Zondervan, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, does not see any ethical dilemma for them in the wake of the revelations of the phone-hacking scandal according to the Church Times:
ZONDERVAN, the American Christian publisher, issued a statement this week saying that the phone-hacking scandal “does not present an ethical dilemma”, despite its being a division of HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corporation.
On Tuesday, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation, and his son James, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation Europe and Asia, gave evidence to the House of Commons Culture Committee about phone hacking that took place at one of the company’s news papers, theNews of the World.
A spokeswoman for Zondervan, which holds exclusive rights to publish the New International Version of the Bible in North America, said: “This does not present an ethical dilemma for Zondervan, as we will continue to operate with autonomy as we always have. . . While we are obviously aware of the matter at hand, it does not distract or detract from our work at hand, and we will continue to pursue our mission and operate as we have for the past 80 years.”
Others think Zondervan’s response is inadequate:
Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist whose books are published by Zondervan, and who is speaking at the Greenbelt Festival this year, told the magazine Geez: “The current issues in England raise all kinds of ethical questions, and I would hope that a company whose mission is explicitly Christian, as Zondervan’s is, would take the opportunity to bear witness and to speak into the culture which is so terribly fallen.”