Hacking trial: reportage and comment

Hacking trial: reportage and opinion

As tabloid newspaper bosses, Brooks and Coulson ruined lives. They did it to sell newspapers, to please Murdoch, to advance their own careers. One flick of their editorial pen was enough to break the boundaries of privacy and of compassion. The singer’s mother suffering from depression; the actor stricken by the collapse of her marriage; the DJ in agony over his wife’s affair: none of their pain was anything more than human raw material to be processed and packaged and sold for profit. Especially, obsessively if it involved their sexual activity.
- Phone hacking trial was officially about crime, but in reality it was about power, the Guardian

James Doleman

In the end it was the skilful cross-examination by lead prosecutor Andrew Edis QC that made the conviction certain. The QC homed in on the events of April 2002 when a News of the World article which directly quoted the voicemails of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler was published. Coulson told the court that it was not his job to police every story in the News of the World, to which Edis responded: "Can we at least agree that part of editing a newspaper involves reading it?"
Even long-time court watchers winced when the prosecution barrister put it to the defendant: "You are a powerful and intelligent man – well, you used to be powerful, but you are still intelligent."
- Why was Andy Coulson found guilty?, the Drum

Roy Greenslade

Although the NoW was undoubtedly a rogue newspaper, as I wrote several times and way before the hacking scandal broke, its journalistic agenda and the methodology some of its reporters employed, was not confined to its Wapping newsroom.
The knowledge of how to hack into mobile phones was known to other journalists on other newspapers. And these reporters were under similar pressures to obtain stories. Newspapers that belittle the significance of hacking have reason to avert their gaze from such truths.
- Newspapers fail to report the real story about the trial, Guardian blog

George Brock

Many people speak and write of journalism as if it can be washed whiter than white. They imply that if only regulation was stiffer (or “Leveson-compliant”) and tycoons were removed from the equation, a new era of moral journalism would be born.
Never mind trivial, intrusive journalism for a moment: even good journalism requires morally dubious activity (inducing people to break confidences), investigative journalism can require secrecy and guile. Implicit in inquiring journalism is the possibility of doing harm to bad people.
- Regulators beware, good journalism crosses boundaries too, Prospect Magazine

Tim Crook

Bob and Sally Dowler’s daughter Milly was not murdered by tabloid journalists. In fact her serial killer was brought to justice with the assistance of “bombshell information” from a Mirror journalist. The News of the World did not delete messages on Milly’s phone giving her parents false hope that she was still alive, but the paper did unlawfully listen to messages on her phone.
The idea they could help to find her represents sheer arrogance and stupidity on their part...
The phone-hacking scandal has conjured a new journalistic demon, that of the “tabloid” privacy intruder whose gutter-press appetites can only be satiated by phone and computer hacking, bribing coppers and seeking a cheap thrill by peddling pornography with the telephoto lens...
What has been minority transgression by popular media has been transformed into the typical and general. Could it be the case that experts in researching moral panic theory have been adroit in perpetuating it?

- The British Press has been demonised by academics and celebrities, The Conversation