British Media Scandals: honest mistakes or deliberate unforgiveable actions?
The scandals that have surrounded the British media all stem from the need to sell a story. Whether the story is false, over-exaggerated or fabricated from an invasion of personal privacy, the British press have seen it all.
The 2011 Phone Hacking Scandal was perhaps one of the biggest media controversies of our time. Top British journalists made the career destroying move by hacking into the voicemails of celebrities, footballers and even Milly Dowler, a kidnapped child who was murdered, all in the hope of getting a story.
This blatant invasion of privacy resulted in one of the biggest British public enquiries, known as the Leveson Enquiry, where top bosses lost their jobs and the newspaper the News of the World got shutdown. The inquiry reportedly cost up to £100 million, and in response to this, British journalists earnt a bad reputation. Even today, some will not buy any newspaper connected to the scandal, particularly newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch as he was directly affiliated with the scandal.
The unforgiveable invasion of privacy proved just how far the British media would go just to sell as story. Yet due to this major scandal, has it resulted in a sense of distrust between the media and the public?
A further example of public outrage regarding the media was the Sun’s notorious reporting on the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989. The infamous front page wrote under the headline ‘The Truth’, that, “Some fans picked pockets of victims, Some fans urinated on the brave cops, Some fans beat up PCs giving the kiss of life”.
Unsurprisingly, the national outrage that the Sun dared to blame the fans for such a tragedy proved so great that more than 30 years later, some still will never buy the Sun again. Of course, journalists make mistakes, yet the deliberate blaming of the traumatised victims on that fateful day is beyond unacceptable.
We know the role of a newspaper is to inform the public of news, yet the clear disregard for any moral obligations regarding privacy or decency proves the lengths the media, particularly tabloid newspapers, will go to sell a story and make money.
The obsession with celebrities and their private lives in the early 2000s proved the lengths that the British media would go in order to get a story. But the real question is, has the media learnt its lesson from such detrimental scandals?
