An hour with the man who broke the hacking scandal

**Nick Davies: “News, instead of being a vehicle for important social and political information, becomes a consumer item, constructed to please a market, purchased for pleasure. That in itself is very dangerous.”**

Bonfire night in Lewes, hours before the ear-shattering processions kick off, and Nick Davies takes an hour to talk to me about the explosion that’s taking place in and around the British press.

Davies has politely refused almost all invitations to interview since the phone-hacking scandal blew up this July, as he is still very much involved in his journalistic research and also a book he is writing on the subject.

The ‘phone-hacking scandal’ has become an over-familiar term. It denotes the greatest scandal brought to the public’s attention since the 1974 Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation. Exposing the corruption and immorality of the press, police and politicians, in a context of declining ethical standards of journalism, Davies has punctured Rupert Murdoch’s seemingly unstoppable power. He has the honour of following in the footsteps of journalists who exposed Watergate, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

The obvious, yet all-important first question that I had to ask concerned his first lead. Journalistic instinct meant that all seemed obvious to him, as he explains, “In January 2007 there was a trial of the News of the World’s royal correspondent Clive Goodman, and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire [respectively accused of phone-hacking and assisting]. A blind man in a dark room could see that the official version of events given at that trial didn’t make sense…” Clearly, the most likely explanation was the News of the World had told him to.
Davies’ pursuit of the official version of events came a year later, when on the Today Programme, the managing editor of News of the World, Stuart Kuttner, opposed his assertion that newspapers were hiring private investigators to act illegally. He continues, “A day or two later I was contacted by somebody who I’d never heard of, who said, ‘I heard Kuttner on the radio, I was really appalled at the lie he told, here’s what the truth is.’” Three years on, after nearly 100 reports, Nick Davies managed to expose what the most powerful British institutions have been hiding from the public for several years.

So how did he go about his research? “It’s difficult to talk about that in an enormous amount of detail,” he says, “because it’s one of those stories where almost everyone who helped has to be very cautious. I would think 95 per cent of the sources are off the record. So, in general terms, you use your imagination to guess what the truth must be, and then again using your imagination: if A is true, who would know it? How would I be able to prove that A is true?
“So, guided by your imagination, you go out and approach people who used to work for News of the World, private investigators who are not cowboys, people who’ve worked at Scotland Yard, people who’ve worked in the Press Complaints Commission, anybody at all who was involved in that trial in January 2007. And then a lot of the skills of reporting are persuading people to talk to you when they don’t want to. So if you can start to get any of these people to talk, the picture begins to emerge.”

It strikes me as bizarre that in 2007 people weren’t interested, though does this perhaps simply reflects a newspaper culture founded by Murdoch? “We’re too busy banging out stories and we don’t have time to do our job properly. But of course on this occasion there was a second factor, which is that Fleet Street is a dishonest institution, or collection of organisations, which is ironic because their main purpose in life is meant to be to tell the truth.” Suddenly, with the case of Milly Dowler, four years later, it became impossible to ignore.

“I think if you had just done the Dowler story on its own, it wouldn’t have had the impact. But by that time I think a great many people in the police, Parliament, the press complaints system and in Fleet Street, could see that there was a huge scandal here. For various reasons, I think it’s pretty clear, the bad guys still felt that they had the power to hold the lid down on it, and there was a lot of pressure pushing that scandal out into the public domain. They were putting a lot of pressure back to keep it hidden, and they might have succeeded, but the Dowler story just blew the lid off in the most extraordinary way.”

What does this say about the public’s interest? Does it take a story as extreme as the phone-hacking of a murdered schoolgirl to expose the inherent immorality that News International pursues to acquire its stories? Davies explains, “When I filed that story in July I sent an email to the editor saying I think this is the most powerful hacking story so far, but I didn’t understand quite how powerful it was. It’s really an emotional reaction; I think the behaviour there was really so bad that nobody could be seen to be an ally of the News of the World.”
The significance of this is remarkable, as Davies explains, “Murdoch and News International were so powerful that almost everybody wanted to be their ally and was willing to behave in really quite a corrupt and dishonest way in order to remain an ally.”

The Internet played an equal part in the social and political furore. “The Internet doesn’t just convey information fast; it also conveys emotion very quickly, so that you get a kind of madness of crowds quite frequently. It’s quite frightening because sometimes that madness is based on falsehood, so you’ll see a false story taking off. Within 48 hours of us running that story, there was this extraordinary sense of anger and panic. Corporations started withdrawing their advertising from the News of the World. On the floor of the House of Commons, every single politician walked away from the Murdochs. Nobody was willing to be seen as their ally. An extraordinary spectacle, as these were people who had previously had their noses shoved right up the Murdochs’ buttocks, and suddenly they were saying, ‘Oh no, I never liked the man, I never had anything to do with him, I’m out of here.’

