21 Nov 2011 | Leveson Inquiry
Actor Hugh Grant linked the Mail on Sunday to phone hacking today as he and other witnesses gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, starting what is set to be a week-long attack on the practices of the tabloid press.
In his marathon account, he spoke of a 2007 story in the paper that claimed his relationship with Jemima Khan was on the rocks due to his late night calls with a “plummy voiced” studio executive. Grant said the only way the paper could have sourced the story was through accessing his voicemail, and that he “would love to hear what their source was if it wasn’t phone hacking.”
He also told the Inquiry about a chance encounter with Paul McMullen, former features editor at the News of the World, who “boasted” about hacking at the paper.
A spokesman for the Mail on Sunday said this afternoon: “Mr Grant’s allegations are mendacious smears driven by his hatred of the media.” Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Mail, has consistently denied that any of its staff were involved with hacking.
Grant went into detail about a slew of other incidents. He noted how he and his girlfriends had been “chased at speed” by papparazzi, the Sun and Daily Express had invaded his privacy by publishing details of his medical records, and that the life of the mother of his newborn baby had “been made hell” due to press intrusion. He also alleged that the Daily Mail paid £125,000 to the ex-lover of the child’s mother for photos of her.
Grant said the “licence the tabloid press has had to steal British citizens’ privacy for profit” was a “scandal that weak governments for too long have allowed to pass.”
In their brief but raw account this morning, the parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler spoke of the moment they believed their daughter was picking up and deleting her voicemail messages. Sally Dowler said, “it clicked through on to her voicemail so I heard her voice and [said] ‘she’s picked up her voicemail Bob! She’s alive!’.”
Milly’s voicemail had been hacked into and her messages deleted, making room for new ones to be left. Sally Dowler said she did not sleep for three nights when she was told of the interception this year.
The Dowlers also described a walk they took seven weeks after their daughter had gone missing to retrace her steps, a photo of which was featured in the News of the World. The Dowlers believed it was a result of photographers being tipped off after their own phones had been hacked. “How did they know we would be doing that walk on that day,” Sally Dowler asked. She called the photo an “intrusion” into the family’s private moment of grief.
Of the press attention that followed Milly’s disappearance, Sally added that the family had to “train” themselves not to answer questions. “Someone would come up to you when you least expect[ed] it,” she said.
The Dowlers added that the press had been a “double-edged sword”, noting the efforts made by the papers to spread information about Milly’s disappearance.
They said they would leave it to the Inquiry to make decisions, but wanted the extent of hacking to be exposed. Bob Dowler said he hoped News International and other media organisations would “look very carefully” at how they procure information for stories. “Obviously the ramifications are very much greater than just an obvious story in the press,” he added.
Journalist Joan Smith also gave evidence. She discovered her phone had been hacked around six weeks after the daughter of her partner, Labour MP Denis MacShane, had been killed in a skydiving accident in 2004. She revealed that detectives had shown her notes taken by Glenn Mulcaire earlier this year, which listed her name, address and phone numbers.
She attacked tabloid culture as “so remorseless” that those involved have “lost any sense that they’re dealing with human beings.”
She said she did not consider herself a celebrity. “You don’t have to be incredibly famous to be a target for their intrusion,” she said, adding later that the press interest in her came from her relationship with MacShane.
Smith was keen to defend freedom of expression, noting that she opposed state regulation and the licensing of journalists. She added that there needed to be a “successor body to PCC (Press Complaints Commission) that isn’t dominated by editors.”
Media lawyer Graham Shear also attacked the redtops, calling the industry a “business model which has become dependent on titillating and sensationalist stories.”
He said his clients began to suspect they were under surveillance in 2004, when “stray facts” known to few began to appear in the press. Several would clients would change their mobile telephone numbers two or three times a year, he added.
He spoke of “orchestrated” attempts to persuade clients to pay off kiss and tell girls, and noted the reluctance of press to contact him and his clients prior to publishing, preferring to pay any damages for breaches of privacy afterwards. He also described the £60,000 in damages paid by the News of the World to Formula 1 boss Max Mosley for privacy invasion as a “very gentle parking fine”.
The hearing continues tomorrow, with evidence from Steve Coogan, Elle Macpherson’s former business adviser Mary-Ellen Field, ex-footballer Garry Flitcroft, and Margaret Watson, mother of murder victim Diane Watson.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson.
3 Nov 2011 | Leveson Inquiry, Uncategorized
Crossposted at Hacked Off
What lies behind the Daily Mail’s assault on Hugh Grant? Could it be conventional piety? Hardly: have you looked at Mail Online lately? It is an artful mix of soft porn and celebrity gossip of the kind which, just a few years ago, the Mail itself would have dismissed as morally corrosive.
Is the paper living in a dream world of Downton Abbey values? Maybe, but look at this story. Delightfully illustrated and just a week old, it shows a Daily Mail that, far from being judgemental, is aware, cheeky and relaxed, even in the face of evidence of mass adultery.
Or could it be that Amanda Platell has some personal objection to Hugh Grant? She would not need one, for her article carries all the hallmarks of Glenda Slagg morality. Imagine that her instructions had been to whip up hatred against the mother in this case rather than the father. She could have done so with exactly the same passion and apparent conviction, simply substituting arentyasickofher for arentyasickofhim.
