14th July 2009
Journalism in the dock…
An extraordinary fascinating session today at the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in which Nick Davies dramatically produced hard evidence to support the Guardian’s claim that, contrary to the claims of its executives, more than one News of the World reporter had known about the use of illegally intercepted phone messages. The relative lack of media interest so far in the stories – nothing I could see in the London Evening Standard, a piece well down the running order on the Radio Four six o’clock news - is a little bit perturbing given the fairly astonishing nature of the claims, now substantiated by strong prima facie evidence given to the Committee: that the Chief Reporter of the NOTW, Neville Thurlbeck, had known about the illegal hacking, contradicting all previous statements made by NOTW including Friday’s carefully crafted line-by-line denial. It also raises serious questions for the police and the CPS.
One additional piece of the jigsaw I raised this morning was the allegation made by Private Eye in July 2007 that Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the heart of the story, had been paid close to £200,000 by the paper after he left jail in return for a non-disclosure agreement. (The magazine also suggested a similar deal was in the offing for Clive Goodman, the jailed NOTW reporter) If that were to prove true the charge made against the NOTW that they were attempting to suppress information – by buying the silence of not just victims like Gordon Taylor but also the perpetrators – would start to look quite plausible. The charge was repeated by Peter Burden in his must-read book of the moment: “Fake Sheiks & Royal Trappings”. As Burden points out, News International have never denied this nor, to my knowledge, has Glenn Mulcaire. News International executives will have an opportunity to confirm the truth of this next Tuesday when I’m sure we will have yet another pretty explosive session.
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