Nick Davies talking:
I’ve been working on this thing for three years, very slowly parceling out the truth. I mean, I think I’ve done 75 stories on it. But the Milly Dowler story was fantastically powerful. I mean, I knew when I filed it that it was the most powerful story we had done so far. But I never foresaw this extraordinary chain reaction of emotion, which just pummeled the entire Murdoch camp. And really very rapidly, within three days, it reached a point where nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s ally anymore. And that’s a really, really extraordinary thing in this country, because for years the opposite has been the case, that nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s enemy. It’s kind of like having a bully in the school playground. And once the bully has beaten up a few people, everybody else in the playground recognizes that the bully is there. The bully doesn’t even have to do anything particularly serious. All the other kids tiptoe around. And that means governments and police forces and other newspapers have all been tiptoeing around Murdoch, frightened to say anything against him. And this one story about this 13-year-old girl, at the end of this long sequence of stories, just broke through and changed the whole dynamic.
For the last two or three years, while we’ve been trying to get this story out, there’s been a maximum of four members of Parliament who were willing to stand up and talk about it. That’s out of a total of about 630.
Take as an example, there’s a guy called Chris Bryant. He’s been very good on this. Back in March 2003, he was a member of one of those parliamentary select committees. And he had in front of him, as witnesses, Rebekah Brooks, the then-editor of The Sun, previously editor of the News of the World, and her close friend and fellow editor, Andy Couslon, who’s the guy who goes to work for David Cameron. Way back there in March 2003, Chris Bryant asked a brave question. He said to Rebekah, “Have you ever paid the police for information?” And she, not considering the impact of her reply, said, “Yes, we have paid the police in the past.” Now this was dynamite. You’re not supposed to admit to paying bribes to police officers. OK, that was March.
In December 2003, the Murdoch press exposed Chris Bryant. They accused him of what is in their ghastly moral framework a crime, which was that he was gay. And they published a photograph of him wearing a skimpy pair of underpants. They did that to humiliate that man, that politician, that elected politician, to punish him for daring to ask a difficult question and provoking a difficult answer. And that is a microcosm of why most of the rest of the 630 elected MPs stayed quiet and why the police go quiet and the news organizations go quiet. The Murdoch organization deals in power. And part of that power is about frightening people.
Nick Davies, on Monday, on the eve of the Murdochs testifying, Sean Hoare, a former reporter with News of the World, who helped blow the whistle on the Murdoch-owned paper, was found dead in his home.
There has always been a submerged network of former News of the World journalists who have assisted me and other people at The Guardian and the guys at the New York Times. Where Sean distinguished himself was that he was the first to come out on the record. And in doing that, he showed real bravery. And he did this in the New York Times, not The Guardian. Real bravery because of the intimidation which the Murdoch organization uses. And specifically if you’re a journalist and you come out and speak out against this organization, you’re losing any prospect of employment in the biggest media organization in the country. Sean did it. OK.
Now, I got to know him reasonably well, and he was a really, really—he was a good guy, had wonderful stories to tell. He dies this week. I’m afraid that unless somebody comes up with some evidence to contradict me, the sad fact is that Sean, who was many years younger than me, died because his body was ruined by alcohol and cocaine and ketamine. And in the background, the reason why he consumed quite so much alcohol and cocaine and ketamine and all the rest of it is because there was a long period of time when Murdoch’s newspapers paid him to do that. So, the way he put it to me was, “I was paid to go out and do drugs with rockstars.” And he was a show business correspondent, so he went out with a lot of very famous rockstars and ingested massive quantities of alcohol and drugs. And Sean was a great guy. He had enormous bounce to him. So he made no bones about it. He had, you know, enormous fun doing it. He enjoyed doing it. But looking back, he could see that it had ruined his body. He had become very, very ill. His liver was in a terrible state. He said to me, “My liver is so bad, the doctors tell me I must be dead already.” So, a kind of black joke. And so, I am afraid that his body caught up with him, and he died. And it’s very tempting for outsiders to say, “Well, that can’t be a fluke. That can’t be a coincidence.” But unless somebody comes up with something I haven’t heard of, it was just a coincidence. And if you were going to kill him, you would have killed him a year ago, before he started talking.
when he went on the record with the New York Times, it was very important. He was the first journalist to come on the record and say, “Andy Coulson definitely knew about this, firsthand. I promise you that that’s the case.” And he kept on saying it, like the interview with you. He was really good. Because it was easy then for the Conservative Party, which was employing Andy Coulson, to deploy their members of Parliament to go out and smear Sean. They said, “Oh, well, he took drugs. You can’t believe him.” Your spot—there’s absolutely no logic in that; that’s just a smear. So they gave him a good, old smearing.
And then the police, Scotland Yard, who were still in the phase when they were absolutely not interested in seeing the truth, they went around and interviewed him. But as soon as they come into the room, instead of saying, “OK, you’re an important witness,” they said, “You’re a suspect. And anything you say could be used against you.” So Sean used foul language and invited them to go. But he was good. He stood by his guns. I really liked him.
You know, it’s easy to look at an organization like the News of the World and see its ruthless invasion of privacy, its lust for destroying people’s lives in order to make money, and assume that everybody within it is as bad as the organization. But in fact there were lots of individuals in there who worked there, smelled the smell, and walked out and left it. And there’s a lot of good people who have helped us along the way.
the reality of life in this country for some decades has been: you can’t run a government and you can’t run a police force unless you are on close, friendly terms with the Murdoch organization. So, there are all sorts of connections between the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard—that’s biggest police force in the country—and News International, which owns Murdoch’s newspapers in this country. And so, the fact that ex-journalists were being employed by their press office is part of that picture. But there’s a whole set of connections.
