The 'Guardian' of press integrity

Autonomous Mind posts on the involvement of the Guardian in the Hackgate scandal and shows that David Leigh, the Guardian's Investigations Executive Editor, has lied about ever indulging in the practice of hacking another person's phone.

It would appear that lying about phone hacking is not the only time that Leigh has been economical with the truth - one just has to ask the United States?

As a point of interest, the video above is a shortened version, the extended version of which can be found here. (15 mins duration)

Autonomous Mind promises further revelations about Leigh and remarks that the most notable absentee from the media, who are thoroughly enjoying the delicious irony of The Guardian being put under the microscope for the very crime it has spent years pushing to the front of the news agenda, is the BBC. Not wishing to steal AM's thunder, where further revelations are concerned, it is worth noting that the BBC reported the Guardian said it 'had been given' the Wikileaks data - implying that Wikileaks had turned up one morning and said: "Here, want this?" - when as can be seen from the video above, the Guardian had actively 'gone out of its way' to obtain the data.

That fact - and the article from the BBC - raises a serious point of ethics where the reporting of news is concerned. At the height of Hackgate, both politicians and the media made much about their - and each others - integrity, yet where is 'integrity' when the media does not report the truth? The most obvious example of a lack of integrity is when XYZ newspaper reports that it 'has learnt' that something has happened, when in fact they have 'stumbled' across the story either in another newspaper or have 'picked it up' from the blogosphere. It is accepted that all newspapers - and the MSM in general - wish to 'sensationalise' their output with claims of 'exclusivity' in order to boost their readership; yet the question remains, where is the 'integrity' in making false claims about how they obtained the news item? If a newspaper is unable to be factually correct in this matter, then doubt must be cast on the story they publish.

It is a sad fact today, when we look to our politicians and the media for truth, that the minute either one of them starts talking about integrity you know damn well they haven't any!