Two years ago, Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, spoke of the “unsettling dearth of integrity across so many of our institutions”. Integrity had collapsed, she argued, because of a collective acceptance that the only “sorting mechanism” in society should be profit and the market. But “it’s us, human beings, we the people who create the society we want, not profit”.

    Driving her point home, she continued, “It’s increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose, of a moral language within government, media or business could become one of the most dangerous goals for capitalism and freedom.” This same absence of moral purpose was wounding companies such as News International, she thought, making it more likely that it would lose its way as it had with widespread illegal telephone hacking.

    As the hacking trial concludes—finding guilty one ex-editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, for conspiring to hack phones, and finding his predecessor, Rebekah Brooks, innocent of the same charge—the wider issue of dearth of integrity still stands. Journalists are known to have hacked the phones of up to 5,500 people. This is hacking on an industrial scale, as was acknowledged by Glenn Mulcaire, the man hired by the News of the World in 2001 to be the point person for phone hacking. Others await trial. This long story still unfolds.

    In many respects, the dearth of moral purpose frames not only the fact of such widespread phone hacking but the terms on which the trial took place. One of the astonishing revelations was how little Rebekah Brooks knew of what went on in her newsroom, how little she thought to ask and the fact that she never inquired how the stories arrived. The core of her successful defence was that she knew nothing.

    In today’s world, it has become normal that well-paid executives should not be accountable for what happens in the organizations that they run. Perhaps we should not be so surprised. For a generation, the collective doctrine has been that the sorting mechanism of society should be profit. The words that have mattered are efficiency, flexibility, shareholder value, business-friendly, wealth generation, sales, impact and, in newspapers, circulation. Words degraded to the margin have been justice, fairness, tolerance, proportionality and accountability.

    The purpose of editing the News of the World was not to promote reader understanding, to be fair in what was written or to betray any common humanity. It was to ruin lives in the quest for circulation and impact. Ms Brooks may or may not have had suspicions about how her journalists got their stories, but she asked no questions, gave no instructions—nor received traceable, recorded answers.

答案精析：根据题干可直接定位至文章前两段。第一段用伊丽莎白的话引出主题：诚信问题普遍存在。随后第二段中，伊丽莎白接着用一起电话窃听丑闻来进一步证明自己的言论。第一段第一句中的unsettling意为“令人不安的”，对应题目中的upset。第二句中的sorting mechanism（筛选机制），进一步解释正是当前这种筛选机制导致了诚信的缺失。A项内容符合原文表述，sorting mechanism是原词复现，故正确答案为A。

错项排除：B项有一定的干扰性，但原文第二段第二句说的是公司更有可能因为道德缺失而迷失方向（lose its way），并没有说会导致财务损失（financial loss），B项内容过度引申，故排除。第二段第一句提到政府、媒体或企业内部目标不明确和道德缺失，但这并不说明政府在处理道德问题上无能，C项内容过度推断，故排除。前两段内容一直在强调社会缺乏道德诚信，而不是滥用诚信，D项与原文意思不符，故排除。

长难句分析：This same absence of moral purpose was wounding companies such as News International, she thought, making it more likely that it would lose its way as it had with widespread illegal telephone hacking.

本句是主从复合句，句子主干是This…absence…was wounding companies…。such as News International是用于举例说明companies，she thought为插入语。making it more likely that it would lose its way为现在分词短语作结果状语，其中的it为形式宾语，that引导的从句是真正的宾语。在该从句中，句子主干为it would lose its way，后面的as引导方式状语从句。

句意为：她认为，这种道德目的的缺失也伤害了新闻国际集团等公司，使其更有可能迷失方向，就像曾发生过的大范围非法电话窃听一样。