Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement “Democracy dies in darkness”. But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts? I experienced, at first-hand, the journalistic techniques that the Washington Post’s publisher and chief executive, Sir William Lewis, and his colleagues used when working for the Murdoch media group and the Daily Telegraph in the UK.
Lewis and Robert Winnett, who was appointed by Lewis as editor of the Washington Post before quickly deciding not to take the job, are accused of benefiting from private investigators who broke the law. As these allegations surface, an “alternative truth” is being briefed that the Lewis team represents a nimble “no-holds-barred” British journalism, in contrast to what is alleged to have been the plodding, loss-making reporting of newspapers such as the recent Washington Post. It is Lewis’s claim that he can turn round the fortunes of the publication, which lost $77m last year, that appears to have endeared him to the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who is the paper’s owner. But as recent revelations demonstrate, the real dividing line is not between the disrupter and an entrenched resistance to change, but between ethics and the lack of them.
I have only recently discovered how Lewis attempted to accuse me of a crime I did not commit. He was asked by the Metropolitan police why, in 2010-2011, News Group had ordered the deletion of millions of emails. These were emails that the police authorities thought may be relevant to their investigations into phone hacking. The Murdoch group continues to claim that emails were deleted “for commercial, IT and practical reasons”. But when the police confronted Lewis about the deletion of emails, including those of the then chief executive, Rebekah Brooks – despite the Met having requested them to be retained – it was a different story, which gave the game away.
His explanation conceded that emails were being destroyed to prevent them being seen. In an interview with the authorities on 8 July 2011, he tried to blame me by explaining to the police that he had been told that I, with Tom Watson, also an MP at that time, was conspiring to steal these emails. The Murdoch team implied I had bribed one of their former employees to do so, and indeed that we already had some of the documents. “We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails,” Lewis told the police. “Then the source came back and said … emails had definitely been passed … she went into a panic.” This operation to steal, according to the source, “was controlled by Gordon Brown”. According to an email chain, which had been sent on 24 January 2011, the supposed thief had “met with Brown”.
None of this was anything other than a complete fabrication. The senior police officer Sue Akers, who headed the initial investigation, has now said she finds Lewis’s explanation to be unbelievable.
Having presented this new evidence to the Metropolitan police in May, I have been informed that the Met’s special inquiry team, which sits under the central specialist crime command, will look into this further. (News UK has responded that “it is strongly denied that News International sought to impede or worse conceal evidence from the Met investigation”.)
While Lewis has always claimed that he was Mr Clean Up, these new allegations point to a cover-up. The destroyed emails were likely to have revealed much more of News Group’s intrusion into the private lives of thousands of innocent people, not least ordinary families hit by tragedy, and almost certainly would have added to what I have only recently discovered about what happened to me.
I have known for some time that the Murdoch group had accessed information about my mortgage from my building society, had reverse engineered my telephone number, had faked my voice to secure personal information about me from my lawyer, and had paid an investigator to break into the police national computer to find out what personal information about me was available. I knew, too, that my tax returns had fallen into other hands, and that my medical records had been accessed (a doctor admitted to doing so), but to this day I do not know who was ultimately responsible for these thefts.
More recently, I have been given information alleging that the Murdoch group also paid investigators to break into other personal accounts of mine – including bank, gas and electricity – suggesting that nothing was out of bounds (in response, the Sunday Times said it “cannot comment on the specifics of these new allegations” but “rejects the accusation that it has in the past retained or commissioned any individual to act illegally”). The Murdoch team has always claimed that the pursuit – not just of me but my family, too – was in the public interest, but it is now clear to me that these were “fishing expeditions” to obtain personal and private information. So this was not merely a defensible lapse of judgment, but an indefensible breach of the law.
And what lay behind the extreme lengths to which Murdoch’s News Group went to subvert the law? It went far beyond a journalistic desire to publish a series of sensational stories. The Murdoch group not only had political motives but commercial designs that went far beyond trying to obtain 100% control of Sky TV. At various times, it planned to buy ITV, and to neuter the BBC (for example by cutting the licence fee, ending its website, taking away national sporting events from free to air coverage). The evidence suggests that the Murdoch empire also wanted to control much of the highly profitable UK telecoms industry, all of which the Conservatives were ready to go along with until the Milly Dowler scandal made it politically impossible.
Marching under the banner of a free press, Murdoch’s News Group violated individuals’ rights to a private life on an industrial scale, from the families of Milly Dowler and Madeleine McCann to the July 2005 bombing victims, intruding on them at their time of greatest grief and heartache. And, as we know from this week’s court proceedings, there is evidence that this went a step further with a cover-up, now exposed as breathtaking in its reach and intensity. We count on our journalists to shed light on the darkest of areas – to awe us with novel reporting, not commit groundbreaking crimes of their own. During these challenging times for print journalism, the answer to any paper’s financial woes is not to operate at the edge of the law, but to follow a clear moral compass. For without ethics, the truth will never shine through the darkness.
Gordon Brown is UN global ambassador for education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
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