There is a point in their Watergate investigation when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein need to know if a member of president Richard Nixon’s White House team borrowed a certain book from the Library of Congress. It’s important, trust me. Bernstein phones the librarian and at first receives co-operation, then it looks as though someone senior has intervened and she clams up. The point about this is that it could never happen here at all. In the UK, finding out via an official channel what a Keir Starmer staffer was reading would be nigh on impossible.
I became a journalist because I regarded Woodward and Bernstein as heroes. I still do. They brought down the most powerful person in the world without firing a shot. It was later, when I was mounting investigations and chasing wrongdoing that I realised how, compared with the US, ours is a much more closed society. We like to suppose it’s not, that the liberal UK is readily open. It’s not. American reporters are able to access far more detail easily and legally than their UK counterparts.
Woodward and Bernstein were of course from the Washington Post. Their historic reporting gave the paper its reputation, one it retains as an organisation that famously speaks truth to power. WaPo now has a British publisher and chief executive in Sir Will Lewis, an ex-editor and investigative reporter in London. Lewis’s appointment has provoked a bitter culture clash with the existing staff.
In the US, journalistic ethics occupy the highest of pedestals. Arguably, they can, since theirs is a nation that affords greater transparency. So, paying for information is prohibited. There, discovering if someone has a criminal record is legal and obtainable. Here, it is illegal and punishable. When he was editor of the Daily Telegraph, Lewis sanctioned payment for a computer disc containing MPs’ expenses. The subsequent stories amounted to an almighty scandal. No matter that it was public money they were claiming, the MPs’ invoices remained a closely-guarded secret. Lewis was showered with UK professional plaudits for the paper’s work. At his new berth in Washington, it’s held against him.
He followed that with a stint working for Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. His task in essence was to clean out the Augean stables for his veteran boss. Running a small unit, Lewis was handing over evidence against individual journalists for phone hacking in return for the police not pursuing Murdoch’s company. Had they done so it would have been disastrous for Murdoch, dissuading investors and possibly spelling the end for his media empire. So Lewis acted as a corporate informer, feeding up names from internal emails and records. His justification was that he was saving the larger enterprise and with it respected titles and thousands of jobs, and he was helping expose criminality in journalism and thereby raising standards. Some might not have done it, but that was his reasoning and he stuck to it, even at the expense of making an enemy of The Sun newsroom and other journalists.
-and-News-International-chief-executive-Rebekah-Brook.jpeg)
From there he went to the US to manage the Wall Street Journal for Murdoch. Lewis is a rare type of journalist — a gifted story-getter, he is also at home in the C-suite, able to talk to proprietors in their language. Fresh-faced, blessed with rumpled charm, he knows how to manage the high-ups, listening and not interrupting, thinking and choosing his words carefully, which they appreciate. He’s good at minding his Ps and Qs, staying the right side of deferential and respectful. He’s also a hack who understands commerce, who, while appreciating the craft of journalism also gets the need to generate profits. That is what made him so appealing to Murdoch and it’s what Jeff Bezos saw when he asked Lewis to steer WaPo.
He inherited a financial mess. He also took over one of the greatest media institutions in the world; one, as they see it, of the two most vital newspapers in the US, along with the New York Times. But while the Times has powered ahead digitally and as well as producing serious, quality content has shown a knack for giving people lighter digital fare with Wordle and the hugely popular NYT Cooking, its DC rival has lost its way. Lewis’s job is to right the ship, to restore profitability without losing its USP. From the owner’s point of view, Lewis ticked the right boxes: commercially-minded and with a name, in the UK anyway, for producing outstanding journalism.
Lewis acted as a corporate informer on phone hacking — his justification was that he was saving respected titles
Lewis was not impressed with what he found. On the editorial side, this has resulted in a stand-off between the new broom and newsroom. With hindsight, perhaps things could have been handled more sensitively. Lewis abruptly replaced a popular editor with his own man from London, Robert Winnett, who like him hailed from the same UK news tradecraft. Probably, that was not the smartest of moves, bringing in a former lieutenant from his Telegraph days. It wasn’t a great look and was bound to rile the staff (Lewis has appointed other former colleagues to lesser WaPo positions).
Perhaps that was the reasoning. Certainly, Lewis believed the news operation required shaking up. The backlash, however, saw Winnett stay put and Lewis appear powerless. Bezos gave his backing to Lewis, which went some way towards cementing his position. Certainly, there was no quick departure, when at one stage it seemed as though there would be.
That’s where WaPo remains, as a grumbling, unhappy organisation. Clearly, that is not sustainable. Something will have to give. Either Lewis will go or he will succeed in bringing in the people of his choice and planting his own identity on the famous news floor. Given the support of Bezos and the urgent requirement to stem losses, the upper hand appeared to reside with Lewis. Whatever the news reporters — present and former — said about Lewis and his past and present, however much they complained, the cold fact is that their once great paper has fallen on hard times.
Now, though, there has been a development that might tip the balance in the opposite direction. Lewis has been accused of going beyond supplying the police with evidence of journalists who were hacking, and concocting a story to justify the deletion of thousands of emails implicating Murdoch and senior executives. In court, lawyers for Prince Harry have claimed that Lewis “fabricated a security threat” — that Gordon Brown, aided by fellow Labour politician Tom Watson, was conspiring with a News UK employee to steal management emails.
Either Lewis will go or he will succeed in planting his own identity on the famous Washington Post news floor
This apparently resulted in Lewis ordering the destruction of millions of emails dating from early 2008 to the end of 2010, which meant they could not be made available to the police, even though they were supposed to be preserved. Brown and Watson rubbish the plot story — the former prime minister has called for Scotland Yard to mount a criminal investigation into the claim and possible cover-up. Murdoch’s company say it isn’t true. For his part, Lewis is broadly denying any wrongdoing but has not commented further.
Depending on how this plays out, this may be the final straw for Lewis at WaPo. The cover-up is worse than the crime, as Watergate, no less, taught us.
