quoted the message in which the Pope said it was “essential” that social communications “should assiduously defend the person and fully respect human dignity.” The Pope noted in the message that “many people” now think “there is a need, in this sphere, for “info-ethics,” just as we have bioethics in the field of medicine and in scientific research linked to life.”
Pentin writes that the Vatican newspaper said that civil society and especially the media need to “introduce a real code of ethics” that respects the “authentic natural and inviolable dignity of the human person”. In today’s “complex, pervasive and decisive” media environment, it said, only a society that takes such ethical considerations seriously would be able to properly exercise the “right of information.”
The Vatican newspaper proposed that such a code of conduct needs to be translated into “forms of self-control and legal protection, a true “ecology” (or ethical health) of social communication which is essential for a proper and free democratic coexistence.”
But, Pentin writes, the Vatican newspaper stressed in closing that an injection of ethics cannot happen without taking into account the moral state and health of society, which the media informs upon, and whose beliefs and behavior it contributes to shaping.
“The ethical weakness of a society, fed also by moral relativism, has always had harmful consequences in all areas of human life,” the editorial said. It creates “a weakness from which social communications is unable to free itself,” but is instead worsened by a lack of a code of ethics which “makes the consequences even broader.”
“The anthropological and ethical deficiencies that certain ideologies have left behind are a sad legacy to contemporary society which can be overcome only with a sincere and humble return to the true moral and legal reality,” Fr Tamayo wrote.
And this, he said, must come from God who, “being the foundation, can not be ruled out.”
William Oddie, also writing for www.Catholicherald.co.uk , says taking away Rupert Murdoch
’s papal knighthood would be “unpleasantly self-righteous.
”
“We’re supposed not to avoid sinners,” he says.
In his article, Oddie asks: “Should Cavaliere Murdoch have his papal knighthood rescinded?”
“My feeling is that it wouldn’t do much good: he gave a lot of money (probably at the instance of his then wife, who was a Catholic, and who at the same time was made a papal dame) after he donated $10 million to help build Los Angeles Catholic cathedral. Just cancelling the knighthood simply gives the impression of futile censoriousness. If we made a mistake in giving him a papal knighthood in the first place, it won’t be undone by taking it away now.”
Oddie writes that taking away Murdoch’s papal knighthood, “(It ) also gives the idea we shouldn’t have anything to do with people who do bad things. Actually it’s just what we’re supposed to do. When I was writing regularly for the Daily Mail, I had an amusing invitation to write a piece for the Sun. Well, it was the way the invitation was put that was amusing: the proposed piece was actually quite serious. ‘What,’ the chap said, ‘do you think of the way the local council [or somebody of that sort] at Newquay is going around the beaches and distributing condoms to 12-year-old girls? It isn’t right, is it?’ ‘Well, no,’ I replied. ‘It definitely is not right.’ ‘That’s what we thought,’ he said. ‘But why? Would you write a piece explaining why it isn’t right?’ ‘Well, certainly,’ I said. It was to be a long piece, a full page: for the Sun, that is of epic proportions. ‘Could you get it in today?’ He said: ‘Next week, we’re doing a big feature, with the headline ‘Nookie in Newquay.’”
Oddie comments: “You couldn’t make it up.”
“Well,” says Oddie, “I wrote the piece, which went down well, I was told, and a few weeks later, I got another phone call. They were going to run a story about two girls who had gone on holiday on the Costa del Sol and had decided (as a kind of holiday task) to try to clock up, during their seven days, sex with at least 40 different men between them. ‘It isn’t right,’ said the chap, ‘is it.’ No, I said, ‘it isn’t right.’ ‘But why?’ he said; ‘Why isn’t it right?’ Would I write a piece explaining Why it wasn’t right.”
