It doesn’t really matter if the BBC has made people’s lives misery due to inaccurate or incomplete reporting, or whether phone lines have actually been hacked or not – it’s all to do with the financial status of the company.

At the end of the day, the success of the company is primarily driven by profit, and the people in the company have as their prime duty the maximisation of wealth within legal boundaries. Whatever happens with Sky, and you can guarantee that there is more to come, or whatever happens with other equally large media organisations, they only really care about money. The irony is that whatever happens regarding secret bugging devices in flower pots for Mike Hollingsworth (as described by the man himself on BBC’s Any Questions), none of it really will affect the share price of Sky unless something drastic happens. The schism between morality, finance and the law is often underestimated, but comes back to bite you when you least suspect it.

Some of us are completely sick of attacks on our reputation by people who couldn’t care less apart from maximising their profit, but we’ve got used to it. Tough. It’s only the notion of enlightened shareholder value that keeps some of us sane, to keep us out of the Big Sweatshop Society inter alia.