The Mail’s great broadside against Grant has nothing to do with morality and nothing to do with the perils of fatherhood outside wedlock. It is simply an act of intimidation.
The actor has been a prominent critic of privacy intrusion by the press and the Mail has chosen to make an example of him. It is saying to any prominent person who challenges the press: if you speak out, this is what we will do to you.
One of the most vivid insights into the culture of the old News of the World was a conversation from 2002 that happily was recorded for posterity. “That is what we do,” a news editor told a reporter, “we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”
The Mail plays the same game, and its technique in this case is wilful distortion. Take three facts and from those facts derive a dozen assumptions, all of which fit your agenda. From those assumptions weave a narrative as demeaning as can be contrived, and then pile the outrage on top. Never mind that the same three facts could provide the foundation of five entirely different narratives, leading to entirely different perspectives on those involved.
Platell doesn’t know the truth about Hugh Grant’s relationships and the Mail doesn’t either, but that does not matter: they have constructed a story that serves their purpose.
Just at this moment, with the Leveson inquiry set to start taking evidence and the joint parliamentary committee on privacy in full flow, the Mail is desperate to blunt the message that the unregulated mas-circulation press — the press that gave us hacking, the McCann case, the Christopher Jefferies case and so many others — is a threat to the health of our society.
Hugh Grant is a Leveson witness, so it makes him a target. And at the same time the treatment doled out to him serves notice, not only on anyone else with opinions the Mail does not like but also on everyone involved in both of those inquiries, that they can be dealt with the same way.
In their high-minded moments, papers like the Mail present themselves as champions of free expression, yet this is how they deal with those who disagree with them. And they have the nerve to call other people hypocrites.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and is a founder of Hacked Off. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
26 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
Hugh Grant’s covertly recorded interview with the former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan, contained this interesting passage about the ethics of intrusive journalism:
Grant: But celebrities you would justify because they’re rich?
McMullan: Yeah. I mean, if you don’t like it, you’ve just got to get off the stage. It’ll do wonders.
Grant: So I should have given up acting?
McMullan: If you live off your image, you can’t really complain about someone . . .
Grant: I live off my acting. Which is different to living off your image.
McMullan: Yeah, but you’re still presenting yourself to the public.
The debate about injunctions and superinjunctions, now enlivened by Andrew Marr’s decision to reveal his injunction in the Daily Mail, keeps this idea in mind. Why do newspapers want to know about the private lives of famous people? Not — let us be sensible here — because they abhor adultery and fornication or because they are exercising freedom of expression. No, I suspect McMullan was articulating a view held in many newsrooms: if you live by “presenting yourself to the public” you can’t complain about loss of privacy, and if you don’t like it you should “get off the stage”.
Though editors would never dare publicly to claim that they have an absolute right to know or publish everything that well-known people do in their bedrooms, that is what this view amounts to.
Marr doesn’t “live off his image”. He lives off his wits — having political knowledge, insights and contacts, writing history books and so on. Nor do Premiership footballers live off their images. They have to play football to quite a high standard. And Grant is right, too, in saying that he is a successful actor.
It is inescapably true, though, that all these people “present themselves to the public”: they have jobs that put them in the public eye, and they are seen on television and in other mass media. And for McMullan that seems to be enough. The victims don’t even have to be rich and they don’t have to have made any claim to moral leadership, or indeed leadership of any kind.
The loss of privacy, on this view, is a kind of tax the famous must pay on the privileges and status which they enjoy and the rest of us don’t.
Imagine you are an actor, singer, dancer, model, weather presenter, athlete or journalist, or an expert on gardening, decorating, fashion, history, relationships or cooking, or a politician, business leader, campaigner, trade unionist or even an academic, and you begin to achieve the kind of prominence that gets people on television or in magazines. Given the news values currently adopted by many newspapers, you need to be very careful.
Whether you are single or married, straight or gay, young or old, you need to think about whether your current private life might be worth a story for the tabloids, and in particular how it might be portrayed by people determined to make it appear lurid and unsavoury to such a degree you probably would not recognise it yourself.
You don’t just need to think about today but also about any time in the future so long as you may be on the public stage (and for some time after that), and also about the past. You need to think not only about yourself but also about those close to you (have you got children?), because they will be affected. You need to think about new people you meet, because they might be part of a sting. You need to think about others you have known, who might tell stories for money. You need to think, yes, about your phones and emails.
It’s nasty, but those are the rules. Accept them or get off the stage.
Or there is a third option. You might consider you were entitled to some protection against the self-appointed people who threaten you in this way. You might go to a lawyer and point at Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, passed by Parliament in 1998, which says [pdf]:
“Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”
Yes, it says “everyone”. Rights are like that.
According to some, however, if you seek to protect yourself in this way you are invoking an infamous foreign-made law. You are appealing to “amoral” judges and lining the pockets of unscrupulous, freedom-hating lawyers. And, if you seek an injunction for any reason, you are resorting to the kind of gagging orders that make Britain almost a police state. Who says? The very papers that want to tell the world who you slept with last night and what exactly you did in bed.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
