IT'S been an interesting week in the media. After 168 years, the News of the World has been forced to close as a result of the phone-tapping scandal.
It is alleged that self-employed enquiry agents sold information to the newspaper which had been gained illegally from tapping phones.
Allegations of hacking into celebrity phones have been made for a number of years, however, the killer blow has been the allegation that phones of victims of serious crimes were hacked, possibly obstructing the police in the course of investigations.
Notwithstanding the irony that there is a media fury about celebrities using so-called super injunctions to protect their privacy, it seems when it comes to an allegation of a genuine criminal invasion of privacy, celebrities are somehow viewed as less important than non-celebrities.
It would be possible to fill an entire edition of The Journal analysing the number of legal implications thrown up by the demise of the News of the World. Rarely does one case touch so many legal topics – crime, tort, contract, employment, human rights, defamation to name but a few. However, the case also throws up some interesting observations about the concept of branding.
On Friday, July 8, the Entrepreneurs’ Forum ran a course delivered by specialist brand consultancy, Violet Bick, on the topic of branding. Branding is often seen as a relatively new discipline, although it is centuries old.
One of the premises is that brands have a central belief, a word or phrase that encapsulates what they stand for. If this is correct, the News of the World would have stood for investigative journalism. For 168 years it had made a virtue out of uncovering crime and hypocrisy.
Again, the premise is that if you stick to your central belief (no matter how tempting it is to tinker with it) your brand will survive. Failure to have a central belief or culture and failure to adhere to it, can lead to spectacularly bad outcomes.
If this is true then it is the subliminal perception of the public that the News of the World became a hypocrite that caused the demise of the paper, not the allegations of criminal activity.
:: Neil Warwick, partner at leading law firm Dickinson Dees LLP