“This is similar to public opinion in the country, or in Fleet Street, which was continuing to try to ignore the story. They had to stop that game which was really remarkable.”
Carl Bernstein, who broke news on the Watergate scandal with Bob Woodward, drew a parallel between the Watergate and Murdochgate stories. I ask Nick Davies his thoughts on this and hear a fantastic story that neatly concludes our discussion. “When I left university in 1974, the Watergate scandal was coming to a peak and it was that that made me decide to become a reporter. So then here we are, whatever that is, let’s say 37 years after I left university, I’m sitting here in my study, and the phone rings one evening, just about two days after the Dowler story broke, and a gravelly voice says, ‘Oh hi, this is Carl Bernstein, I just wanted to say well done.’” Davies was clearly touched: recalling it revives the emotion. We both laugh as he says, “It was like God calling.”

Bernstein told Davies that ever since Watergate he’s felt rather irritable with scandals always having the word ‘gate’ added to the end of the central noun. This is the first time, he says, that he thinks it really deserves the comparison, to be designated ‘Murdochgate’. Davies simply states the central connection with Watergate: it exposes the power elite. “First of all, the most powerful news organisation in the world, you have the most powerful police force in this country, you have the most powerful political party, for good measure you also have the press regulation body. All four of these organisations are exposed in different ways and shown to be failing. That’s where it’s like Watergate, because the Watergate story takes you to the heart of power and shows it to be corrupt.” And what a relief that it’s been proved, too!
I’m interested in how Davies sees the future of journalism. People look for ‘information’ in bitesize form on the internet and 24 hour news; therefore newspapers and in-depth reporting have a much smaller audience. How, I wonder, does the journalist engender a critical, rather than conformist, readership?

Davies pauses, re-structures the question, and then responds precisely answering what I’ve asked; the exact way a journalist’s brain should work. “First of all, newspapers from a financial point of view are dying because the internet is taking our readers and our advertisers. Then, if you look at what the punters want, you can see there’s been quite a shift in the last thirty to forty years; it’s something to do with Thatcherism and Reaganism. What’s emerged from the post-1979 era is that people tend to identify themselves as consumers, rather than in social and political terms. That shift has then produced a shift in the demand for news, so that people want to be entertained and made to feel good. News, instead of being a vehicle for important social and political information, becomes a consumer item, constructed to please a market, purchased for pleasure. That in itself is very dangerous.”

In his statement for the ongoing Leveson inquiry, former News of the World deputy features editor Paul McMullan spoke exactly in these terms of readers as consumers, saying: “If the public found the targets of our stories distasteful they would not have bought it. The inverse is true. [What is] of interest to the public is what they put their hand in their pocket and buy.” In this sense, “they are the judge and jury of what’s in the paper.” McMullan equally attempted to justify the breaches of privacy, declaring, “Privacy is for paedos.” McMullan’s statements reinforce how the Guardian retains critical broadsheet values while, under the influence of Murdoch, tabloids including the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times, have lost theirs. The only papers remaining independent of major corporations are the Observer and the Guardian, which according to Davies “behaved worse than any other newspaper over the hacking story, and attacked it for about 15 months,” while other newspapers simply refused to report on it.
The phone rings and I’m thrilled to be present as he discusses confidential information concerning his research and this week’s article. Even more excited when I learn I mustn’t repeat what I heard. What a great confirmation of my idealised image of life as a top journalist. I take a moment to look around his study, with big open glass doors facing on to his front garden; books and papers surround his desk, including several editions of his book Flat Earth News; a picture of Fidel Castro, John Lennon and a dung beetle on the wall and many photos of his three children. I felt that I was sitting in a secret den, surrounded by details that put together his life.

I turn the dictaphone back on and we return to the interview. “The thing is, because there’s that cultural shift, it’s very difficult because I can’t create a readership that isn’t there, so what you’re left with is a significant minority of people who still do think in social and political terms and still are interested in the way the world works. You end up writing for them, really, because the mass market is far less interested than it was.”

Is it true to say that the Guardian is the only paper to encourage in-depth and honest reporting? “Serious long-term reporting isn’t dead, but it’s really suffering because of the commercial problem, so there are just little pockets where that survives. I think it is fair to say that the Guardian is the biggest pocket.” Davies was also behind the Guardian’s partnership with Wikileaks, which strikes me as an interesting parallel to the phone-hacking scandal, though perhaps different in terms of morality.

“What I’m trying to do is to tell the truth about important things, so in the case of Wikileaks I went out and tried to persuade Julian Assange not to put all these secrets on his website, but to give them to an alliance of the Guardian and the New York Times because it’s very important that we should know the truth about what’s going on. There what you’re up against is official secrecy. Governments always and everywhere try to hide information from their own people, which those people should be entitled to have. So I don’t have any problem at all in defying official secrecy. I think the actual amount of information that governments ought to keep secret is far, far smaller than the area they do keep secret. If that involves breaking the official secret zone, I would say that it’s morally right because governments are abusing the law.

