NICK DAVIES
Vintage Books, 2015, 443 pages
At Britain’s annual press awards in London’s Savoy hotel in
2011, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World
accepted, with no hint of shame, the prize for ‘scoop of the year’ for its exposé
of corruption in Pakistani cricket, beating the nomination of the freelance/Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, for
his six-year investigation of the criminal phone-hacking scandal that was
engulfing Murdoch’s flagship gutter-press rag.
Hack Attack is
Davies’ step-by-step account of how he unearthed the “dark arts” of snooping used
by News of the World, in the process
displaying the “secret world of the power elite and their discreet alliances”,
the “casual arrogance” of press, police and politicians snubbing the law and covering
up their wrongdoing.
What started as a minor skirmish which saw one private investigator and one journalist jailed in 2007 for hacking the mobile-phone voicemail of a few Buckingham Palace staff, ended in a major route and the ignominious closing by Murdoch of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper.
Guided by sleazy public voyeurism rather than legitimate
‘public interest’, and driven by a bullying managerial imperative to ‘just get
the story’ regardless of ethics or legality, Murdoch’s stable of British
tabloids had pioneered phone-tapping, email hacking and break-ins to dredge up
the “most intimate, embarrassing and painful” secrets, usually involving sex
and drugs, from the private lives of the famous and not-so-famous. Confidential personal information was stolen
from police and government databases using false pretences and deception
(‘blagging’) and through cash bribes paid to corrupt employees.
News of the World took the phone-hacking criminal enterprise to stellar
heights, with thousands of victims spied on.
It was a practice deeply embedded in the paper, including amongst Murdoch’s
editors who themselves directly commissioned dirt-bag private investigators or
condoned their journalists’ use of them.
Yet, as the Guardian
began to publish Davies’ revelations, there was a marked “shortage of people
willing to get in a fight with Murdoch”.
The rest of the press (both tabloid and ‘quality’) were mute because
they had their own dirty ‘dark arts’ linen to conceal. The “senior ranks of the criminal justice
system” (top cops, government prosecutors) waved everyone on. The police were anxious to protect their own bent
coppers who were on the take, were keen to butter-up a press to run only good
police news stories, and were desperate to keep their own secret sexual affairs
from the prying eyes of News of the World.
The then Labour Government (despite its own prominent targets
of the phone-hacking) was inert. Their politicians
either ideologically embraced Murdoch’s neo-liberal values, or feared the Murdoch
safes rumoured to contain dirt files on politicians, or cowered before Murdoch’s
power to make and unmake governments - for the last 36 years, “no British
government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch”. The incoming Conservative Prime Minister,
David Cameron, appointed as his media and communications chief the Murdoch editor
who had supervised the phone-hacking operation.
Both governments had invited Murdoch, his editors and his
Chief Executive Officer into their inner sanctum where the price paid to keep
Murdoch on side and stay his hand on mobilising News Corp readers as election-punishing
“ballot fodder” was to soft-pedal on News Corp’s transgressions, to adjust media
policy to promote the corporation’s business expansion, and to involve Murdoch
in government appointments and Cabinet reshuffles.
Davies contrasts the elite’s kid-gloves view of the
phone-hacking scandal with “the version that was being shown to me by a small
collection of nervous off-the-record sources” – journalists, private
investigators, the managers and lawyers of various celebrities, morally upright
police detectives and government whistleblowers.
What brought the Murdoch fortress crashing down was the spread
of the phone-hacking victims from the rarefied world of celebrities to common
people whose targets included a murdered schoolgirl (Milly Dowler), the victims
of the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and, unforgivably to Establishment
patriots, the families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This development made the News of the World product-line toxic to the entire Murdoch brand,
and threatened Murdoch's plans for government sanction for gaining sole control
of the TV news channel, BSkyB. Millions
of pounds of revenue were also being lost as corporate Britain withdrew their advertising. The Church of England disinvested its £3.7
million shareholding in News Corp.
Facing such business pressures, Murdoch cut his losses and closed the
paper in 2011.
This outcome would not have been possible without Davies’
forensic skills of investigative journalism.
Not content to recycle press releases, or write “propaganda masquerading
as journalism”, Davies demonstrates how “the best stories are the ones which
someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know”.
His accomplishment is testament to his infinite patience and unwavering
attention to detail (virtues which, be warned, the reader of his book must also
possess – its focus is microscopic).
“Truth had won a battle with power”, writes Davies of the phone-hacking
wash-up but, he adds ruefully, “very little has changed”. “Some people resigned and Murdoch suffered a
brief humbling” but the police strengthened their anti-whistle-blowing powers
and politicians’ doors have remained open to Rupert and his clones. News of
the World was relaunched as the Sun
on Sunday, whilst twelve months after the Dowler story, News Corp shares
rose by 23%, the company’s value rose to $73 billion, and Murdoch’s personal
annual income hit $30 million. “The
power of the elite” remains, concludes Davies.
As with many Murdoch-centric books on the media, Davies’
treatment of the non-Murdoch media elite is under-developed. Ungrounded in a
critical analytical framework of the media under capitalism, the focus on the grubby
excesses of Murdoch can make his more moderate corporate and state media rivals
appear more meritorious than they warrant, including ‘lefty’ papers like
Davies’ The Guardian. The phone-hacking
of people’s private lives should be exposed but so should capitalism’s destructive
hacking of people’s economic and political lives. This is rarely part of the job description of
any media which is based on and respects the boundaries imposed by the profit
principle.
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