Ethics, Law and Society

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide some of the principles which Lord Hutton might wish to bear in mind as he considers those aspects of the case before him which bear upon the ethics of journalism. The specific journalistic issues under consideration by Lord Hutton are, however, relatively clear, even straightforward. When Greg Dyke gave evidence to the Hutton inquiry on September 15, he gave the inquiry some striking statistics about the scale of the British Broadcasting Corporation journalistic operations. The question for Lord Hutton, and then, later, for Dyke and Gavyn Davies, is whether the standards were breached by Andrew Gilligan’s reports and, if so, whether this was a regrettable, but inevitable, aberration in an otherwise soundly managed news department, or something more serious. One difference between Gilligan’s reports and those of Susan Watts, his colleague and rival on Newsnight, was that Watts had tape recordings of her conversations.

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