If chickens are at last coming home to roost in the phone hacking scandal, the people we need to thank most are a bunch of celebs. Sienna Miller, Steve Coogan, Chris Tarrant, Paul Gascoigne and Andy Gray are now heroes of free speech in Britain, as are Lord Prescott, Nicola Phillips (formerly Max Clifford’s assistant), Sky Andrew (football agent), and all the rest of those taking legal action over hacking.
They may be unlikely heroes in some ways and they may be in with a chance of damages, but without them this affair would probably have died months ago. And make no mistake about it, they are brave, because Rupert Murdoch’s News International is a very powerful enemy to make.
Peter Oborne’s Channel 4 documentary Tabloids, Tories and Telephone Hacking reported that the News of the World compiles dossiers on people in public life even when it isn’t planning to publish. Why? Just remember the line attributed to Greg Miskiw, a former news editor at the paper: “This is what we do: we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”
Oborne also found an MP prepared to talk, cautiously, about intimidation — Adam Price. And another MP, Tom Watson, put it as bluntly as could be in the Commons chamber: “We are scared of the power she wields…” He was referring to Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and Christmas drinking chum of David Cameron.
Imagine you were an actor, a television personality or a young PR worker, and think about how much influence Brooks could have on your life. She is already the boss of four national newspapers which all have the power to promote or damage careers. And with her links to Sky, ITV, Five, Shine, Fox TV and in Hollywood 20th Century Fox, her influence goes much, much further. You would need a lot of nerve to take that on and stay the course.
For Brooks and her colleagues the stakes in this scandal are very high. Andy Coulson was one of them, their man in Downing Street, and he is out. Current News International chiefs know they are on record saying lots of things that now look very hard to defend. And the people suing the company threaten to make things much worse by dragging into the open the whole story of wrongdoing at the News of the World.
It so happens that most of those taking legal action are celebrities, but they could have been anyone at the wrong end of the tabloid machine. And for almost every celebrity there are others — secretaries, mothers, boyfriends, whatever — who believe they were collateral damage because they left voicemails that were listened to.
They need courage to keep going and they need support. News International is fighting all the way and the remarks of Miskiw and Watson give us a hint of how nasty that might be.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University and tweets at @BrianCathcart
