The Right Dishonourable

The cancellation of exams during the lockdown has raised a familiar debate: are we over-testing our kids? Simon Jenkins of the Guardian takes the progressive line that doing without exams for one year might be beneficial.

In the mind of Jenkins, quantifying what students have learned has perverted school and university education, without even giving employers a decent flow of graduates ready to work or a reliable indicator of how well a recruit will perform in the job. “Education lies in the totality of the course, not something that can be written down on paper,” he writes.

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Mark Di Stefano listening into private Zoom calls at the Evening Standard and the Independent is hardly a new phone hacking scandal. The now former media reporter for the Financial Times accessed calls about staff pay cuts and furloughs – not great, but not hacking a murdered schoolgirl’s phone either.

What lost Di Stefano his job, however, is less what he published and more how he got the information. The FT editors were happy to publish the piece when the information was attributed to “people on the call”, but reversed their position once they found out those “people” were their own reporter.

Yet what is more striking than a man losing his job is the sympathy that Di Stefano received on Twitter from figures as diverse as the BBC’s Emily Maitlis, the anti-Murdoch Peter Jukes, the Guardian’s Owen Jones, former BuzzFeed colleague Alex Wickham, and various Novara media figures. Is the offence deemed too trivial?

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