Phone-hacking scandal outrages human decency

The phone-hacking scandal started out as a story about power and its abuse, and as such understandably attracted intense interest from politicians and the media whose daily business is power. But for those outside the beltway who didn't follow the fine detail of who did what when, the story could have seemed rather abstract with little relevance to their lives. But no longer. First there were the revelations that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked , and then on Monday there was Gordon Brown's account of how the Sun tabloid ran an article about his young son's disability while he and his wife Sarah were still struggling to come to terms with the news. Suddenly this is no longer a story just about the rich and powerful, but a scandal of how news is gathered, one which could have touched any family at any time. Two families in the midst of two very different crises were deprived of the privacy that would be regarded as sacrosanct by most people. Every parent in the country could not help but glimpse something of the anguish of the Dowler or Brown parents; the desire to protect one's child is instinctive and deeply felt. And given the intensity of such feelings, the need for privacy is crucial. It's a sharp reminder of how much, even in a culture of unprecedented self-revelation and social media, there are moments or aspects of our lives where we still deeply value our privacy – and respect that need in others. So the hacking scandal is subtly but powerfully reframed not just as an abuse of power but as something even more fundamental, more basic: an outrage to human decency. And that is ultimately a question of ethics. As with the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009 or the banking crisis of 2008 , people were left astonished and angry at the gulf between the standards by which they live their lives and expect of others around them, and those that operate in a major national institution. As in both previous crises, the inevitable questions that emerge are how did the organisational cultures of these institutions become sufficiently corrupted to allow behaviour that to an objective outsider is quite clearly wrong. Both previous crises – the banks and the politicians – escalated into a debate about ethics: how individuals could justify their behaviour, how systems designed to regulate and enforce appropriate behaviour failed. And in both cases – as in the current crisis – the key issue was what were the pressures and incentives that meant widely recognised ethical norms were simply overruled or ignored. Now, as argument rages about how the Sun obtained the information on Fraser Brown's cystic fibrosis, the wider public regards such things as detail. The bigger picture is invasion of privacy. There is renewed sympathy for the celebrities who have been trying to protect some privacy in their lives; on Newsnight Hugh Grant talked of his medical records appearing in the Sun. Much of this confirms what an increasing proportion of the public were feeling about journalism; trust in the media has been dropping sharply in recent years with falls of over 20% for both television news and broadsheets between 2003 and 2010, while News International titles such as the Sun have always scored very low on trust – only 10%. Only politicians come lower than journalists in public esteem. What's disturbing is that the visceral disgust prompted by News International's behaviour spills over to all journalists. The decline in trust goes across the board. While many recognise that it is journalists who have played a vital role in exposing this abuse of power, for many others the response is "a plague on all your houses". Three major national crises of trust in as many years, and neither of the two previous crises have led to convincing reform. The danger we face is of an intensifying cynicism, and the angry apathy that entails.