Fresh dirt in UK
phone hacking scandal
Probe opens into reports of abuses at other publications
By Bill Cromwell
Jul 26, 2011
The phone hacking scandal that brought down the News of the World is now spreading to other British newspapers beyond those owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Trinity Mirror, which owns the Daily Mirror and the Daily Record, said yesterday that it has opened a review of its own editorial practices.
The company denied conducting an investigation into phone hacking per se, but the timing is no coincidence. The inquiry comes days after a former Daily Mirror employee claimed that phone hacking took place under the paper's former editor, Piers Morgan, now a CNN host.
Separately, a BBC2 report has alleged that the Sunday Mirror not only hacked phones but hired private detectives to dig dirt on the paper's subjects.
Trinity Mirror described the inquiry yesterday as "good corporate governance," undertaken in the wake of revelations of widespread hacking at the NOTW, including the phone of a 12-year-old murder victim.
Accusations of hacking at Trinity Mirror reach beyond the flagship publication. In a New York Times story last week, five former reporters at The People, a sports and celebrity title, said that phone hacking was commonplace during the late 1990s.
The Trinity Mirror review will focus on editors' awareness of where certain stories came from, which would seem to cover phone hacking, as well as whether the papers paid for some stories and why they did so.
Trinity Mirror director of risk and audit Charmian Steven will chair the review panel.
Meanwhile, here are the other most recent developments in the phone hacking scandal:
* Guardian reporter Nick Davies, who pursued the phone hacking story for years before landing the scoop that broke it open this month, has landed a book deal for "Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up With the World's Most Powerful Man." It will be published in fall 2012.
* A week after an ill-received editorial defending News Corp., the Wall Street Journal yesterday published a report from the paper's editorial committee criticizing the newspaper's coverage of the scandal and accusing it of being too soft on chief executive Rupert Murdoch in an interview that ran just a day before the publisher of the paper, Les Hinton, was forced to resign related to the scandal.
"[The Journal] could have done a better job with a recent story allowing Mr. Murdoch to get his side of the story on the record without tougher questioning. We have discussed this with the involved editors," the report said.
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