06.11.2014

The limits of journalism

Nick Davies Hack attack: how the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch Chatto and Windus, 2014, pp430, £20

Last month saw the death of Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post and a legend of the press business.

His name is not so well known as perhaps it should be - Bradlee was the man who, after the Nixon administration prevented the New York Times publishing the Pentagon papers, put them in the Post; and backed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as they chased the Watergate scandal right up to the door of the Oval Office. He and his colleagues took on the president (and ‘all the president’s men’) and beat him; indeed, destroyed him, ensuring that Richard Nixon would be remembered by history as the cynical, crooked vulture he truly was.

The Washington Post of Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein is something like the ‘ideal type’ of modern journalism; newspapermen and women squint in the mirror until they see that image looking back. Journalism “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable”, said Finlay Peter Dunne; it is supposed to provide a check on arbitrary power, which is a fundamental component of democracy.

Hack attack, Nick Davies’s account of his investigation into voicemail hacking at the News of the World, is on one level a story of this kind of journalism. No, Davies, his colleagues and superiors did not topple a head of state; they did not even topple Rupert Murdoch, although whether he should be thought of as an easier or harder mark than Nixon is a complex question. Yet it was hardly inconsequential either: the fallout claimed the scalps of the NotW itself, the press complaints commission, the culture minister, the prime minister’s director of communications, the top two cops in the country … Not a bad haul for one weekend (sure enough, we find a glowing puff on the back cover from Bernstein himself).

Because of its subject matter, however, the book is also the opposite - a story of journalism at its most grasping, decadent and morally bankrupt; of how the pressure to get any scoop, at any cost, leads into murky waters; and, above all, how the press as a business is more often in cahoots with, than keeping a gimlet eye on, state power.

Addicts and drunks

Hack attack is formed out of two narratives, in alternating chapters. One is a first-person account of Davies’s investigation into the phone-hacking, taking us essentially from the conviction of private eye Glenn Mulcaire and News of the World royal correspondent Clive Goodman for the crime in 2007 up to the appearance of Rupert and James Murdoch before a parliamentary select committee in July 2011. The other is a grander story - narrated in the omniscient third person - of the paper’s steady descent into criminality.

While both narratives are interesting, the second has a level of drama attached to it that would make it, extracted into its own, shorter book, a true crime classic. The first two such chapters are in their own ways astonishing - ‘Inside the News of the World’ introduces us to the rogue newsroom in full: from good-hearted showbiz hack Sean Hoare (“‘My job,’ Hoare used to say, ‘is to take drugs with rock stars’” - p28), who would become one of Davies’s sources later; to Andy Coulson, the ruthlessly ambitious, callous Essex boy.

Most others are true grotesques: Ian Edmondson, who recently pleaded guilty to hacking phones, is presented as a self-mythologising, backstabbing sociopath; managing editor and ‘fixer’ Stuart Kuttner, who is like “the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp fiction … notorious for the violence of his bollockings” (pp36-37); on it goes. The pick of the bunch is surely former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, an unreconstructed, bigoted tyrant who is quoted as describing the film Gandhi as “a lot of fucking bollocks about an emaciated coon” (p84).

The second narrative also traces the emergence of the ‘dark arts’ among private investigators in the post-war era; and their eventual encounter with the Fleet Street elite. A key link in this story is one particular private eye, pseudonymously known as Al Green, who was a heroin addict. Around him there grew, in the early 1990s, a network of addict-investigators who specialised in blagging (obtaining information by deceit). For Green, addiction to hard drugs enabled him to be a most effective blagger - “the alcoholic will steal your wallet. The heroin addict will steal your wallet and then help you to look for it” (p78). Narcotics Anonymous meetings served well both to extend the network and its client base among wealthy recovering addicts.

Most of their work initially consisted of tracing individuals over debts; but eventually their talents reached the notice of the Murdoch papers. Concurrently, those talents extended to obtaining phone records. The discovery of voicemail hacking was only a matter of time.

Unravelling

The bulk of both parts of the text covers the steady unravelling of the lies put out by News International to mitigate the fallout from the arrests of Mulcaire and Goodman. The major beats of this story are well known - further investigation by Davies and colleagues at The Guardian brought the story back into the public eye in 2009, but was stamped on by both News International and the police, who claimed that the full extent of Mulcaire’s hacking had been investigated thoroughly.

