When The Guardian dropped its Milly Dowler bombshell back in July, I called the News Corporation hacking it reported “abhorrent and illegal.” But I reserved the harshest words (“downright evil”) for the News of the World’s alleged deletion of Dowler’s voicemails.
That Guardian report unleashed the whirlwind. Since then, the News Corp. hacking scandal has exploded, taking down the 168-year-old News of the World, crippling Rupert Murdoch in the United Kingdom, and, presumably, at some date in the near future, forcing his son James out of the company.
Now a major element of the story— the deletions—has had to be corrected, and, not for the first time in its years-long, heroic coverage of the hacking scandal, The Guardian is on the offensive. Murdoch’s people are on the attack.
Murdoch’s Australian reprinted a story from his “serious” UK paper,
The Times of London, and blasted this headline:
Error led to News of the World’s closure
Murdoch’s Sun managing editor, Richard Caseby, pushed the same company line and said that The Guardian was guilt of “sexing up” its story, which coming from a tabloid editor is really something. A former Sun editor asked, shamelessly: “Who will say sorry to Rupert?”
What happened here, and how does it affect the narrative of the hacking scandal?
There was indeed a major problem in The Guardian’s story: Its assertion that NotW journalists deleted Dowler’s voicemails in the days after her disappearance may not be true. In the original July 4 story, Nick Davies and Amelia Hill reported on concerns by Surrey police about the deletions, reporting as fact that “The messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages.”
Last week, Davies and The Guardian broke the news that new evidence showed that part of its story was probably wrong.
in a correction appended to the story, The Guardian wrote this:
An article about the investigation into the abduction and death of Milly Dowler (News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone during police hunt, 5 July, page 1) stated that voicemail “messages were deleted by [NoW] journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive.” Since this story was published new evidence - as reported in the Guardian of 10 December - has led the Metropolitan police to believe that this was unlikely to have been correct and that while the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone the newspaper is unlikely to have been responsible for the deletion of a set of voicemails from the phone that caused her parents to have false hopes that she was alive, according to a Metropolitan police statement made to the Leveson inquiry on 12 December.
The Guardian would be much better off here if it had only followed a basic rule of journalism and attributed information to sources. Investigations are inherently fluid. What police believe one day may turn out to be wrong or at least less likely as new evidence turns up. That’s what appears to have happened here, as The Guardian reports Surrey detectives believed back in 2002 that NotW journalists had been responsible for the deleted messages and told Dowler’s parents that at the time.
Instead, The Guardian asserted it without attribution or hedging that “messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space.” This is an awfully dumb mistake to make. Had the paper simply followed that sentence with a comma and a “police believe,” it would not have even needed to correct its original story.
In fact, the paper wasn’t too far from doing that. Here’s how it introduces the deleted-messages assertion in the July 4 story (emphasis mine):
In the last four weeks the Met officers have approached Surrey police and taken formal statements from some of those involved in the original inquiry, who were concerned about how News of the World journalists intercepted - and deleted - the voicemail messages of Milly Dowler.
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NI chose to close down the NotW rather than contest the Guardian's claims. NI could have decided at the time to refute the Guardian but chose not to so. NI closed down the NotW because it wanted to win the rest of BSkyB it did not own. Fortunately, the Guardian's welcome and timely intervention has saved us from the Foxification of non BBC television.
Get it into your heads that NI is a vicious monster than still like the hydra have all of its evil heads cut off.
#1 Posted by Charles Norrie, CJR on Fri 23 Dec 2011 at 04:52 PM
The Milly Dowler charges were the emotional heart of the campaign against Murdoch. Without them, what you basically had was hacking into the phones of royals and celebrities. Not an unimportant matter, but also one which has been known of Murdoch's tabs, as well as others (see Morgan, Piers) for some time now. The retraction of the Dowler charges make it look as though the British establishment, alternately in bed with and threatened by Murdoch, used the charge to finally try to reign him in.
It's an old story in Britain - back in Stanley Baldwin's day, he denounced the press lords as having 'power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.' The power structure there is much more incestuous than over here. What we're left with is a power struggle of little interest to outsiders.
BTW, I'm glad Ryan finally noted the retraction of the Dowler charges, which up to now I've seen mentioned only in the conservative media ghetto - still necessary to visit for news the lamestreamers won't carry. There's been a blackout on the retraction, though I heard a lot about the original charge.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 26 Dec 2011 at 07:15 PM