Did she, didn't she?
The verdict in what has been referred to as ‘this century’s mother- of- all- courtroom- battles’ in the United Kingdom has raised more questions than it has answered. The battles relating to the hacking, by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain, of the phones of ordinary citizens , politicians, members of the British royal family, celebrity film stars, musicians, sportspersons and even school girls, in order to get scoops.
Murdoch’s media company New International’s constant claim, since the phone hacking first came to light, was that one ‘rogue reporter’ was responsible for it. It had consistently denied that top editorial management knew about the hacking. This theory was torn to shreds on June 24, with the conviction of Andy Coulson, former editor at News International, and one-time press aide to Prime Minister David Cameron. Coulson was pronounced ‘guilty’ of the charge that he had criminally conspired in the hacking operations conducted by his paper, including the hacking of the mobile phone of a murdered school girl, Milly Dowler. He will be sentenced later this month along with three others who have confessed to phone hacking at Murdoch’s tabloid, News of the World (NOW), which closed down in 2011. Coulson and the three are expected to go to prison soon after.
The real shocker, however, one that raised the hackles of many in Britain on the day of the vedict, was the fact that 46 year old Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of NOW and a one-time head of News International, was let off with a ‘not guilty’ verdict along with her husband, Charlie Brooks, and her personal secretary.
The 12 member jury’s verdict that Rebekah Brooks was on holiday abroad when the Milly Dowler hacking was on and was therefore not complicit in the paper’s illegal hacking activities, has been openly critiqued. Much of the comment in the media can be summarised thus: “ How can being away on one holiday for a week absolve her of any complicity in a crime that was committed over years? If she was totally unaware of what was going on in her paper, what sort of out-of control Editor was she ? What about the fact that she was in a relationship with Andy Coulson when the hacking was going on - you mean to say they did not share this piece of information with each other or discuss the daily fallout of the stories on readership?” .
Public opinion is clearly very conflicted on the verdict that has fully absolved Rebekah Brooks – who is known to have been close to two former prime ministers, Tony Blair and Cameron. Brooks herself told the media that she was ‘vindicated by the unanimous verdicts’ on three separate charges of criminal conspiracy.
However, the criminal trial that lasted eight months and reportedly cost 100 million pounds, has revealed that the hacking was done on an industrial scale. So far the authorities have come across nearly 1000 victims with over 5600 hacked phone calls. Rupert Murdoch is reported to have paid over half a billion pounds so far in compensation, and in mounting a most expensive defence of his former editors, Brooks and Coulson, to keep them out of prison. The media magnate only managed to save one of them, his favourite employee – Rebekah Brooks.
News UK, Rupert Murdoch’s re-christened media organisation put out a dry press release: “We said long ago that wrong doings had been done and we apologise for it. We have been paying compensation and we have also changed the way we do business.”
In an article in the Guardian newspaper, investigative journalist Nick Davies wrote that this was “no ordinary trial” and went on to describe it as a “Rolls-Royce defence”: “Rupert Murdoch’s money flooded that courtroom. It flowed into the defence of Rebekah Brooks, because he backed her; and to the defence of Andy Coulson, because Coulson had sued and forced him to pay. Lawyers and court reporters who spend their working lives at the Old Bailey agreed they had never seen anything like it, this multimillion-pound Rolls-Royce engine purring through the proceedings. Soon we found ourselves watching the power of the private purse knocking six bells out of the underfunded public sector. As the weeks went by, this trial came to embody the peculiar values of this particular century – its materialism and the inequality which goes with it, the dominance of corporation over state.
Minutes after the jury pronounced Coulson ‘Guilty!’ at the Old Bailey courtroom on Tuesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered what he described as a ‘full and frank apology’ to the nation for having given Coulson the top media job at 10, Downing Street. Despite the fact that Coulson carried the baggage of phone hacking with him, Cameron had appointed him his media advisor. The media had then said Cameron had desperately wanted a ‘spin doctor’ in Downing Street like Coulson, just as Tony Blair had Alastair Campbell as his Director of Communications.
“I am extremely sorry that I employed him…I gave him a second chance and it turned out to be a bad decision…I am profoundly sorry about that”, a red-faced Cameron said.
“The real question is why did David Cameron give him a second chance?” asked Mark Lewis, the attorney for the victims. The British Prime Minister’s apology was critiqued as lame and a sham by most political commentators. A BBC journalist interviewing him asked: “It reflects on you…the poor judgement doesn’t it, Prime Minister?” To which Cameron could only repeat his earlier statement. Norman Smith, Chief political correspondent of the BBC described Cameron’s apology as a “very very rare one”, which hoped that by its very nature the Prime Minister could evade being further pinned down on this issue.
