24 Jan 11 | News and features
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
21 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
Why has Andy Coulson resigned now, after clinging on so long, and just days after David Cameron backed him? If his position has suddenly become untenable it is hardly just because, as he put it, the spokesman needs a spokesman. They could afford a line of 20 of those.
One of the reasons must be the simple one that the “one rogue” defence of his time at the News of the World has collapsed. The suspension of senior news executive Ian Edmondson and the naming of one other former news editor in court documents related to alleged phone hacking have left News International struggling for a form of words to shore up its position. And all the time the lawsuits from angry celebrities continue to pile up.
But you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to ask whether the future of BSkyB is as important in the balance of factors here as the question of how many people still believe Coulson could have failed to know members of his staff were hacking phones.
James and Rupert Murdoch are determined to buy the shares in BSkyB that they don’t already own. It is the springboard for their UK business strategy over the next ten years and compared to this the fates of Andy Coulson and a bunch of News of the World hacks probably doesn’t add up to much.
The Murdochs don’t usually care much about public opinion either, but they need political blessing for the BSkyB deal to go through. In this context the embarrassment of constant stories about hacking (even though most of the press has shabbily ignored them) is most unwelcome, and there is no doubt that Coulson’s presence at the heart of government has made that worse.
Now he’s gone, will the TV deal be easier to pull off? Only if we’re all suckers.
So bad has the phone hacking scandal become that the whole News International hierarchy has questions to answer, and that includes not only Rebekah Brooks but James Murdoch himself — for one thing, he personally approved the six-figure settlement payment to Gordon Taylor which was prompted by the discovery of that infamous bunch of hacked transcripts marked “for Neville”.
If James Murdoch wants to convince us that his company should be able to own BSkyB outright, with all the monopolistic opportunities that affords, then he needs to convince us that the company he already runs is a clean one. And before that can happen we need to see what happens to Sienna Miller, Chris Tarrant, Andy Gray, Steve Coogan and the host of others who are in the courts claiming that Murdoch’s paper breached their privacy.
Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here, here, here, here, here and here
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and tweets at @BrianCathcart
17 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
The phone hacking scandal has entered a new phase and a number of very powerful people, up to and including David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch, should now be very worried. Glenn Mulcaire’s reported confirmation that a senior News of the World news editor, Ian Edmonson, commissioned him to hack phones elevates a nagging problem into a national political crisis.
The problem is most acute at the Murdoch press, which must now defend itself against the charge that its staff hacked phones with the blessing of management. It also has to explain why it has insisted for four years that the management didn’t even know. The senior executives who need to justify positions which they have previously adopted in public but which now look very dubious indeed include Les Hinton, now the CEO of Murdoch’s US press empire, Rebekah Brookes, chief executive of News International, Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World, and Tom Crone, News International’s legal affairs boss.
Of course Andy Coulson, the prime minister’s press adviser, is also in what we might call a delicate position, which means the David Cameron himself is tainted. Why did Cameron appoint this man, trust him and stand by him? It now looks like a gross and stubborn misjudgement by a man who is supposed to get things right.
Rupert and James Murdoch are in the same position. What did they know? Did they tolerate this? Are they responsible for creating the conditions in which it happened? Why were they not more energetic in pursuing the problem to its source, once it was exposed? Remember that James Murdoch is currently pressing to buy the big slice of BSkyB he doesn’t own. Is he fit to do that?
The Metropolitan Police Service, the largest and most important police force in the country, is dreadfully compromised. They said that this stopped with one man at the News of the World and refused to follow any further leads. For reasons unknown, they tiptoed around the paper’s newsroom. Senior detectives should now have to account for that. The Director of Public Prosecutions, too, has failed to cover himself in glory, having repeatedly endorsed the Met’s stance.
The mobile phone industry also needs to be challenged. How was Mulcaire able to get phone numbers and PINs so systematically? It beggars belief that he picked them up one at a time. Who helped him?
And finally, the rest of the national press is on the brink of disgrace. With few exceptions they have deliberately ignored and belittled a scandal which, if they cared about honest journalism, they would have investigated with passionate vigour. Why, for example, did the Daily Mail not report this story properly? Paul Dacre should have to answer that.
Forget the idea of a paltry evidence review by the Director of Public Prosecutions. As the New York Times implied months ago, this affair makes Britain look like Berlusconi’s Italy. Let’s demand a full public inquiry or a Royal Commission to open the doors and let the stink out.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follown him on Twitter @BrianCathcart
10 Dec 10 | Uncategorized
So the CPS will not press new charges in the News of the World phone hacking case. We shouldn’t be surprised. They won’t be surprised at News International either.
The Metropolitan Police was never the right body to reinvestigate a case it has already made a mess of once. What motivation did it have? Had the CPS found grounds for a prosecution, after all, it would have been the same as saying that the Met got it all wrong first time.
For the sake of credibility alone, the Independent Police Complaints Commission or HM Inspector of Constabulary should have managed the reinvestigation. We know, in fact, that the Inspectorate wanted to, but the pass was sold. So establishing why no one stepped in is just another in the pile of seriously worrying questions associated with this affair.
Of course the scandal of tabloid phone hacking is not over. The 23 legal actions that are either current or in the pipeline will see to that. And it is instructive, if you are in any doubt about the moral questions involved, that many of these cases are being held up because convicted hacker and former News of the World employee Glen Mulcaire is challenging a High Court order telling him he must reveal the names of the people at the paper who gave him his orders.
Think that through: the issue is not whether he was given the orders but whether he has to say who gave them. His argument, to cap it all, is that by revealing the names he might incriminate himself. The News of the World and its former employee are that far from the moral high ground.
We will have to wait until the new year, I understand, to hear the result.
So far it has been worth at least £2m to News International to settle cases in this affair and prevent the facts coming out. That includes a settlement with Gordon Taylor and two of his associates. It also includes Max Clifford, who landed a seven-figure deal with News International at the just the moment he dropped his case against them. It includes, too, the pay-offs made to convicted hackers Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire.
Most of those now engaged in legal proceedings know, or have strong grounds to believe, that they were hacked. They have the indignation of crime victims and of people whose privacy has been violated. Nor, in most cases, are they nobodies — Andy Gray, Steve Coogan, Chris Tarrant…
They also know that News International is paying these large sums in the effort to hush up the affair. It is a perfect legal storm.
And beyond the pending cases, dozens and even hundreds more could follow. The Met is under very strong legal pressure — from Lord Prescott among others — to reveal the identities of more of those named in the papers it seized from Mulcaire’s office and home. For some reason it has been very reluctant indeed to do so — potential victims of crime they may be, but they don’t seem to have a right to know it, in the Met’s eyes. Again, the courts will be the judge of that.
No, it’s not over, by a long shot.
Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here and here
