ABSTRACT
Mainstream journalists scepticism over standards is, in part, a consequence of the ethical contradictions within the newspaper industry. Clive Goodman was given a four-month prison sentence in 2007, along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who had been paid by News International and pleaded guilty to the same charges. Their imprisonment was to prove only the beginning of a saga that would change newspaper journalism forever and bring the ethics of its workers. As media specialist Raymond Snoddy (1993) commented: It certainly sets the British press apart from newspapers in the US where on the whole the word ethics can be uttered without hoots of derision. Many journalists challenge such notions as professionalism, objectivity and the free press, and stress the mainstream media's function as one of social reproduction in the interests of dominant groups and classes. The marginalisation of women in the press and the glorification of macho or laddish values do not usually come from any deliberate policy.