“Beyond that, there are a whole bunch of other laws that we should respect. There are, for example, the laws that prevent the newspapers and everybody from listening to your voicemail, getting inside your emails, burglarising your house and getting hold of your data. What the News of the World were doing was to break those laws without any good reason. They were simply getting tittle-tattle about people’s private lives. If the News of the World had been breaking those laws in order to expose a scandal, which would otherwise have not come out in the public domain then possibly they could have been justified… possibly. But as it was they weren’t, they were just breaking the law in order to get stories to sell newspapers; there was no higher motive involved at all.”

In order to ease the Internet’s financially damaging effect on newspapers, the Guardian has had to evolve to adapt to the internet age, but how? “Journalistically we’ve adapted brilliantly, but financially we’re in the same mess as everybody else. It has this hugely successful website, with around 40 million users a month there. We have more American readers hitting the Guardian website than the Washington Post website. Plus, with the newspaper the story was dead within 24 hours, the paper was physically wasted, whereas now the stories are there forever. Commercially, however, we are in a deep black hole, like everybody else, because the internet is taking the readers and the advertisers. Our policy is to be high-minded and journalistic and to carry on giving away the information.”

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward inspired Davies to become a journalist in 1974. What does he hope to have changed with his work? “One of the good things happening in journalism is that it still does attract bright, intelligent, idealistic people who want to become journalists so that they can make the world a better place. So if the phone-hacking, or any other of the Guardian’s stories encourages that to keep happening, I’m certainly pleased about that.” There was an extraordinary amount of feedback from people who were excited about the break through on the phone-hacking story in July. He reflects, “So maybe it has encouraged more people to think about journalism, wanting to defend journalism and wanting to be journalists.”

And does he think students’ interest is important? “Yes, because what you don’t want to happen is that because the commercial side of newspapers is so bad people say ‘well I’m not even going to try to become a journalist, I’ll go off and take my intelligence elsewhere’. That will hasten the death of the profession. What we want is that people will still want to become journalists, and we hope that somehow or another we will solve the big financial problems that are currently killing us. The thing is, the fallback is that if you left university and trained to be a journalist and then discovered that the industry really is dying, that there just are no jobs and is no future for journalism, which could happen, well then you can take the skills that you’ve learnt as a journalist and transfer those elsewhere. If you’re trained as a journalist you will be good at taking large amounts of complicated information and reducing it to something short and clear. You will be very skilled at dealing with people because one of the big skills of journalism is persuading people to talk to you when they don’t want to. You may have picked up specific areas of knowledge; you will be able to take your skills elsewhere to stay alive.”

So is newspaper journalism a viable career? “The real answer is that nobody knows whether it’s a viable career; nobody can see what the future of journalism is, because we don’t know what the business model will be in the future. The existing model has been broken by the Internet. It is possible that over the next two or three decades you’ll see the industry of journalism collapsing and the profession of journalism effectively dying. It is equally possible that we will somehow find new ways to fund it and the need for journalism has probably never been greater. Since the need is so great, it is possible and conceivable that somebody will come up with a solution that will keep it alive.”

I tell him he’s more or less answered my final question and he quips, “I’m ahead of your game!” yet nonetheless asks to hear it. Where and how does he think the most interesting journalism will be happening in the next ten to twenty years? “From the point of view of people who are trying to become journalists, basically I would aim for the BBC or the Guardian in this country, which are big enough to sustain these pockets of healthy activity. Do whatever you have to do to get work in there.”
He remembers working on local papers doing stories that were “excruciatingly tedious about things that nobody cared about and didn’t want to read about” and also the “ghastly business of interns being used as unpaid slave labour. In a way there’s a kind of natural justice in that, because the people who do stick to it and break through will be the ones who are really committed. The people who are just thinking ‘oh well that’ll be interesting’ will just drop out and they’ll go off and work in the PR industry or something.”
Davies concludes by giving advice that will help see me through life, with a great metaphor. “Do you see over on the wall there, the picture of a dung beetle?” I acknowledge that I was curiously observing it earlier, in all its insect wonder. He elaborates, “The point about the dung beetle is that the female lays her egg and builds it into a tennis ball-sized sphere of elephant shit. When the baby dung beetle is born, in order to be able to grow and fly free it has to eat shit. But if it eats enough shit it then becomes strong enough and free enough to be whatever it wants, which is to be a grownup dung beetle. Well the reason why that’s on the wall is because that’s a great metaphor for life and particularly a good metaphor for anyone who’s trying to become a good journalist. You have to eat shit before you get what you want.”

Nick Davies is currently writing a book on the phone-hacking scandal, and has previously published Flat Earth News.