Andy Coulson and the Ethics of Business

However high you are, the law is above you, wrote Dr Thomas Fuller in 1733. We might paraphrase this: however high the law might be, the moral law is above it. In other words, we stand judged not so much by legal conventions and rules but by morality. That is why, it seems to me, we need to ratchet up the debate on business ethics.

On Tuesday June 24th Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, was found guilty of authorising phone hacking. Rebekah Brooks, his former lover and editor from 2002-2007 (which included the now infamous hacking of a murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler’s phone in 2002), was cleared of all charges. There was apparently no evidence the jury heard which directly implicated her in the activities of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was paid by NOTW journalists to supply ‘stories’.

It seemed that Andy Coulson made one very big mistake which exposed his not guilty plea as a lie. When George Best’s son Callum Best allegedly made a girl pregnant in a nightclub tryst, Coulson sent an email which ordered Mulcaire to ‘do his phone’. This was enough to convict Coulson, whereas Rebekah Brooks, his lover and confidant was cleared because no similar damning email was ever found. But should senior managers in business organisations escape so lightly?

Businesses have an ethos (Greek word for ‘character’) and it has been obvious to anyone reading these newspapers what this ethos was: sensationalist, vicious, cruel and (important for the moral argument) using information which could only have been gleaned by immoral means. How did these newspapers know that a celebrity had ‘just been arrested’? Only because a policeman somewhere had rung them up (were the police paid – evidence suggests they were). How did reporters know the content of conversations with information shared with very few? Well the celebrities often assumed (wrongly) that their personal assistants or close friend had betrayed them. Think of the suspicions, injustices and general paranoia that this kind of activity encouraged.

Newspaper editors often said they were reporting what the public wished to read. This is highly debatable – the motives for reading any newspaper are mixed (I read some for the sport, some for the crossword some for the cartoons and others for their leading articles). Yet I cannot think of any member of the public who would approve of these gross invasions of privacy, deception and bribery as means of getting a story. What is more, consider some of the hacked off members and what they suffered. Hugh Grant, caught by Police picking up a call girl in America; Carole Middleton, mother of the Duchess of Cambridge, hacked to try to get information about Kate’s relationship with William and then of course, the Dowler family who were led to believe their daughter was still alive. There cannot be any public interest defence for these or many of the other instances of invasions of privacy.

Can any leader of an organisation involved in such immoral and illegal practices really plead ‘not guilty”? I don’t think so. It reminds me of something a student of mine once said “I will do anything to get on’. Anything? Betray your best friend? Steal from your parents? Morally, it seems, the News of the World reporters were prepared to do anything to get a story. “You haven’t fulfilled your brief this year” Coulson told his reporters, “I’m not for a moment doubting your efforts but we need a hit badly’. News becomes about “hits’ rather than truth and integrity and the pursuit of sensational story lines became a matter of lawbreaking and moral hypocrisy. All those at the top would have known, at least, that a culture of 'get a story whatever it takes' might just include illegal means. It's up to leaders to stamp (imprint, enforce) a moral code on all concerned.

The greatest moral hypocrisy was this: at the same time as the NOTW was printing stories about celebrity affairs, Coulson and Brooks (both married) were conducting a secret affair themselves. The messengers delivering a message that ruined the careers of MPs such as David Mellor or caused such suffering to others such as David Blunkett were themselves engaging in the same immoral practices they themselves took the moral high ground to expose.

However high and mighty they thought they were they all stand condemned in the moral court.