Phone-hacking inquiry targets tabloids
Years ago, when I was a (very) junior reporter, I was approached after a court case by a man who had been fined for a comparatively minor offence.
He offered to buy me a pint of beer if I would keep his case out of the paper, saying it would deeply upset his mother if she learned about his conviction.
Another time, an offender offered me 10 shillings, right there on the pavement outside the court building, to forget about his case.
In both instances, I gave the answer we juniors had been taught: I must write the story but I would add a note to the Editor that exclusion had been sought on compassionate grounds.
What the two men did not know but I did was that such an approach virtually guaranteed that their stories would appear.
It never crossed my mind to take the beer or the 10 bob but I was disturbed by these incidents at the time.
Half a century later, amidst daily reports of newspaper phone-hacking, bribery of the police and undue influence, my scruples would probably seem incomprehensible to modern journalists.
Last week, a major inquiry began in London, led by Appeal Court judge Lord Justice Leveson, into “the culture, practices and ethics of the Press”.
It rose from public anger at the murky practice of securing information about people by accessing their voicemails.
At the heart of the scandal was the mass-circulation Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, owned by Australian-turned-American Press tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Initial investigations, back in 2005-2007, concluded that the paper’s hacking activities targeted mainly celebrities, some politicians and the royal family, including Prince William, the Queen’s grandson.
The tabloid’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were arrested and charged with accessing royals’ mobiles. Goodman was jailed for four months, Mulcaire for six.
This year, the scandal widened when it was revealed that the cell-phone of a murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, had been hacked, as had those belonging to relatives of British soldiers killed abroad and victims of the London bombings of 2005.
A huge public outcry ensued against Murdoch’s Sunday paper and, as advertisers’ boycotts grew, he closed the News of the World last July, ending 168 years of publication.
Among those claiming their phones were hacked were actors Hugh Grant, Jude Law and Sienna Miller, former Premier Gordon Brown, MPs Lord Prescott and George Galloway, singer Paul McCartney, ex-police chief Brian Paddick, footballers David Beckham and Ryan Giggs, and the spokesman for the parents of Madeleine McCann, a girl of three who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 and has not been found.
Numerous sackings and resignations have marked the course of the scandal, including some of Murdoch’s top executives and editors, and two high police officers.
Murdoch and his son, James, were summoned to give evidence before a parliamentary media committee.
On the first day of the Leveson inquiry, it was revealed that Mulcaire’s notebooks were found to contain 28 names of News of the World employees plus references to the Sun, another Murdoch paper, and the Daily Mirror, a competing daily.
The indication was that these had all asked for phone hackings. The inquiry is expected to last a year and the expectation is that it will transform the way newspapers operate in this country. Leveson said his task was to decide “who guards the guardians?”
------------------------
A thief has been stealing from the offertory boxes at our church for a long time.
He uses a straw or a long thin spoke, attaches some sticky stuff to the end, lifts coins up to the slot, then manoeuvres them out with a knife blade.
Our pastor caught him at it once and he pleaded poverty. He agreed that by raiding the charity box he was stealing from people as poor as himself, but he didn’t see anything particularly ironic about that.
Of course, Father let him go and he promised he would look hard for a job. Last week by chance priest and sinner met again — on the street, this time, not at the back of the church — and the thief proudly announced that he wouldn’t be raiding our boxes any more since he had got a job.
Wonderful! said Father. As what? (Wait for it). A security officer!
------------------------
More from the court record:
Lawyer: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
Witness: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
Lawyer: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
Witness: The autopsy started around 8.30 pm.
Lawyer: And Mr Denton was dead at the time?
Witness: If not, he was by the time I finished.
Lawyer: All your responses must be oral. What school did you go to?
Witness: Oral.
Lawyer: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
Witness: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
