Hard times for Corporate Social Responsibility. After the failures of the self-regulation of the market and of the financial and industrial managers that hit us from all sides, worrying news is also arriving from the inner circle of the media. One of the oldest newspapers in the world, founded 168 years ago and which sold 2,7 million copies every Saturday (twice as many, so to speak, as the Sunday New York Times!), was closed by its legendary owner, Mr. Rupert Murdoch, as he is engulfed in a gruesome scandal.
Journalists intercepted thousands of people and families, of all social and political responsibilities, to draw scandalous scoops from them without retreating from anything, even the abductions of minors, causing all sorts of injuries to professional ethics and to the victims of these interceptions, which is much more serious from a human point of view. Not only the famous English police, the legendary Scotland Yard, whose head was forced to resign in the wake of the scandal for having accepted a holiday as a gift from the Murdoch group, but also the Conservative party in its highest leadership and part of the British ruling class was somehow involved and hit by the scandal.
Murdoch acted masterfully, it must be recognized: he admitted the faults of his collaborators and closed the newspaper by not stopping at the economic calculation and appointed a top-level manager to the top of his companies, whom we in Italy know well for his role dynamic and integrity that has made it possible to break the oligopoly of information in a country like ours. There remains the lesson to be drawn and to do so we need to ask ourselves the questions that up to now I have not seen formulated by any newspaper either in Italy or abroad: what was the recruitment policy of these journalists? How were they paid and incentivized? How did you proceed with the selection of the news?
Instead, we begin to shed light on the machine of external and institutional complicities and we can be sure - forgive my Anglophilia - that justice and English public opinion not yet devastated by nihilism and stupidity will have a redemption movement and will shed light on this scandal. The lesson to be drawn is that the short-termism that places enrichment without any morality at the center is a sort of anthropology of social being much more complex than its well-known economic form.
Earning more by selling poisoned copies, poisoning public opinion itself, is a mortal sin even for non-believers, that is, it is a vulnerability to civilized life which is now reaching danger levels. I always say that the global economic crisis is a derivative (look a bit) of the moral crisis that has hit those who hold the fate of the economies and public opinion of nations in their hands. The News of the World scandal is a terrible confirmation of this thesis.
*Professor of Economic History at the State University of Milan
