With the recent indictments of top editors at News Corporation’s News of the World, analysts say the company will eventually pay out over a billion dollars in fines and lawsuits related to the phone hacking scandal.
The effect on British newspapers will be long lasting.
What is becoming clear, media analysts say, is that the push-the-legal-limits newsroom culture that has gone untrammeled for years at the British tabloids and has even found its way into some of the country’s upmarket broadsheets, including Mr. Murdoch’s Times and Sunday Times, could be a casualty of a new culture of caution…
…Already, some who work at British newspapers say, the scandal has had a chilling effect on newsrooms, with editors, reporters and their proprietors less eager to trumpet splashy exposes that might involve, or be perceived to involve, less than ethical standards of news gathering…
One tabloid journalist, who insisted on anonymity because of concern for his job, lamented what he called the end of the “anything goes” era. “Before, it was a case of ‘Don’t tell me how you get it, just get it,’ ” he said. “Now things are looked at differently.”…
…Media critics say the legacy of the “yellow journalism” of turn-of-the-20th-century America has migrated in recent decades to Fleet Street, the traditional home in London of many of Britain’s most powerful papers. Many editors and reporters nurtured in that culture have migrated abroad, some of them to Murdoch-owned papers in America, Australia and elsewhere, taking their no-holds-barred attitudes with them.
Some critics say Mr. Murdoch’s London tabloids, The Sun and The News of the World, and rivals here that compete for the same scoop-hungry readership of millions, have set a grim and degrading standard of journalism that will not be missed.
Interestingly, some media analysts from both the left and right urge caution as England reviews its journalism culture and regulations.
They fear that overaggressive prosecutions on journalism practices will creep their way up the publishing hierarchy, affecting not just the tabloids behind the phone hacking and checkbook journalism (ie, paying sources for scoops) scandals, but also the aggressive — and legitimate — journalism practiced by more staid broadsheets.
![futurejournalismproject:
Risky Business
In a study of murdered journalists around the world, it’s local journalists covering politics that bare the most risk.
Via National Geographic:
Since 1992, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) calculates that 918 journalists have been killed, for simply doing their job in the ‘wrong place’ at the wrong time. Top of the list of danger hotspots for journalists is (perhaps not surprisingly) Iraq, with 151 ‘motive confirmed’ killings since 1992. The Philippines exhibit the next highest number of journalist killings with 72, followed by Algeria with 60; Russia with 53, and Colombia with 43 (unexpectedly, Afghanistan trails in at number 10 on the index, with 24).
These figures differ from many other indices reporting violence against journalists because the CPJ investigates each journalist death and includes the case in the ‘motive confirmed’ index only if they are confident that the journalist was murdered in reprisal for his or her work, or was killed while completing a dangerous assignment such as reporting on a combat situation or a street protest…
…While many of these are foreign journalists, reporting on conflicts, political instability, civil unrest, or corruption for the audience back home, local journalists face much higher stakes. In fact, local journalists are almost seven times more likely to be killed for doing their jobs than foreign journalists…
…[W]hat is the riskiest subject for a journalist to cover? The CPJ finds it to be politics; 40% of journalists killed were on the political beat, compared to 34% covering war. Keep in mind that although 34% of journalists were covering war when they were killed, only 18% of journalist deaths were actually a result of cross-fire or other combat-zone causes. Some 70% were reprisals – covering war can be dangerous in more ways than might be expected. Local journalists in particular are at high risk of reprisals for providing war coverage..
Bonus: See the Committee to Protect Journalists’ special report, Getting Away with Murder, from earlier this year. A PDF of the report can be downloaded here.
Image: Pakistani reporter Saleem Shahzad was murdered after reporting that Al-Qaeda was behind this May 2011 attack on a Karachi naval base. (Reuters/Athar Hussain). Via CPJ.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m71y15N46C1qedj2ho1_500.jpg)
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