Rupert Murdoch's Case

When Rupert Murdoch’s 《News of the World》， which was more than one hundred years and was the biggest selling newspaper in United Kingdom1, was suspended of publication because of the phone hacking scandal on July 7, 2011, the British can still said : “ We also have BBC.” However, these days this last solid fortress of British media was fall into serious crisis of trust because of a series of scandals. First scandal is the sexual abuse scandal of Jimmy Savile, who is BBC’s former famous English DJ and television presenter. By 11 October 2012 allegation had been made to 13 British police forces that he was involved in many sexual abuse cases. Victims are more than 200 and most of the victims are under-age female teenagers2. Soon after this, one of BBC’s famous program, the Newsnight, attempted to shelve this scandal to protect BBC’s reputation. Furthermore, the Newsnight reported fake child abuse news of Lord McAlpine, a prominent Conservative. As a result of this series of scandal, the director-General of BBC, George Entwistle, apologized for what had happened and further internal investigation would take place, he also quit his job after these. On the internet, many British netizens discussed that can we trust BBC any more?

Before Entwistle’s resign, on October 23th, 2012, he said directly that it was BBC’s cultural atmosphere and bureaucratic structure made this kind of scandal happened. There are too many hierarchy and the organization is overstaffing, this kind of structure made it very hard to manage all the aspect of the organization so that the staff may not observe the professional ethic. As a result of this series of scandal, Newsnight was fall into internal investigated and the BBC is going to carry out a series of thoroughly, structural reform to rebuild their reputation.

At the same time, a book named << Can We Trust the BBC? >> written by Robin Aitken was sold very well these days. Robin Aitken was a former journalist and staff of BBC, he had worked for BBC for more than 15 years. According to his real work experience and personal observation during his working period, he queried about BBC’s fairness of news report. He believed that even BBC was regarded as one of the most impartial and disengaged news media of the world, there are also bias and position within BBC3. He used lots of evidence to query the position of BBC on a series of event, such as Iraq war, abortion and racialism. He also discussed the ethic position of BBC. This book is also applicative to many other news media.

Beside BBC’s scandal, I also remembered some scandals of different news media in different countries, such as NewYork Times’ economic journalist plagiarize other newspaper’s article, some Chinese media keep silence facing with some poignant news. The I searched online about media scandals, I found that there are plentiful of scandals such as fake news, bias and hide almost in every country. After