It was a dramatic day at the inquiry, with former tabloid journalists presenting like sinners at the pearly gates …
— The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, on Tuesday’s session of Britain’s press standards hearings
The sinner who got the most ink, it turns out, was Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor for the now-defunct News of the World, who did not come looking for forgiveness.
McMullan and others confessed to paying cops for information, staking out the homes of celebrities, politicians and crime victims, breaking into their homes to steal documents, fishing through their trash, hacking their voice mails, accessing their medical records and all sorts of other cloak-and-dagger reporting tactics.
The “dark arts,” one reporter called them.
“Perfectly acceptable,” McMullan said.
They testified before a judicial panel investigating the culture and practices of the British press in the aftermath of a phone-hacking scandal that brought down the 168-year-old News of the World, the country’s largest Sunday newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch.
McMullan’s grandiloquent defense of Fleet Street’s journalistic excesses went on for two hours.
On exchanging private cellphone numbers with other reporters : “I think I traded Sylvester Stallone’s mother for David Beckham.”
On celebrities who protest being stalked by the press: “Hugh Grant puts on a bit of makeup, ponces about in front of a camera and complains. … Sienna Miller should be cock-a-hoop to have photographers outside her house, because who is she?”
On posing as a teen-age rent collector to proposition a priest: “You don’t just go up to a pedophile priest and say, ‘Hello, good sir, you are a priest; do you like abusing choir boys?'”
On paparazzi pursuit scenes: “I absolutely loved giving chase to celebrities. How many jobs can you have car chases in? Before Diana died, it was such good fun.”
On why none of the above suggests the industry is in need of government regulation: “I think the public is clever enough to decide the ethics of what it wants in its own newspapers.”
The public may indeed have had enough. Despite their famous appetite for sensational headlines, Brits recoiled upon learning that News of the World reporters had hacked the cellphone of missing teenager Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered.
The paper also is accused of breaking into the voice mails of victims of terrorist attacks on London’s public transit system and families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
More than a dozen reporters and editors and two London police officers have been arrested in the continuing probe. The public backlash caused Murdoch to shut down the newspaper.
But Murdoch says he knew nothing about what had been going on. Neither did his son, chairman and CEO of the paper’s parent company, or the top executives who have resigned in the face of the scandal, or the former editors who have been arrested. In 2007, when a staffer went to jail for intercepting the royal family’s messages, one of those editors chalked it up as the work of a single rogue reporter.
McMullan maintains that hacking was widespread — and hacking a 13-year-old’s cell phone was “an honorable act.” Reporters were only trying to find the girl, he said, something the police had failed to do because they’re “a bunch of Inspector Clouseaus.”
The bad guys, in his book, are the editors who threw the reporters under the bus once the scandal broke.
“They should have had the strength of conviction to say ‘I know, yes, sometimes you have to enter a gray area or enter a black illegal area for the good of our readers, for the public good, and yes, we asked our reporters to do these things.'”
In his first year on the job, McMullan said, his department had a budget equal to $4.5 million to pay for sources and documents. “That was the joy of working for Murdoch,” he said.
“In 21 years of invading people’s privacy, I’ve never actually come across anyone who’s been doing any good.”
Yes, they do things differently across the pond, and we’re not here to defend it. Still, it’s refreshing, in the face of so many pious denials from up the chain of command, to encounter someone willing not only to speak frankly about the ethically bankrupt Fleet Street culture, but to own it.
