Profit without purpose 'a recipe for disaster'

What an unlikely ally for me! Especially since the playwright Dennis Potter named the cancer that killed him ‘Rupert’, after Rupert Murdoch. This latest speech by Elisabeth Murchoch may not please her brother brother or her father (she is the second oldest of his 6 children), but it’s given me an opportunity to wave the flag once again on behalf of ethical writing and publishing.

Elisabeth Murdoch was delivering the keynote MacTaggart lecture at the MediaGaurdian Edinburgh International Television Festival on 23 August 2012. She said quite a lot about the phone hacking case and went on to say that as a consequence organisations involved in publishing must ‘discuss, affirm and institutionalise a rigorous set of values based on an explicit statement of purpose’. Yes! She also said that it isn’t sufficient to use money and profit as the baseline way of measuring everything. She added that an absence of purpose is a very dangerous thing for capitalism and freedom.