It's easy to laugh at these examples with hindsight. NewsCorp is committed to highest standards of corporate governance, etc etc.

But I think the more important point is that even we, the well meaning business and investment professionals are ideologically over-committed to some tools like transparency, codes etc.

At best they are components of the solution, not the magic bullets we like to think they are. We'd be much more effective if we took a more systems perspective. But do we want to be or is it enough for now to appear that we are concerned? After all the benchmark is so low that perhaps this appearance of doing good is enough to get by? At least for a bit longer.

Discuss!