An awkward day for the press to praise itself
The arrest, on suspicion of conspiracy to intercept voicemails, of the chief reporter and the former news editor of the News of the World occurred, with a certain elegance, on one of those days when the press gathers to congratulate itself at a “glittering gala dinner”.
The annual press awards of the Society of Editors even held out the prospect of a run-off for the top prize involving both the News of the World and its nemesis, the Guardian.
Among the obvious questions to be aired among the guests — many of whom have been insisting for years, with a most unjournalistic scepticism, that the phone hacking story would never go anywhere — was how the press might report this interesting and important legal development.
After all, the Sun, the Mirror, the Star, the Express and the Mail have all tried their best to keep the hacking story from their readers ever since it first broke in 2006. And when other papers have reported the affair — as the Guardian, the FT and the Independent all have — they have been dismissed as misguided or (hah!) politically motivated.
Now, it must be said, with people under arrest, tabloid editors have the option of abiding closely by the contempt of court restrictions — restrictions which when it suits them they so often interpret in the most flexible manner. So we are set to witness a rare example of the press glimpsing what it might be like to be its own victim, and acting accordingly.
I’m not about to break the contempt law here either, but it is clear by now that those restrictions alone will not be enough to keep the scandal, in its widest sense, under wraps. The same day, after all, saw a remarkable new twist in the dispute between the Metropolitan Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions over — essentially — who was to blame for prematurely burying the hacking affair in 2007. The DPP, Kier Starmer, released a long and detailed letter which appeared to contradict directly the claims on this point of Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates.
As if that were not enough, the Met also appears to be heading towards an awkward libel trial over its assertion that a solicitor, Mark Lewis, had wrongly attributed to a police officer a claim that there may have been 6,000 phone hacking victims.
And perhaps most sensationally, the private legal actions for breach of privacy against the News of the World by the likes of Sienna Miller and Steve Coogan are not only growing in number, but are moving forward in a way that surely should alarm Rupert Murdoch’s London henchmen. All such cases are now to be dealt with by one judge, Mr Justice Vos, and he has thus far shown little sympathy for the newspaper.
In interim rulings last month Vos appeared to sweep aside a number of key points in the defence offered by the News of the World. To the suggestion that there was no concrete evidence to show private investigator Glenn Muclaire actually hacked the phones of Andy Gray (though he had accumulated all the means to do so, and had apparently tried), Vos replied that he was satisfied that “interception of Mr Gray’s voicemails was something that Mr Mulcaire was undertaking regularly”. As for the proposition that there was nothing to link the paper to these activities, the judge announced bluntly that he disagreed, and that Mulcaire was effectively a News of the World employee.
A few days ago we learned that James Murdoch was leaving London to move to the heart of his father’s empire in New York. Young James was at the helm of News International here from early 2008, so he carries the ultimate responsibility for sustaining over two years the claim that hacking was all a finished affair involving just one rogue reporter. If the time comes to hold James accountable — say, before a public inquiry — we can look forward to his return.
Listen to Brian Cathcart’s podcast on the phone hacking affair here
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He Tweets at @BrianCathcart
