20 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
You might say it was a brave move for Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates to ask to be questioned in public again by MPs about the phone hacking scandal. He clearly feels stung by the suggestion — put forward most recently by Chris Bryant MP in Parliament — that he misled the Commons media committee on the subject in 2009.
Yates’s justification then for implying that the News of the World’s hacking was a small-scale affair rests on a legal point — he says the Crown Prosecution Service told the Met to stick to a very narrow definition of the offence, and so officers acted accordingly. The CPS, however, tells the story differently.
No doubt Yates has some answers on all that; he would be a fool if he didn’t. It will be of greater long-term interest, however, to see how he responds to questioning about other aspects of the Met’s conduct in the hacking affair, because he won’t escape without that.
I saw his performance in 2009 and I recall thinking that if I was a serious criminal under investigation I would want Yates to be in charge of my case. For a top detective he seemed astonishingly unsuspicious. Police knew that a News of the World reporter transcribed dozens of voicemails, but they never questioned the reporter or the person whose phone had been hacked. The transcripts were marked “for Neville”, but police never established who that was, even though the paper employed only one person called Neville, and he was the chief reporter. And so on.
Yates insisted there was nothing wrong with all this myopia. I have written before that one of the most remarkable characteristics of the whole phone hacking affair is that people keep saying utterly incredible things and expecting you to believe them. So police officers can’t spot a lead that would have been obvious to an Enid Blyton reader and the entire staff of a national newspaper can’t remember a single thing about a story (about Gordon Taylor) which they fully intended to put on their own front page.
Yates will be questioned in detail this week about why the Met kept insisting there were very few hacking victims. Just as important, however, is the matter of how the police have handled inquiries from possible victims who have asked them about evidence. Lawyers have been lining up to complain that these inquiries were frequently stalled and even obstructed by police, in a way that has benefited one party — Rupert Murdoch’s News International. Why was that?
There is the matter of when the police studied and audited the voluminous hacking information they seized in 2006. Read Yates’s evidence from 2009 and you would probably form the impression that his officers were on top of it, that they had seen every piece of paper and every computer file and they knew its evidential significance. That position, however, is difficult to reconcile with our present knowledge — see for example the case now being made on behalf of Sienna Miller. It is also difficult to reconcile with the fact that the Met has launched a new, “robust” investigation into the whole affair.
There is much more. Why did three years pass before we learned that the princes, William and Harry, were victims? (That delay benefited News International by muting the public outcry.) If the documents offered the slightest hint that John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, had been hacked by a private investigator, why was the matter not pursued with the utmost vigour, as an issue of national security? Why did the Met tiptoe into the News of the World office in August 2006 and seize only the barest minimum of their materials? Why did Met officers dine with News International executives at a time when the company was under investigation? Has the Met investigated whether any police officers helped Glenn Mulcaire gain his industrial-scale access to mobile phone data?
There is a lot to address, besides the matter of the CPS’s legal advice. Yates may need to remind himself, as he sits there facing the music for his force, that he asked for it.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follow him on Twitter: @BrianCathcart
10 Feb 2011 | Uncategorized
If, as seems more and more likely, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World hacked into the voicemail messages of the deputy prime minister of this country, what should be done about it?
It is easy to lose sight of the scale of this scandal, which has been running long enough to make us blasé. John Prescott is not a figure of great gravitas, and he is in company here mainly with entertainers and sports figures. Murdoch too has been around such a long time he is part of the national furniture. Plenty of people are ready to shrug it off.
But bugging the country’s elected leaders is a gross affront to democracy and a threat to national security. Just imagine what would be happening if the Russians, the Chinese or the French were suspected of doing it — and then factor in the suspicions that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were targets too.
It was Lord Fowler, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, who pointed out that this was Watergate in reverse –– not a newspaper bravely protecting the public interest, but a newspaper directly attacking the public interest.
So what is happening? A lot, but so far nothing to match the scale of the problem.
The Metropolitan Police, newly energetic if not yet actually penitent, are promising to contact their list of people who may have been real hacking targets. The “handful” once spoken of is stretching almost by the day, and lawyers now speak seriously of the possibility that it may be hundreds.
A good many of these will then join another list of people — those who are suing. That is already said to have jumped from around 20 to between 30 and 40, if you include those who have instructed solicitors but not actually issued legal papers.
What will happen to all these cases? At the moment Glenn Mulcaire and the News of the World give every impression of wishing to fight them all the way, but the sand is shifting under their feet. First, the Met’s change of position — from obstructing possible claimants to assisting them — removes the first line of defence and means the disclosure of damaging documents is likely to speed up. Second, the courts are expected in due course to tell Mulcaire he must answer questions about who told him to do the hacking — something he has resisted on the grounds he risks incriminating himself.
How long will the newspaper fight on? That, of course, is closely linked to the question: what hope does it have of winning? The odds are that not everyone who sues for breach of privacy will have a strong enough case to win, but does News International really believe it can win them all and vindicate itself?
Barring a change of heart — and despite the excitement surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s recent visit to London he does not appear to have ordered that — a long, squalid and extremely expensive series of civil cases is in prospect which will steadily erode what remains of the group’s public standing. And in the meantime, we still have the problem of a media organisation at the heart of our public life whose activities are, to say the least, a matter of grave public concern.
Lord Fowler demanded a public inquiry but that is highly unlikely before the legal cases are concluded. Lord Prescott and others are set to renew their case for a judicial review of the conduct of the police, which might lead to something resembling a public inquiry into that aspect of the case. And there are other processes under way. The Commons Home Affairs Committee is looking into the matter, and of course the police are reviewing their old investigation and conducting a new one.
Last and certainly least, the Press Complaints Commission has set up a committee to look at the lessons to be learned. Is there anybody left, inside or outside the industry, who thinks the PCC matters?
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and Tweets at @BrianCathcart
24 Jan 2011 | 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 2011 | 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