Oddie writes, “That, too, went down well, it seemed; but I was getting a little puzzled. Why, if they were so disapproving of these activities, were they running stories about them in the first place, thus giving such behavior a kind of popular currency? So I asked them about it. The answer was simple. They worked for the Sun: those were the kind of stories the Sun did. But they also had young families: and that somehow gave them this instinctive feeling that ‘it wasn’t right.’ I wrote another couple of pieces of the same sort for them, one of which appeared when Rupert Murdoch was in this country on one of his flying visits. After that one appeared, I got an awestruck phone call. ‘You’ll never guess who told us he liked your piece,’ he said. ‘No, who?’ ‘Are you sitting down?’ he said ‘Yes.’ ‘Well. It was [lowered voice] MR MURDOCH. What do you think of that? That’s not bad is it? Well done!’ You would have thought that he was telling me I’d been awarded the OM, or was going to be invited on to Desert Island Discs.
Oddie says the then editor of the Sun was sacked shortly after that, so he got no more of these invitations; but when, shortly thereafter, Rupert Murdoch
was given his papal knighthood, Oddie hadn’t quite got the heart to join in the chorus of condemnation from Catholic public opinion.
“Publicans and sinners, I thought, publicans and sinners; we’re not supposed to hold ourselves aloof. And so I think now. That papal knighthood was never taken as meaning that the Church approved of page three girls or of stories about ‘Nookie in Newquay.’ I don’t know quite what it did mean; maybe it was an encouragement to stick with his Catholic wife; if so, it failed, because he later divorced her and remarried,” Oddie writes.
He continues: “But if we’re now to take this papal honor off him because of what some of his journalists have so appallingly done, are we not taking it on ourselves to declare his guilt for something he claims (almost certainly truthfully) not to have known was going on? Similarly with Andy Coulson and Rebekah Wade. The editor of a newspaper, said the ghastly (sorry, but I think he is) Ken Livingstone
last week, either knows what’s going on in his newsroom, or if he doesn’t, he’s just incompetent. As a former editor of a much smaller newspaper, I can state authoritatively that there was no hacking of telephones at the Catholic Herald
in my time. But that’s because my staff was so small I knew my journalists well enough to be certain they wouldn’t do that. On a huge paper the size of the News of the World that just can’t be the case.”
Oddie suggests: “So, let’s not be in too much of a hurry to spread the guilt around as widely as possible. That the journalists who carried out these really vile acts, especially the tapping of the phones of the bereaved, have been guilty of something really despicable, is clear enough.”
He continued: “But it is pretty clear, too, that most of the journalists who lost their jobs when the News of the World was closed down this week have paid the price for crimes committed by other people, as a direct result of the deeply unattractive tendency of the British people to whip themselves up overnight into a moralistic frenzy which can only be appeased by such dramatic (and in this case wantonly destructive) gestures. The death of a paper founded over a century and a half ago to cater for an audience which had previously been ignored – that is, the poor – has to be seen, whatever its remaining faults, as a tragic event. As the Times said this week, the News of the World was the first newspaper to appeal to the newly literate working class. It still catered for its working-class audience, an audience addressed by the press of no other European country. Of course some of its content was pretty nasty. But much of it wasn’t (the curate’s egg comes to mind).”
Oddie concludes: “Personally, I wouldn’t have it in the house. But many others, who rarely read anything else, still did: it was their one tenuous link with regular functioning literacy. Now it has gone. There are quite a lot of people around in all this whose behavior seems to me dubious to say the least. Those who are now crowing at the disappearance of this historic paper are among them.”
Church of England retains stake in Murdoch empire
Meanwhile, the Church of England
is to retain its £9 million investment in Rupert Murdoch
’s media empire in the hope that the share price will rise again if all his British newspapers are sold or closed.
Tim Ross, Religious Affairs Editor for The Telegraph
newspaper (www.telegraph.co.uk ) says the Church Commissioners, who manage the Church of England’s £5.3 billion investments portfolio, owns shares in both News Corp and BSkyB.
Ross reports that they have come under pressure from senior Anglicans
to pull out of Murdoch-owned companies in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal on the grounds that continuing to invest is unethical and “embarrassing.”
According to Ross, Andreas Whittam Smith, the first church estates commissioner, acknowledged that the issue posed a “ticklish” dilemma for the investment fund.
But he suggested that selling the Church’s £3.8 million of shares in News Corp and £5.3 million invested in BSkyB, which is part-owned by Mr Murdoch, could waste an opportunity to make money, Ross reported.