The political fallout, too, was instant. The Opposition Labour Party leader, Ed Milliband, accused Cameron of having ‘turned a blind eye to the accusations against Coulson’ and thereby having wilfully brought a ‘criminal to the heart of 10 ,Downing Street.”. Questions were asked in Parliament, and in newspaper columns and TV studios about whether the British Prime Minister had thrown to the winds due diligence In the extremely important matter of security vetting for Coulson , before offering him the media top job.
Tom Watson, a British Labour party MP, wrote in the Guardian soon after the ‘gulity’ verdict was pronounced on Coulson : “For David Cameron to appoint Coulson to Downing Street, bypassing all the usual vetting procedures, casts grave doubt over his judgment. At prime minister's questions he claimed that all the difficult questions had been covered at the Leveson inquiry. Yet at the inquiry, Cameron claimed that in 2009, when the Guardian first reported that phone hacking at the News of the World may have gone further than a single rogue reporter, Coulson said he knew nothing about it – repeating an assurance made on taking the job with the Conservatives. Under oath, Cameron said: "I was reliant on his word but I was also reliant on the fact that the Press Complaints Commission had accepted his word, the select committee had accepted his word, the police had accepted his word, the Crown Prosecution Service had accepted his word." But at that point in 2009, Coulson had not been interviewed by the police, the CPS or a select committee on the subject, and the PCC never interviewed Coulson personally. The prime minister gave an explanation which was – wholly, demonstrably and in detail – false.”
Watson did not spare his own former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair either: He wrote in his column: “One of the most disturbing revelations throughout this period was that Tony Blair was the secret godparent of one of Murdoch's children. There was Tony, on the banks of the river Jordan, satin robes rippling in the breeze, genuflecting to the most powerful media oligarch on the planet. And when it was revealed that poor Milly Dowler's phone was hacked, what was Blair's first reaction? It wasn't to ring Mrs Dowler. It was to offer to advise the company on their PR strategy. Like many others in the Labour party, I am ashamed of him.”
Former Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett, who was a victim of the phone hacking scandal and had to step down from office when his conversations professing love to a married woman were made public, said ‘Justice had been done’. Blunkett who had earlier said: ‘The hyenas of the press had finished me off ’, said he had gone through what could be described as a near ‘nervous breakdown’ when his conversations were hacked and made public. It had terrible consequences to his family life.
The irony of course was that at the time Andy Coulson was grilling Blunkett on his ‘affair’, Coulson himself, a married man, was having an affair with his co-editor, Rebekah Brooks. This fact had emerged during the court proceedings. A taped interview that Blunkett had preserved of Andy Coulson interviewing the former Home Secretray about his affair with a married women, replayed on television channels after the verdict. It went onto establish further what Blunkett had been stressing- that Coulson was aware and part of the hacking operation. The interview showed that Coulson’s questions to Blunket were on the basis of having heard the hacked conversations. Coulson refers to these conversations as ‘very reliable sources’.
The important thing in this phone hacking inquiry was: Who knew, when they knew and how they knew.
Tom Watson, the British MP, concluded his column in the Guardian on this note of caution: “The lesson of the News UK scandal is not that journalists are bad. It's that corrupted journalism was so corrosive to democracy that only great journalism could save it. When the police, 95% of the media and successive governments failed, it was only fearless journalism that exposed the wrongdoing. Politicians gave Murdoch his power, now we must challenge it..Unless media owners are constrained, the British public face yet more scandals and cosy relationships that are corrosive to democracy. In the end this is a story about power. And Murdoch just got too powerful. He owned too much of Britain's media estate. He still does. But it's politicians that gave Murdoch his power. And I'm sorry to say, I don't see much changing. They're still queuing up to take a bow, albeit less obsequiously than before. Without rules that stop the monopolistic tendencies of the powerful people who run our media, can we, with any certainty, say that a similar situation will not arise again? I'm certainly going to campaign for a Labour manifesto commitment to widen pluralism in our media market”
Though written far off in the context of UK media, Tom Watson’s words hold a sinister meaning also for India’s media which is fast falling into the grip of corporations and big business and being forced to move away from the agenda of good and ethical journalism.
The last word on the phone hacking scandal in the UK has not yet been uttered. The coming days and months is likely to see the Leveson Commission part 2 starting its hearings and the Independents Press Watchdog kicking in this autumn to check illegal journalism that is actually criminal in nature like the phone hacking saga over a 15 year period indulged in by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid stable in UK. It may also see the British authorities summoing Rupert Murdoch again for further questioning to clarify his complicity as the owner of all the publications to find out whether he was the heart of darkness.