Studied ignorance: willful blindness and collective amnesia

Monkeying with Global Governance (Part #7)

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The excellent commentary on the news organization case by Roy Greenslade (News Corp's three wise monkeys knew nothing, London Evening Standard, 20 July 2011) notes that the three executives interviewed:

• emphasized consistently that they were ignorant of any wrongdoing in an insignificant part of a sprawling global empire, having been misled by an anonymous group of executives "hired and trusted" by Murdoch Senior who were misled in their turn by the people they had also hired and trusted.
• employed different techniques in maintaining this overarching defence: The 80-year-old Rupert did it haltingly, giving us an insight into his increasingly fragile state of health. His corporate-speak heir apparent did it with confidence, but at tedious length. Brooks did it with an impressive straight-faced coolness, illustrating that she was mistress of her brief.

Greenslade argues that their positions lacked credibility given the well-known hands-on governance by Rupert Murdoch in frequent contact with his senior executives -- and the impossibility of conceiving that anyone would endeavour to lie to him either by commission or omission. As Greenslade puts it:

• he saw through bluster and was not above testing the veracity of what he was told by one executive by running it past another -- how come he did not "smell a rat"
• his cross-referencing of his internal company sources was journalistic; he wanted to hear the minutiae; who had said what to whom
• how had he avoided responding to reports published in other national papers that hacking was a routine activity within the News of the World and at other tabloids
• it remains unclear why either Murdoch or his son failed to demand a forensic internal inquiry to get at the truth, rather than, as they claimed, being betrayed by people who had lied in ways which they accepted.
• the news organization executives interviewed then affected to ignore the drip-drip-drip of allegations published over the course of two years, issuing an apology only when obliged to do so by circumstances
• the departure of various News of the World executives was never adequately explained.
• the misdemeanours have been blamed on unidentified staff, together with the police -- who in turn laid the blame on News International.
• the argument suggests, at least, an abnegation of responsibility and a failure of corporate governance

A significant feature of any culture of irresponsibility is to render such irresponsibility "unconscious" -- perhaps as part of the wider pattern identified by John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization, 1995). It is possibly to be recognized as systemic negligence and necessarily has that consequence.

Those responsible for the governance of Enron were characterized by investigators as indulging in willful blindness. The news organization executives were invited to comment by the Select Committee on the applicability of the term to their attitude to corporate governance. A related term is collective amnesia -- as the report of the previous interview of the executives of that same news organization by the Select Committee concluded in 2003. The phenomenon merits careful attention as previously argued (Pointers to the Pathology of Collective Memory, 1980):

• David Leigh, Patrick Wintour, Caroline Davies (MPs' verdict on News of the World phone-hacking scandal: Amnesia, obfuscation and hush money, The Guardian, 24 February 2010)
• Paul Douglas Newman (Collective Amnesia or Collective Alzheimer's: America 'Remembers' Ronald Reagan, Common Dreams, 7 June 2004)
• Joseph Farah (The world's collective amnesia. WorldNetDaily, 19 September 2002)
• Collective Amnesia: Vietnam War [resources]

At what point do claims of "being out of touch" and "not knowing what is going on" cease to be credible? In such cases, as with the seeming ignorance of many governance matters by those responsible for the news organization, it is appropriate to ask whether they are competent to govern the organization. How ignorant is it possible to be, and for what period, without jeopardizing the viability of the institution?

It is appropriate to note that, when challenged by UK Parliamentarians, those responsible for the news organization, the UK Prime Minister, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioners all placed great emphasis on the argument that if they had known then what they know now they would then have acted differently. Curiously, both prior to and subsequent to the appointment of Andy Coulson (former editor of News of the World) as his press secretary by the Prime Minister, he only received a minimal security vetting in contrast to the more extensive vetting of his predecessors. As noted by Ian Katz (Andy Coulson vetting saga: damp squib, or dynamite? The Guardian, 22 July 2011):

It's worth remembering that by May 2010, when Cameron and his PR chief arrived in Downing Street, the Guardian had run 91 articles about illegal activities at the News of the World under Coulson, 14 of them on the front page. Never mind the private warnings passed to Cameron's staff by Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown and the Guardian.

However, as stressed by the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, it is not sufficient to use the clarity of hindsight to excuse the inadequacy of foresight -- especially if warnings then had been ignored and cautionary briefings then were refused. As he put it:

It's not about hindsight ... It's not about whether Mr Coulson lied to him. It's about all the information and warnings that the PM ignored. He was warned and he preferred to ignore the warnings. (Phone-hacking scandal: Wednesday 20 July 2011, The Guardian, 20 July 2011)

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