Whittam Smith told the Church’s national assembly, the General Synod, in York: “A premature sale of News Corp and BSkyB might just be simply very bad timing.
“I don't argue with anything that anybody is saying about them but I think it must be possible that News Corp will get rid of its entire British holdings of newspapers.
“If it is to do so, first of all the problem would have vanished from the point of view of the parent company, and for us as investors, and the shares will certainly bounce up again. So it is a ticklish area.”
Ross reported that Whittam Smith’s remarks follow protests from clergy over the Church’s continued investment in Murdoch’s media businesses.
He writes that the Church’s ethical investment advisory group wrote to Murdoch last week demanding that his senior executives -- such as Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International -- should be held to account for “gross failures in management” at the News of the World.
The Sunday tabloid was closed last week after disclosures that it had been involved in hacking the mobile phone voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler.
Whittam Smith, a former Daily Telegraph City editor and founding editor of The Independent newspaper, said he wished the Church’s ethical investment officers the “best of luck” in their discussions with News Corp about the scandal.
“I do wish them the best of luck in talking to Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah whatsit,” he said. “It won't be easy, and I do not volunteer to be part of the team.”
has weighed in on the News of the World hacking scandal, saying it shows the urgent need for ethics both in the media industry and in general culture, according to an online article by Edward Pentin at www.Catholicherald.co.uk .Pentin says that in an editorial for tomorrow’s edition, the newspaper suggested that the victims of the phone tapping scandal were not just those directly affected but also the general public and the communication industry itself.
Pentin writes: “Public opinion suffered because it was ‘deprived of truth in the information to which it was entitled,’ the newspaper said. But it added the industry was also a victim ‘because it takes away the prestige and credibility of journalism which is essential to free and democratic societies.’”
“This incident confirms the need and urgency, underscored by the Pope in his message for 42nd World Day of Social Communications, to require greater ethical consideration in the media, which cannot only submit to the dictates of economic and political strategies,” read the editorial, penned by Spanish media specialist, Fr José María Gil Tamayo.
Pentin says Tamayo quoted the message in which the Pope said it was “essential” that social communications “should assiduously defend the person and fully respect human dignity.” The Pope noted in the message that “many people” now think “there is a need, in this sphere, for “info-ethics,” just as we have bioethics in the field of medicine and in scientific research linked to life.”
Pentin writes that the Vatican newspaper said that civil society and especially the media need to “introduce a real code of ethics” that respects the “authentic natural and inviolable dignity of the human person”. In today’s “complex, pervasive and decisive” media environment, it said, only a society that takes such ethical considerations seriously would be able to properly exercise the “right of information.”
The Vatican newspaper proposed that such a code of conduct needs to be translated into “forms of self-control and legal protection, a true “ecology” (or ethical health) of social communication which is essential for a proper and free democratic coexistence.”
But, Pentin writes, the Vatican newspaper stressed in closing that an injection of ethics cannot happen without taking into account the moral state and health of society, which the media informs upon, and whose beliefs and behavior it contributes to shaping.
“The ethical weakness of a society, fed also by moral relativism, has always had harmful consequences in all areas of human life,” the editorial said. It creates “a weakness from which social communications is unable to free itself,” but is instead worsened by a lack of a code of ethics which “makes the consequences even broader.”
“The anthropological and ethical deficiencies that certain ideologies have left behind are a sad legacy to contemporary society which can be overcome only with a sincere and humble return to the true moral and legal reality,” Fr Tamayo wrote.
And this, he said, must come from God who, “being the foundation, can not be ruled out.”
Strip Murdoch of Papal Knighthood? -- Not necessarily
’s papal knighthood would be “unpleasantly self-righteous.”
“We’re supposed not to avoid sinners,” he says.
In his article, Oddie asks: “Should Cavaliere Murdoch have his papal knighthood rescinded?”
“My feeling is that it wouldn’t do much good: he gave a lot of money (probably at the instance of his then wife, who was a Catholic, and who at the same time was made a papal dame) after he donated $10 million to help build Los Angeles Catholic cathedral. Just cancelling the knighthood simply gives the impression of futile censoriousness. If we made a mistake in giving him a papal knighthood in the first place, it won’t be undone by taking it away now.”
