05 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
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
20 Mar 11 | 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 11 | 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
27 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
If it is true that News International is confronting the phone hacking scandal with a new zeal, we can only welcome it. The pity is that it has taken four and a half years to reach this point, not least because, as any detective or criminal lawyer will confirm, in that period useful evidence is likely to have been lost.
This makes it all the more important that, whatever other investigations may be taking place, there should also be a proper inquiry into how the company conducted itself between the arrest of its royal editor in August 2006 and the onset of this new zeal. A key concern must be the repeated assurances given by company executives that in this long interval they did everything in their power to track down any evidence that anyone on their staff other than Clive Goodman might have been involved in phone hacking.
Les Hinton, former chief executive of News International, gave such an assurance to the Commons select committee on the media in 2007. He repeated it to MPs in 2009. Colin Myler, the editor of the News of the World, gave similar assurances; so did Tom Crone, his legal affairs director, and so did Andy Coulson, editor at the time of Goodman’s arrest. You can read what they said in the oral and written evidence section of the committee’s report here.
That evidence raises a lot of questions. To take a simple example, a point made by Myler and repeated by Hinton was that the internal investigation involved examining 2,500 emails. The implication was that this showed thoroughness, but 2,500 emails in an organisation like the News of the World must be a drop in the ocean. One reporter might receive 2,500 emails in a matter of weeks. So why were only 2,500 emails examined back in 2006-7?
More generally, there is the role of the solicitors, Burton Copeland. Coulson said (Q1719) he brought them in very quickly to find out “what the hell had gone on” and gave them everything they needed. Crone pointed out to MPs (Q1388) that they were “probably the leading firm in this country for white collar fraud”. That sounds very vigorous and thorough. You might infer that this top firm went in and, with full management support, carried out a top-class internal investigation, leaving no stone unturned.
But police evidence to the MPs left a very different impression of Burton Copeland’s role. Detective Chief Superintendent Philip Williams, in a number of answers (see Q2010) portrayed the firm, not as independent investigators or as facilitators for the police investigation, but as lawyers acting in defence of the company’s interests, and he implied that they were a good deal less helpful than the police hoped.
A subsequent written submission (Nov 2009, Q6) by Assistant Commissioner John Yates put it bluntly:
News of the World instructed lawyers to respond to our requests for disclosure and they took a robust legal approach to our requests and provided material strictly based on the evidence against Goodman and Mulcaire.
So that’s another question. Were Burton Copeland there as independent crimebusters called in by the company to track down any possible traces of wrongdoing, as News International executives told MPs, or were they solicitors representing the corporate interest in unwelcome dealings with the police? Whatever it is that they were tasked to do, I’m sure the firm did it professionally and ethically, but we need to know.
This is not a matter of idle historical interest. For one thing, it is reported that Burton Copeland are acting for News International in this matter again today. More fundamentally, questions of this kind are crucial to the public understanding of News International’s conduct and they may have a bearing on the evidence that is available to police today.
So who is going to ask these questions? So far as I can tell they are not within the remit of the new CPS and Met investigations, and we are surely not relying on Rupert Murdoch or the Press Complaints Commission to ask them. The case for a public inquiry gets stronger and stronger.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University and tweets at @BrianCathcart
