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.
Which of the following is suggested in the last paragraph?
推理判断作者在最后一段前两句话指出，新闻报道的目的不是为了促进读者的理解，也不是为了追求公平或者违背人类共有的人性，而是通过追求发行量的影响率来破坏人们的生活。即文章从一开始指出的一个问题，为了追求利益而造成了诚信的丧失。从“ruin”一词可以看出，作者对新闻记者的这一行为持否定的态度。并且通过Ms.Brooks女士的行为加以佐证。作者通过正话反说的方式，突出新闻报道过程中诚信的重要性。故正确答案为选项C moral awareness matters in editing a newspap
