What do phone-hacking at the News of the World and Wikileaks have in common from an ethical point of view?

UNESCO's conference "The media world after Wikileaks and News of the World", held in Paris on 16 February addressed this question in its second panel debate about "Professionalism and Ethics in the New Media Environment".

Borja Bergareche, author of the book "Wikileaks confidencial" and London correspondent for the Spanish paper ABC, argued that the connection between the two is that they both involve distrust of the press.
Both cases raised issues about media and ethics and law and put journalistic standards in the spotlight: the News of the World scandal has led to intense scrutiny of journalistic practices, while Wikileaks raised questions about how journalists deal with a huge amount of information.

If there is one industry in which acting professionally has ethical implications, it's journalism, said Bergareche. When it comes to journalistic standards and to dealing with huge amounts of raw data and information, for example the US embassy cables, questions need to be asked about the nature of WikiLeaks.

Whether or not regulatory reform of the press is necessary has been on the agenda today at the Leveson inquiry, the public inquiry on the role of the press and the police in the wave of the phone-hacking scandal.

The future of press regulation, including the role of the Press Complaint Commission, has been at the centre of the Financial Times editor Lionel Barber's participation.

Responding to Barber's evidence, Lord Justice Leveson has signalled that he expects the newspaper industry to undertake substantial regulatory reform, the Guardian wrote. The reforms will need to be recognized as credible by readers if they want to be effective, he added.

Press Gazette reported however that the presiding judge declared that he is against state controls on journalism and that he is keen that any new regulator remains "independent".

Newspapers in the UK commissioned private detectives to hack email accounts as well as phones, it emerged yesterday. The Independent reported that police have uncovered evidence that Gordon Brown's emails were accessed illegally during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, as well as those of a former Labour adviser Derek Draper.

"Several Fleet Street titles" may have commissioned private detectives to access emails of as many victims as those involved in the phone-hacking scandal, the Independent said. Peter Hain, former Northern Ireland secretary, has confirmed that he has been in discussions with police concerning hacking of his emails.
Labour MP Tom Watson has called for London's Metropolitan Police to expand its investigation into possible computer hacking, known as Operation Tuleta. Currently eight police officers are working on the email-hacking investigation, while the Operation Weeting team investigating phone-hacking is 120-strong, according to the Independent.

Plagiarism: it's an act that is strictly against various ethical codes and industry guidelines followed by many journalists the world over. However, recently the issue has become a problem not only for journalists, but for the cartoonists as well.

At the beginning of November, the cartoonist for Urban Tulsa Weekly, David Simpson, resigned after he was discovered to have plagiarised material from the late, great, Pulitzer-winning Jeff MacNelly.

Last week, another incident of alleged plagiarism occurred, in which the work of Jeff Stahler of The Columbus Dispatch bore a close resemblance to a piece published in 2009 in the New Yorker by cartoonist David Sipress.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) now has to decide how to react to Stahler's case, as he was suspended from the Columbus Dispatch on grounds that he lifted text and visuals from Sipress's work. The AAEC are currently consulting their bylaws regarding this incident.