Oddie writes that taking away Murdoch’s papal knighthood, “(It ) also gives the idea we shouldn’t have anything to do with people who do bad things. Actually it’s just what we’re supposed to do. When I was writing regularly for the Daily Mail, I had an amusing invitation to write a piece for the Sun. Well, it was the way the invitation was put that was amusing: the proposed piece was actually quite serious. ‘What,’ the chap said, ‘do you think of the way the local council [or somebody of that sort] at Newquay is going around the beaches and distributing condoms to 12-year-old girls? It isn’t right, is it?’ ‘Well, no,’ I replied. ‘It definitely is not right.’ ‘That’s what we thought,’ he said. ‘But why? Would you write a piece explaining why it isn’t right?’ ‘Well, certainly,’ I said. It was to be a long piece, a full page: for the Sun, that is of epic proportions. ‘Could you get it in today?’ He said: ‘Next week, we’re doing a big feature, with the headline ‘Nookie in Newquay.’”
Oddie comments: “You couldn’t make it up.”
“Well,” says Oddie, “I wrote the piece, which went down well, I was told, and a few weeks later, I got another phone call. They were going to run a story about two girls who had gone on holiday on the Costa del Sol and had decided (as a kind of holiday task) to try to clock up, during their seven days, sex with at least 40 different men between them. ‘It isn’t right,’ said the chap, ‘is it.’ No, I said, ‘it isn’t right.’ ‘But why?’ he said; ‘Why isn’t it right?’ Would I write a piece explaining Why it wasn’t right.”
Oddie writes, “That, too, went down well, it seemed; but I was getting a little puzzled. Why, if they were so disapproving of these activities, were they running stories about them in the first place, thus giving such behavior a kind of popular currency? So I asked them about it. The answer was simple. They worked for the Sun: those were the kind of stories the Sun did. But they also had young families: and that somehow gave them this instinctive feeling that ‘it wasn’t right.’ I wrote another couple of pieces of the same sort for them, one of which appeared when Rupert Murdoch was in this country on one of his flying visits. After that one appeared, I got an awestruck phone call. ‘You’ll never guess who told us he liked your piece,’ he said. ‘No, who?’ ‘Are you sitting down?’ he said ‘Yes.’ ‘Well. It was [lowered voice] MR MURDOCH. What do you think of that? That’s not bad is it? Well done!’ You would have thought that he was telling me I’d been awarded the OM, or was going to be invited on to Desert Island Discs.
Oddie says the then editor of the Sun was sacked shortly after that, so he got no more of these invitations; but when, shortly thereafter, Rupert Murdoch
was given his papal knighthood, Oddie hadn’t quite got the heart to join in the chorus of condemnation from Catholic public opinion.“Publicans and sinners, I thought, publicans and sinners; we’re not supposed to hold ourselves aloof. And so I think now. That papal knighthood was never taken as meaning that the Church approved of page three girls or of stories about ‘Nookie in Newquay.’ I don’t know quite what it did mean; maybe it was an encouragement to stick with his Catholic wife; if so, it failed, because he later divorced her and remarried,” Oddie writes.
He continues: “But if we’re now to take this papal honor off him because of what some of his journalists have so appallingly done, are we not taking it on ourselves to declare his guilt for something he claims (almost certainly truthfully) not to have known was going on? Similarly with Andy Coulson and Rebekah Wade. The editor of a newspaper, said the ghastly (sorry, but I think he is) Ken Livingstone
last week, either knows what’s going on in his newsroom, or if he doesn’t, he’s just incompetent. As a former editor of a much smaller newspaper, I can state authoritatively that there was no hacking of telephones at the Catholic Herald in my time. But that’s because my staff was so small I knew my journalists well enough to be certain they wouldn’t do that. On a huge paper the size of the News of the World that just can’t be the case.”Oddie suggests: “So, let’s not be in too much of a hurry to spread the guilt around as widely as possible. That the journalists who carried out these really vile acts, especially the tapping of the phones of the bereaved, have been guilty of something really despicable, is clear enough.”
