The Willful Blindness of Rupert Murdoch

The Huffington Post:

After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. A few rogue, or over-zealous employees just went off piste. Then the full scale of the debacle emerges and another face-saving fiction emerges: no one could possibly have seen this coming. Both arguments were wrong in Abu Ghraib, at Enron, WorldCom, BP, Countrywide and Lehman Brothers and both are wrong today at News International.

The phone hacking scandal, and the enormous price paid for it by News Corporation, isn’t the unfortunate byproduct of a few naughty freelancers. Nor was it an unpredictable, unforeseeable event. Rather, it was the product of a series of systemic failures any one of which was visible, but each one of which Rupert Murdoch and his UK-based chose to ignore.

Willful blindness is a legal term, cited in the trial of Enron’s Skilling and Lay. It states that if there is knowledge that you could have had and should have had but chose not to have, you are still responsible. The causes of organizational willful blindness are many but News International demonstrated most of them..

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post