Journalistic ethics - isn't that a contradiction in terms?

First of all, no. It's an oxymoron. Read your style book.

But on to the news. This News Corp stuff is obviously massive and, as James Fallows says, is turning into a sort of Watergate for our generation (I'd actually say that's probably Wikileaks, but maybe Wikileaks is a Pentagon Papers for our generation...).

I'm going to be all weird and general in this post because I am, of course, an employee of the News Corporation and it's in my contract that I don't go round talking smack about the internal workings of the company. And of course the fact is I know sod all about the internal workings of any of the stuff now under scrutiny. In fact, at the time the most heinous events happened, I was working for News Corp's inquisitor-in-chief the Guardian, whose reporting of all of this has been exemplary.

So just a couple of throwaway thoughts:

1. John Hempton makes an interesting point here about on-record and off-record sourcing, but I think he misses the point slightly. As he puts it, the Murdochs were doing exactly the right thing by not inquiring into the sources of their stories. To do so would be unethical in a proprietor - it's tantamount to meddling in the reporting of the news, and there should be Chinese walls ensuring that such behaviour stops at the editor.

I think that's all well and good, but the problem here as I see it isn't that proprietors should be allowed to quiz their reporters about their sources. I quite agree that's unacceptable. The problem is that proprietors should have both a disinterested, and self-interested, view on how the news they publish is gathered. If you publish material that is poorly sourced--and you don't need to know the identity of a source to know whether something is poorly sourced or not--then you are damaging your publication's credibility and putting yourself on the hook for any legal action that comes about as a result. Ditto if your reporters obtain material through illegal means, make up quotes, etc.

Publications have codes of practice, which are often observed more in the breach than anything else. But I see no problem with a proprietor being involved in crafting that code of practice - in fact, I think it's a good thing, as long as the code is uniformly and broadly applied (no more-ethical-than-usual standards should be enforced for articles relating to the proprietors' mates, for instance). I think we can all agree that News Corp, as a company, badly fell down in failing to inculcate any decent standards, and ignoring breaches of them when they came up.

2. The journalistic standards of Fleet Street have been appalling for too long. I studied on the most respected journalism course in the country--Nick Davies, who broke most of these stories, used to teach there--and I'm shocked to admit that I never had proper training in journalistic ethics while I was there. Simple stuff like the importance of always calling every party you're writing about was simply never taught. I had to learn it on the job.

Equally, publications frequently fall short of their more high-minded standards. Back when the News of the World was tapping Milly Dowler's family's phones, I was working at the Guardian in the wake of the David Kelly dodgy dossier story. There was a big ethics post-mortem at the BBC in relation to this, and the Guardian sent round a similar missive telling journos to always use two sources if something was anonymous, always detail the circumstances of any quote, etc.

I quickly found I was the only one following this. Brief decoder: when you read a news story including a quote and the words "he/she said", 90% of the time the journalist in question has simply read a press release or a newswire story. Strictly speaking, that journalist should declare how they're getting the information--"he/she said in a statement" would be fine, or "he/she was quoted as saying by XYZ"--but almost inevitably they don't. On the other hand, people frequently write the words "he/she told This Publication" as if getting someone to speak is some great achievement, rather than the bare minimum work a journalist should be doing.

I think an interesting dynamic that's happening at the moment is that the internet is leading to a spread of American-style journalistic ethics to a lot of places where they previously didn't flourish. Journalists expect their arguments to be challenged in the comments/blogosphere free-for-all, and I think that means they construct their arguments more carefully now. In additions, UK publications that have previously had pretty shoddy standards are in many cases upping their game to compete for a global readership.

3. There's a huge reconfiguration of ideas of public and private journalistic standards going on in the UK, and I don't think any of us really know where it's going. We seem to have decided that it's wrong for Ryan Giggs to use the law to hide his indiscretions, but it's right for soldiers or victims of terrorist attacks or, of course, grieving relatives to be protected from intrusion. I'm no fan of the rise of super-injunctions, but this emerging standard doesn't really pass the ethical sniff-test--it's a sort of rule-by-Trisha, where if you're beloved in the court of public opinion you deserve protection, but if you're a rich snotty footballer or a fleecing bank boss you don't.

The problem of course is that the rights to privacy and to a free press are ultimately incompatible, so there's never really going to be a neat division between what's right and what's wrong. But I think getting the distinction right depends on being a lot more precise about our definition of the public interest, and I find it hard to believe that Ryan Giggs' sex life would be considered fair game under that standard.

4. This is getting waaay too long. My editor said I've got a 1,000-word limit. Ends.