He continued: “But it is pretty clear, too, that most of the journalists who lost their jobs when the News of the World was closed down this week have paid the price for crimes committed by other people, as a direct result of the deeply unattractive tendency of the British people to whip themselves up overnight into a moralistic frenzy which can only be appeased by such dramatic (and in this case wantonly destructive) gestures. The death of a paper founded over a century and a half ago to cater for an audience which had previously been ignored – that is, the poor – has to be seen, whatever its remaining faults, as a tragic event. As the Times said this week, the News of the World was the first newspaper to appeal to the newly literate working class. It still catered for its working-class audience, an audience addressed by the press of no other European country. Of course some of its content was pretty nasty. But much of it wasn’t (the curate’s egg comes to mind).”
Oddie concludes: “Personally, I wouldn’t have it in the house. But many others, who rarely read anything else, still did: it was their one tenuous link with regular functioning literacy. Now it has gone. There are quite a lot of people around in all this whose behavior seems to me dubious to say the least. Those who are now crowing at the disappearance of this historic paper are among them.”
Church of England retains stake in Murdoch empire
Meanwhile, the Church of England
is to retain its £9 million investment in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in the hope that the share price will rise again if all his British newspapers are sold or closed.Tim Ross, Religious Affairs Editor for The Telegraph
newspaper (www.telegraph.co.uk ) says the Church Commissioners, who manage the Church of England’s £5.3 billion investments portfolio, owns shares in both News Corp and BSkyB.Ross reports that they have come under pressure from senior Anglicans
to pull out of Murdoch-owned companies in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal on the grounds that continuing to invest is unethical and “embarrassing.”According to Ross, Andreas Whittam Smith, the first church estates commissioner, acknowledged that the issue posed a “ticklish” dilemma for the investment fund.
But he suggested that selling the Church’s £3.8 million of shares in News Corp and £5.3 million invested in BSkyB, which is part-owned by Mr Murdoch, could waste an opportunity to make money, Ross reported.
Whittam Smith told the Church’s national assembly, the General Synod, in York: “A premature sale of News Corp and BSkyB might just be simply very bad timing.
“I don't argue with anything that anybody is saying about them but I think it must be possible that News Corp will get rid of its entire British holdings of newspapers.
“If it is to do so, first of all the problem would have vanished from the point of view of the parent company, and for us as investors, and the shares will certainly bounce up again. So it is a ticklish area.”
Ross reported that Whittam Smith’s remarks follow protests from clergy over the Church’s continued investment in Murdoch’s media businesses.
He writes that the Church’s ethical investment advisory group wrote to Murdoch last week demanding that his senior executives -- such as Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International -- should be held to account for “gross failures in management” at the News of the World.
The Sunday tabloid was closed last week after disclosures that it had been involved in hacking the mobile phone voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler.
Whittam Smith, a former Daily Telegraph
City editor and founding editor of The Independent newspaper, said he wished the Church’s ethical investment officers the “best of luck” in their discussions with News Corp about the scandal.“I do wish them the best of luck in talking to Rupert Murdoch
, James Murdoch and Rebekah whatsit,” he said. “It won't be easy, and I do not volunteer to be part of the team.”
Michael Ireland is Senior Correspondent for ANS. He is an international British freelance journalist who was formerly a reporter with a London (United Kingdom) newspaper and has been a frequent contributor to UCB UK, a British Christian radio station. While in the UK, Michael traveled to Canada and the United States, Albania,Yugoslavia, Holland, Germany,and Czechoslovakia. He has reported for ANS from Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, Jordan, China,and Russia. Michael's volunteer involvement with ASSIST News Service is a sponsored ministry department -- 'Michael Ireland Media Missionary' (MIMM) -- of A.C.T. International of P.O.Box 1649, Brentwood, TN 37024-1649, at: Artists in Christian Testimony (A.C.T.) International where you can donate online to support his stated mission of 'Truth Through Christian Journalism.' If you have a news or feature story idea for Michael, please contact him at: ANS Senior Reporter
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