Here’s a thought for key sections of the British press: be afraid, be very afraid. Prince Harry’s battle with the Mirror Group (MGN) and his success today will come as no surprise to those who have studied the working methods of the red-top newspapers over the last few decades, so brace yourself for more revelations. The availability of the technology to snoop on their targets made it daft, in a highly competitive market, not to hack phones. If it looked as if the other side was doing it – and the law requires us to say that there is no confirmation that the Sun was indeed doing so – then you would be missing a trick not to do it yourself.
How did it work? Initially, it was done by experts sitting in dingy suburban offices, but then the editors and their accountants realised there was no need for the experts, and it became a free-for-all. Why pay for a hack to stand on someone’s doorstep when you could get someone in the office to do some “finger-fishing”, as it was sometimes called, on any number of people?
Anyone could have a go. The only time the experts were needed was when hacks were snooping on one another, trying to find out who was having an affair with whom. Damn them, they kept changing their pin codes.
All this was denied for years, of course. No, no. Anything the press did was in the public interest, though that was debatable, and certainly not in the face of laws designed to stop illegal snooping. One newspaper even had a “hack off” contest, to see who could hack the most phones in a given period. It was won by a senior executive who has so far escaped justice.
About a dozen years ago, I was told that a senior executive on a red-top paper had suggested to the police that there be an amnesty for phone hackers. He knew how widespread and how normal it was. He knew it was systemic and smiled upon, and had been made indispensable by bosses, but to my knowledge the police dropped the idea pretty quickly. The bad guys would have got off without penalty, and any number of Milly Dowler moments – the hacking of that murdered girl’s phone by the News of the World – would have been buried.
Which is why the judgment against MGN is just the start. The judge ruled that there was extensive phone hacking between 2006 and 2011. He also found that Piers Morgan, who was forced to resign from the Mirror in 2004, knew about phone hacking. He even called it a “little trick”, yet he denied on oath to the Leveson inquiry knowing anything about it. His own position will now surely come under scrutiny.
You may or may not like Prince Harry. You may think he is a damaged young man who has had too much therapy following the highly public death of his mother. Even allowing for the creation of hateful narratives about the influence and ethnic background of his wife, in most circumstances he would be a candidate for widespread public sympathy, but there is little sign of that in the way his activities are reported.
If you have ever wondered why Prince Harry gets such a bad press, consider the context. For Britain’s most popular newspapers, the backstory is terrifying. This is a man on a mission, and while you may say he is tilting at windmills in trying to reconfigure the British media, it will clearly take more than a bit of personal abuse to stop him. The newspapers may or may not be guilty, but the legal costs, let alone the reputational ones, of trying to prove their innocence, and the costs of defending subsequent claims from aggrieved celebrities, will be breathtaking.
Having done a small amount of work investigating this area, I think I know that few cupboards are entirely skeleton-free. Some of the activities that went on can arguably be defended as public interest journalism. But many fail the test set by the great Harry Evans (of Sunday Times fame), which is as follows. If a journalist is considering using subterfuge or doing something ethically questionable, he or she should ask themselves this question: when I come to write up this story, will I be willing to confess to the reader exactly which ethical corner I cut? In other words, will the reader be willing to say that, say, in pursuit of a paedophile I invented a false story, or whatever, then that was fair enough?
That simple test is surely a good basis for any such discussion, and should help dismiss any notion that trawling through celebrities’ private lives – all of which perpetuates a market that needs to be fed – has any conceivable wider public interest. Tittle-tattle may be hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
Quite how things have come to this ought to be a mystery, but it isn’t. The former Press Complaints Commission was asleep at the wheel and almost completely failed to keep tabs on how new technology had made unlawful snooping a piece of cake. And the police crossed their fingers and hoped that, after a few junior execs had gone to prison and a lot of money had been spent, the last-chance saloon had learned its lesson. They had no idea of the depth of the problem, that there was in effect a boozy lock-in going on. That is the party Harry and his friends want to break up, and he, Elton John and others have the money to do it.
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