A further drip of stories drew the ire of the Press Complaints Commission, which considered Davies and co to be scurrilously impugning the good name of the Murdoch papers. Eventually it emerged that there were more victims of phone hacking, costing Andy Coulson his cushy new job as chief spin doctor for Number 10; and finally, that one of those victims was Milly Dowler, a teenager murdered in 2002. The Dowler story finally blew the gaff entirely, and the establishment was plunged into crisis.

To those of us observing from without, the attitude of the Murdoch empire, the police and so forth looked pretty monolithic; they lied, brick-walled and obstructed until the truth was forced out of them. The great virtue of Davies’s book is its demonstration of a well-known truth about conspiracies: it is devilishly difficult to keep them secret; the more parties there are to a cover-up, the more precarious is its success.

Davies’s first-person narrative, in particular, is driven by a steady series of individuals within the culpable institutions, many still anonymous in these pages, who actively sought him out to become sources. His story begins, indeed, with an encounter with Stuart Kuttner on the BBC, concerning Davies’s then new book, Flat earth news; and the guy, here called ‘Mr Apollo’, who was so enraged by Kuttner’s barefaced dishonesty that he sought Davies out. “He left me his mobile phone number,” Davies notes, “but told me never to leave a message on it” (p5). It was another such source that put him onto the Milly Dowler story.

But there is also the other side: the increasing discord within the camp of the conspirators. As the story slowly expanded, the Murdochs had a serious, big-money problem: their bid to take full ownership of BSkyB. As the scandal threatened to engulf all who had worked at the News of the World, including News International’s new chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, the clique at the top began to fragment. Factional warfare opened up between Brooks and James Murdoch, on the one hand, and former Brooks confidant Will Lewis, who became convinced that serious disclosures had to be made in order to avoid something truly terrible coming out - say, the Milly Dowler hack.

Hangover

The final few chapters cover the fallout from the Dowler disclosure: the closure of the News of the World; the multiple police investigations; the Leveson inquiry; the resignations of public officials and Murdoch’s employees alike.

Davies ends on something of a downer, however, in spite of his pride and relief at being vindicated after years of work. For him, as for us, the major story was the corrupt nexus that grew between press barons, politicians and the armed wing of the state (in this case, most particularly, the Metropolitan Police); and, indeed, the ravages of neoliberal capitalism:

When you ‘roll back the state’, you reduce the power of the people in each nation … The simple, beautiful idea that people should run their own societies disintegrates … Over and again, you allow the hard logic of the market to usurp human choice and so you create a society with all the morality of an anthill, where all human life is reduced to labour, all freedom flattened by the demand for efficient production, all weakness punished, all violence justified, where schools and hospitals are cut, while crime and alienation flourish and millions are thrown into the deep pit of unemployment (p406).

News Corp is particularly culpable for this process, in Davies’s view, for which it was an “ideological vanguard”, using media power to force public opinion rightwards. Tweaking Murdoch’s nose has not changed that: “For a while, we snatched a handful of power away from one man. We did nothing to challenge the power of the elite” (pp407-08).

In truth, he is slightly too modest here, and that is linked to a significant failing of the book. The Guardian’s exposures did more than just prevent Murdoch from further enriching himself in one big deal; they revealed the corrupt, self-serving activities that bind the elite together. There was no political movement available to take up the general struggle against such activities; but, even so, heads rolled and significant figures started squealing on each other like it was going out of fashion.

What Davies rather naively fails to see is, to put it bluntly, the slightly dubious character of some of his friends. Most egregiously, not a bad word is to be found about Max Moseley, the F1 racing tycoon, who was a key ally and source of funds for legal challenges; his monstering by the tabloids for daring to have an orgy with ladies of easy virtue was plainly cynical and salacious, but it is a small step from defending Moseley’s privacy as a matter of principle to the superinjunctions of an Andrew Marr, to obscure his hypocrisy; and a very small step from there to Trafigura, a corporation who obtained such an injunction to prevent reporting of environmental atrocities in Africa.

The trouble is not that Murdoch found his feet again, but that other elements of the establishment benefited by obtaining more stringent regulation of the press - which endangers the Nick Davieses of this world as much as the Clive Goodmans.

Such is the irony of the phone-hacking crusade - a truly momentous, exemplary journalistic investigation that was twisted into a weapon against journalism by those, like the Murdochs and their chums, with power and dark secrets they wish to bury.

William Kane