Phone hacking

Sometimes someone’s tragedy is exposed and the question is: whom does it serve to help?

Victims’ stories come in different packages. Some are valid in seeking justice but others, like the celebrity bandwagon, seek attention just for the sake of it.

Getting a good story at any price might please some unscrupulous editor or newspaper proprietor and a hunger for increasing circulation and beating off competitors, but surely good journalism stands for different values?

It might not be cool to be honest, but deception crawls out of the gutter.

Phone hacking is underhand.

It sets up a politician or public figure, exposes some wrongdoing and the scandal is revealed to a public that shows contempt.

Then there are the myths and the things people want to believe, or are led to believe, are true.

Where it becomes despicable is when media activities interfere with or directly obstruct the course of law.

The media has an important role to play covering stories that require accuracy and sensitivity.

They need to be responsible if they are to be taken seriously and sensationalism can never replace the truth.

Murder is a crime, but so too are the activities of those individuals and organisations whose actions cause great distress to people who have already suffered a great deal.

For too long the unscrupulous has become the acceptable and the control and power they exert has been unchallenged. Now it is time for change.

Bernie Walsh, Coxhoe.

THE Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers The News of the World and The Sun have been a national disgrace for many years now.

They have belittled people, smeared innocent people and scape-goated innocent people, including genuine asylum seekers and various other groups who are in a vulnerable position in society and find it difficult to fight back.

They have also lied time and time again, Liverpool still remembers the appalling lies The Sun told over the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, and the notorious Swan Bake story, when asylum seekers were blamed for killing royal swans, in what turned out to be a complete work of fictition.

The scandalous case of hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone and the false hope her family got as a result should be the last straw. It also turns out that the parents of murdered Soham girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman have been visited by police investigating phone-hacking by journalists.

What these familes have gone through is terrible enough without these revelations.

If Murdoch is found in any way to be associated with this, criminal proceedings must start immediately, as they also should against Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch’s son, if they are also found to be involved.

Even if they are not found to be culpable over the phone hacking, there can be no doubt that they have presided over newspapers with very poor ethical and moral standards.

Peter Sagar, Heaton.

IF the current allegations are correct, then the phone hacking antics of The News of The World or its agents have plunged into a deep dark abyss.

The alleged hacking of the phones of helpless victims of serious crime is not only morally abhorrent but a serious crime in itself.

No doubt the police investigation will identify those responsible who should have the full weight of the law meted upon them.

However, let’s look at why these crimes are committed. The most obvious one is revenue.

More papers equals more sales equals more money.

The other is to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the public for gossip. As this gossip becomes greater in its content then the public’s appetite for it grows. I have always condemned the general obsession with celebrity. This development appears to be the spawn of that obsession.

The general public now has a chance to rectify a situation that they have created by boycotting red tops and glossy magazines filled with drivel.

Colin T Mortimer, Pity Me.