And to me, what’s so revealing about this story is what—the sequence is this, you see? You have News of the World journalists going out there breaking the law, routinely, and they’re allowed to get away with it. But then they make a terrible mistake: they hack into the voicemail of the one group of people who are more prestigious or powerful than the Murdochs. That’s the royal family. They get caught hacking Prince William’s phone. So, finally, the police have to come in and do something, like their job. But at that point, when the police have the option of gathering evidence to show how much crime was being committed by Murdoch’s people, they chose not to. They did a little job on the royal family as victims. They sent the royal correspondent of the paper to prison. They sent the investigator to prison. And the rest, of all the evidence that they collected during that inquiry, they didn’t properly investigate, because they didn’t want to get into a fight with that powerful organization. And then, you see the seriousness of that, that they were exempted from normal law enforcement just because they’re so powerful. Really, really wrong.
back in 2007, there’s a trial. The royal correspondent and the inspector go to prison. Those two guys come out, and the royal correspondent, in particular, says, “You sacked me, and I want some compensation.” And he then says, “Look, I know everything that was going on in your newspaper. And if you don’t give me decent compensation, I’m going to blow the whistle on you.” So News International then take this collection of emails and send it to a firm of lawyers. The firm of lawyers look at them and then write a letter, which says, “There’s no evidence in these emails that anybody knew that the royal correspondent was breaking the law.” And you’ll see that’s a very, very narrow statement of denial.
What has now emerged is that those same emails included all sorts of evidence of criminal activity, including the bribing of police officers. So when the Murdochs, James and Rupert, gave their evidence to the select committee, they said, “Well, we didn’t know that was in there. This law firm should have told us that there was evidence of crime in all these emails. Don’t blame us. Blame the law firm.” The law firm is saying, “We want permission,” which I think they’ve now got, “to publish the instructions which we were given by Murdoch’s organization.”
Now, I don’t know what those instructions are, but the implication is that they were told to look through the emails and report only on the very narrow question, “Do these emails contain evidence that the royal correspondent was instructed to hack royal voicemail?” And because they weren’t asked whether also there was an orgy of other criminal activity revealed, they didn’t. So, they’re going to throw the ball back at the Murdochs, you see? We’re in that cover-up phase, who was responsible.
“Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to realize that it’s very hard to get elected in this country without the backing of the Murdoch press, so she was the first one to become an undignified sycophant to that organization, to that media tycoon, where a pattern has been followed by every single prime minister since, including this one.” Hugh Grant said.
The criminal activity was going on in lots of other newspapers in Fleet Street. Whether or not we get to expose that depends on whether or not we can actually find evidence to prove it, because if all you do is to state it without being able to produce evidence, they will deny it. So, that’s one whole chunk of stuff.
There’s another whole thing about whether or not this story has a U.S. end to it. And I would say it wouldn’t be surprising if it turned out that Murdoch journalists visiting the United States had done this kind of thing. It wouldn’t be surprising if Murdoch journalists permanently based for his news organizations in the States had done these kind of things. But we need to be careful, because it is all about evidence. And I have a bit of a worry at the moment that one of the tabloids over here a few days ago, the Daily Mirror, ran a big front-page story which implied that victims of 9/11 had had their phones hacked by Murdoch journalists. Now, at the moment, I am not aware that there is any evidence anywhere to support that. And if at the end of the current FBI inquiry they come up empty and say, “Well, we can’t find the evidence,” then you can bet that the Murdoch crew will use that to try to discredit the entire story. And it does worry me that the Daily Mirror shot off too early. And so, that’s a worry as to whether or not—but in general terms, I would say it’s highly likely that evidence could be produced.
And the other interesting thing is this story breaking overnight, which is whether or not the Murdoch people were using private investigators to do illegal things on the commercial, not on the journalistic, side of their operation. Were they engaged in industrial espionage, for want of a better word? So there’s at least three different ways for this story to keep breaking.
the impact on Scotland Yard has been absolutely huge. You know, the commissioner has resigned. The assistant commissioner, who was responsible for the job, has resigned. They face an internal police inquiry, which is likely to throw up more dirt than a judicial inquiry, which is going to focus in on the implications of their far-too-cozy relationship with Rupert Murdoch and their failure to enforce the law. I mean, there’s a lot of damage being done.
Insofar as Cameron is concerned, it’s a slightly grayer picture. Clearly it’s doing him political damage. Will the story reach the point where he’s actually forced to leave office? I have never thought it would. But the temperature is rising. There’s an interesting story breaking about how, when David Cameron, as prime minister, hired Andy Coulson, formerly of the News of the World, to be his media adviser, he failed to put him through the normal level of vetting. Now that’s a strange thing to do. You would think that that was part of the routine. You’re going to be allowed into the Prime Minister’s office. You’re going to see the most secret paperwork, take part in the most secret meetings. You have to be fully vetted. But he was vetted up to only a sort of medium level. What was that about? That begins to look like somebody took a decision not to look too deep, in case they came up with a reason which wouldn’t allow them to hire him. And you understand, in the background, the reason they feel they have to hire him is they have to have the Murdoch organization on side. Otherwise, they can’t run the country. And therefore, if you can have a Murdoch man in your office, that establishes the connection. So that’s what tempts Cameron to make a terrible mistake. But we haven’t got there yet. We do not have, at the moment, evidence which would force the Prime Minister out of office.
Discussion with Nick Davies.
Nick Davies, longtime Guardian reporter who exposed the phone-hacking scandal.
– from democracynow.org