As the investigation into phone-hacking gathers pace, will the scandal change British media for the better or lead to more restrictions?
DAVE WOODING, the News of the World's political editor, stood on a table in Moncrieff's Bar in the House of Commons on Wednesday night and bade farewell to colleagues, but not before paying tribute to the journalist whose work put him out of a job.
Raising a glass, Wooding, who is highly regarded and much liked on all sides, lauded Nick Davies, the Guardianreporter whose years of investigation had finally forced the phone-hacking scandal at the Sunday tabloid into the global gaze.
“It was a great piece of journalism. Remember that. Don’t let politicians use this as a stick to beat us all with,” declared the Liverpudlian, who arrived on Fleet Street in 1985 after making his name covering the Heysel stadium disaster, in Brussels.
Though a Street veteran, Wooding had been with the tabloid for just 18 months before the crisis erupted with the revelation that the newspaper had hacked the mobile of Milly Dowler after the teenage murder victim went missing, in 2002.
In the days after the Murdochs ordered the closure of the News of the World, Wooding became the voice for the staff in the paper, forthrightly condemning the phone-hacking but also standing up for the survival of a vigorous tabloid press.
Wooding, who is now looking for work, still has a sense of humour, musing about the film that will surely be made: “Mick Hucknall will play Rebekah Brooks.”
Humour, much of it of the gallows type, is common these days. “I’m not a criminal. My writing might be criminally bad, but I’m not,” joked a tabloid reporter on Thursday as he and colleagues waited in Admiralty House for Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister.
But where there is humour there is nervousness, too. A few know that they were involved in hacking. More know that they were involved in “blagging”, the acquisition of private data by subterfuge. Even greater numbers fear that they might get “mangled as collateral damage”, in the words of one.
News of the World's newsdesk executives, it is alleged, acted as gatekeepers: reporters would go to them seeking help with a story; they, in turn, would go to private investigators such as Glenn Mulcaire, who would do the necessary. The gatekeepers then came back with the goods.
The tabloid’s culture, like others of its ilk, was aggressive.
Sackings were common, leaving reporters constantly uncertain. Few refused to take orders, or, if they did, they had taken precautions beforehand to find a job elsewhere.
The lack of trade-union rights in Wapping – News International’s east London headquarters – lies at the heart of the crisis, the Labour MP John McDonnell argued, because the National Union of Journalists was “cleared out” by Rupert Murdoch.
“We heard the description of the working atmosphere in Wapping: the bullying, the victimisation and the pressure put on journalists to produce material by whatever means. Someone described it as the development of a culture of sewer journalism,” he said.
The NUJ had twice come to the Commons during Labour’s years in power urging for “a conscience clause” to be put into employment law to protect journalists who refused unethical assignments, but it was turned down, he said.
So far, the scandal that destroyed the News of the Worldhas not seen other London newspapers in the frame, but that's likely to change as the Metropolitan Police's investigation gathers pace and the Levenson inquiry begins to probe, under oath, the practices and ethics of the British press.
The majority of the press, innocent of the charges, look on, not displeased to see the arrest of some deeply-disliked individuals. The majority are hopeful that the scandal will change the trade for the better but are convinced it will lead to more restrictions.
Further prosecutions are possible, particularly using the files seized from a private detective, Steve Whittamore, by the UK information commissioner in 2003, when he investigated the capture of confidential information, even if other investigators may have shredded their files.
The Whittamore files showed blagging was then rife, holding details of 4,000 requests from 305 journalists throughout Fleet Street, as well as the names of finance companies, estranged couples, criminals, even local authorities that had used subterfuge.
More than 950 cases involved 52 of the Daily Mail's reporters, followed by the Sunday Peopleand the Daily Mirror, the commissioner reported. The News of the Worldcame fifth in the list, with 182 confirmed cases.
Underneath a portrait of Lord Wellington in Westminster on Monday, Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail, Britain's most powerful editor, denied that his newspaper had ever hacked or blagged.
The Conservative MP Stephen Phillips asked: "Has the Daily Mailever published a story that you knew at the time, or subsequently came to know, was based on a hacked message or any other source of material that had been obtained unlawfully?"
“Absolutely not,” replied Dacre.
Defending both hacking and blagging in some circumstances, the London Timescolumnist Matthew Parris blamed the UK's libel culture: "If I were being perverse, I could argue that it is because we set the bar so high that journalists sometimes resort to subterfuge.
“They feel that they must gather the information that they will need should they be sued. If we had more of a free-for-all in the press, people might not try so hard to tap people’s telephones and find out what the truth is beforehand.
“A journalist has a responsibility to behave in a decent manner, which means not tapping telephones or hacking phone messages and so on.
“Journalists also have a responsibility to get the facts right. One might behave irresponsibly on the first count in order to behave responsibly on the second.”
The maximum penalty for blagging under section 55 of the UK data-protection act is a £5,000 fine before magistrates, or higher before the Crown Court, but blagging or phone hacking is not always illegal in the UK.
Conduct can be justified in the public interest. There are times when it has been self-evidently so, such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation, which led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
“We were investigating a series of crimes that were being covered up, and so when we did get some phone and credit-card records it was of the people who allegedly – and, as it turned out, had – committed criminal acts that they went to jail for,” Woodward said this week.
However, a public-interest defence is all but unthinkable, said the Commons home-affairs committee, in UK cases that involved the tampering of voicemails of “essentially private individuals unwittingly brought to public attention”.
In any event, the Crown Prosecution Service did not use the data-protection act or the misuse-of-computers act to charge and convict Mulcaire and the News of the World’s royal correspondent Clive Goodman.
Instead it used the far more draconian section 1 of the regulation of investigatory powers act, which allows for a public-interest defence in only the most extraordinary of circumstances and which threatens up to two years in jail.
Just as significantly, it allows hacking victims to sue. Mulcaire, who has now been told that News International will no longer pay his legal bills, is already facing 30 such actions. He will not be alone before this scandal is finally ended.
