Sunday Times reporting:
RANDOM THOUGHTS | By Neville de Silva
The fiasco over the reported widespread phone-hacking of public and private figures by the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World truly epitomizes what critics have been saying about the steady decline in the ethical and professional standards of Britishjournalism.
Those who have kept a weather-eye on the British media over the years-and that has included several media and academic institutions in Britain too- warned a long time back about the perceptible deterioration in journalistic standards from the days when British journalism was among the best in the world and boasted professionals any media organization would have been proud to have working for them. Several individual editors and journalists come to mind, several of them from the prestigious “Guardian”- previously the Manchester Guardian- of which I was Colombo correspondent some 40 years or so ago.
But over the years professional standards continued to drop-and there are several reasons for this including the pressure from TV and more recently its 24-hour news cycle-which worried professional bodies and media training organizations. The recent shenanigans by the News of the World which led to its closure of this 168-year old tabloid is but one, albeit perhaps the most far reaching in its consequences, in a long line of media misdemeanours that has troubled British journalism and brought it into disrepute in the UK and elsewhere.
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/110717/News/nws_80.html
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