Dispatches is following up on its October phone-hacking investigation tonight with a new installment.
Channel 4 News presenter Alex Thomson tweets that there is “furious re-editing” underway “as new evidence comes in of News International dirty tricks”.
According to Thomson, “it’s not just the tabloids Dirty Secrets…”
Tune in to Channel 4 at 8pm tonight.
Society needs journalists who are prepared to break the law in order to serve the public interest, argued the former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald last night.
Speaking at a debate at City University on the the News of the World phone-hacking case and the lengths to which reporters can go to get information, MacDonald said: “There are bound to be cases where journalists will want to break the law, and for good reason (…) We do want journalists to break the rules.”
Macdonald did not condone the phone-hacking at NotW, and stressed that it was only under certain public interest circumstances that journalists might be forgiven for breaking the law.
He was joined by key players in the phone hacking scandal: Nick Davies of the Guardian, ex-News of the World journalist Paul McMullan and defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, as well as Max Mosley, Roy Greenslade and libel barrister Caldecott QC.
Mark Lewis, who is currently suing the Metropolitan Police and the Press Complaints Commission for libel, echoed Macdonald, saying that in certain circumstances illegal activity is acceptable.
“If you know something is of public interest then you can use certain methods to corroborate it,” he said. However, he stressed that these methods should not be used to obtain a story.
Macdonald also cautioned against increasing privacy laws, warning it could create a “contagion of caution” among newspapers, and pointed out that a culture of deference has developed in France due to its strict privacy rules.
However, Macdonald conceded that it is nearly impossible to define what is and isn’t in the public interest.
As former Daily Miror editor and journalism professor Greenslade pointed out, “the public interest for the Guardian’s audience is very different to the public interest of the News of the World readers.
“There is no easy way of drafting a public interest definition that would give journalists clear guidance on what they should and shouldn’t publish.”
More from Journalism.co.uk:
Former News of the World journalist defends phone-hacking at lively debate
PCC claimes it did respond to Dispatches with phone-hacking statement
Phone-hacking on Dispatches: a good documentary but not enough new evidence
Following the Twitter conversation around last night’s Channel 4 Dispatches on phone-hacking, Andy Coulson and the News of the World, it seems that for those already following the story there was insufficient new evidence.
But for those less aware of the ongoing claims and the series of investigations that have been conducted, the programme did a great job of putting the most recent claims – sparked by the New York Times’ reports in September – into context with what has gone before, starting with Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire’s arrests in 2006.
Dispatches had comments from Paul McMullen, a journalist working at the News of the World when Coulson joined, and an unidentified source who worked under former editor Coulson while he was deputy editor.
Both alleged that phone-hacking did not begin and end with Goodman and Mulcaire. McMullan told the programme that there was surprise in the newsroom following Goodman’s arrest and sentencing that no one else had been charged.
Of 13 people who worked at the paper during Coulson’s editorship or time as deputy editor and have spoken to Dispatches, not one believes that Goodman was a lone “bad apple”.
Questioning Coulson’s “collective amnesia” and rulings by the Met Police and other industry groups that Goodman and Mulcaire were the only people involved in the practice may not be new, but Dispatches did a good job of raising some new points, as yet largely uncovered by the mainstream media. In particular, the programme spoke with a non-celebrity potential victim of phone-hacking, who explained how difficult it has been to get information from the police and her mobile phone operator to check if she had been hacked.
Concerns were raised by interviewees, including Brian Paddick, who is calling for a judicial review of the Met’s 2006 inquiry, and DCMS select committee member Adam Price, who had suggested that News International’s Rebekah Brooks should be made to give evidence to its phone-hacking inquiry, that whatever the truth behind the allegations about the extend of the practice, the way in which investigations by government and the Metropolitan police have been conducted suggests that the News of the World may be “above the law”.
Tom Watson MP, who worked on the department for culture, media and sport’s select committee inquiry into allegations against the NOTW, told Dispatches that he considered giving up politics after a senior News International journalist told him that he would be pursued by its titles after he called for Tony Blair’s resignation in 2006 because of the support of News International for the then PM.
Watson has now published a letter on his website written to the Prime Minister and asking him to make a statement in parliament this week about the allegations against his communications director Coulson.
Coulson has repeatedly denied knowledge of phone-hacking at the News of the World and told Dispatches he had nothing to add in response to its broadcast.
Lack of press coverage at the time of Goodman’s arrest suggested similar goings-on at other papers, said Dispatches’ host Peter Oborne last night. But given the Daily Mail columnist’s involvement and the featured commentary from former News of the World journalists, Channel 4 and the Guardian, has last night’s broadcast created a more united front amongst the press to investigate its own state of affairs?
Tonight’s Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, Tabloids, Tories and Telephone Hacking, will reveal new phone tapping allegations against Andy Coulson, Channel 4 News revealed yesterday.
In a breaking news announcement, presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy reported that a past colleague of Coulson’s will claim in tonight’s broadcast that the former editor of the News of the World, and now communications director for the Prime Minister, not only knew about phone hacking at the tabloid and asked recordings to be played to him. Coulson has always claimed that he had no knowledge of hacking at the paper.
The Dispatches programme, which features an investigation by political journalist Peter Obourne into the tabloid’s relationship with police and the government, will be aired on Channel 4 tonight at 8pm. The programme follows fresh allegations of phone hacking at the tabloid made by the New York Times last month, sparking emergency debates in the House of Commons, a new police investigation and a series of lawsuits.
Channel 4’s Dispatches will tonight air extracts from a conversation between current London mayor Boris Johnson and Old Etonian friend Darius Guppy from 1990 in which the pair discuss beating up a journalist – then News of the World reporter Stuart Collier.
In an Independent.co.uk interview in January 2007, Johnson said he had offered Guppy his help in finding the journalist because Guppy had told him ‘that some tabloid scuzzbags had reduced his family to tears’.
Listen to excerpts from the conversation at this link.
According to a statement on the Dispatches website, a spokesman for Boris Johnson said: “This was a colourful story from almost two decades ago. It was of little or no consequence back then – and has no relevance whatsoever now.”
Following up on yesterday’s Ofcom round-up, here are further reports from the House of Lords, where Channel 4 chief executive, Andy Duncan spoke at a Communications Committee hearing.