Two years ago,Rupert Murdoch’s daughter,Elisabeth,spoke of the“unsettling dearth of integrity across so many of our institutions”Integrity had collapsed,she argued,because of a collective acceptance that the only“sorting mechanism”in society should be profit and the market.But“it’s us,human beings,we the people who create the society we want,not profit”.
Driving her point home,she continued:“It’s increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose,of a moral language within government,media or business could become one of the most dangerous foals for capitalism and freedom.”This same absence of moral purpose was wounding companies such as News International,shield thought,making it more likely that it would lose its way as it had with widespread illegal telephone hacking.
As the hacking trial concludes–finding guilty ones-editor of the News of the World,Andy Coulson,for conspiring to hack phones,and finding his predecessor,Rebekah Brooks,innocent of the same charge–the winder issue of dearth of integrity still standstill,Journalists are known to have hacked the phones of up to 5,500 people.This is hacking on an industrial scale,as was acknowledged by Glenn Mulcaire,the man hired by the News of the World in 2001 to be the point person for phone hacking.Others await trial.This long story still unfolds.
In many respects,the dearth of moral purpose frames not only the fact of such widespread phone hacking but the terms on which the trial took place.One of the astonishing revelations was how little Rebekah Brooks knew of what went on in her newsroom,wow little she thought to ask and the fact that she never inquired wow the stories arrived.The core of her successful defence was that she knew nothing.
In today’s world,title has become normal that well—paid executives should not be accountable for what happens in the organizations that they run perhaps we should not be so surprised.For a generation,the collective doctrine has been that the sorting mechanism of society should be profit.The words that have mattered are efficiency,flexibility,shareholder value,business–friendly,wealth generation,sales,impact and,in newspapers,circulation.Words degraded to the margin have been justice fairness,tolerance,proportionality and accountability.
The purpose of editing the News of the World was not to promote reader understanding to be fair in what was written or to betray any common humanity.It was to ruin lives in the quest for circulation and impact.Ms Brooks may or may not have had suspicions about how her journalists got their stories,but she asked no questions,gave no instructions—nor received traceable,recorded answers.
It can be inferred from Paragraph 3 that
推理判断第三段第一句指出，Andy Coulson因为参与手机黑客案件被裁定有罪，然而他的前任却被认定是无罪的。通过这一事件，作者得出的结论是（as hacking trial concludes）：由此造成的诚信缺失广泛问题依然存在（the wider issue of dearth of integrity still stands）,即仍然存在一些人没有被裁定有罪。接着文章指出了在新闻业中，已经有记者被认定非法侵入用户手机。而还有一些在等待审判（others await trial），由此
