Jail for Goodman

At a time when the Home Office is struggling with prison places, it seems a little harsh to send Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the News of The World, to jail for tapping the phone of Prince William. However his four month sentence will be seen by many as a serious warning that unwarranted intrusions into people's privacy are likely to attract punishment from the courts and minimal sympathy from the public.
NoW Editor Andy Coulson later resigned, confirming the view of many that an editor should know what is going on in his paper and should not be condoning, implicitly or explicitly such intrusive journalism; journalism that is in clear breach of the PCC's code of practice.
No doubt some will see this sentence as an attack on the freedom of the press and the freedom of journalists to dig for stories. Of course it is nothing of the sort. Goodman's ethods were underhanded and deceitful, intended to dig out stories that would boost circulation rather than reveal information of public importance.
What may be worrying is that a rising revulsion about the methods employed by some journalists might allow the government to clamp down on freedom of information and to limit access to data that might be in the public interest, all in the name of protecting privacy. It is vital journalists behave professionally to prevent giving government the excuse to cut off access to those stories that matter.

Big Brother row

The big story in Media Ethics today is the Big Brother row. It offers some difficulties to journalists in that reporting it risks repeating some of the material that has already drawn so much criticism. If the material is offensive or likely to spark racial hatred when transmitted by Big Brother, the offence is no less if reported by journalists. Most seem to have coped with this problem by concentrating on the row rather than the detail of what caused it.