Arresting Development

Carrot Top Rebekah Brooks was arrested Sunday on suspicion of phone hacking and bribing police.  This might be why:

(Reuters) – “It was the kind of place you get out of and you never want to go back again.” That’s how one former reporter describes the News of the World newsroom under editor Rebekah Brooks, the ferociously ambitious titian-haired executive who ran Britain’s top-selling Sunday tabloid from 2000 to 2003.

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Journalists who worked there in that period describe an industrialized operation of dubious information-gathering, reporters under intense pressure attempting to land exclusive stories by whatever means necessary, and a culture of fear, cynicism, gallows humor and fierce internal competition.

“We used to talk to career criminals all the time. They were our sources,” says another former reporter from the paper who also worked for Murdoch’s daily tabloid, the Sun.

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The 168-year-old paper published for the last time last Sunday after exposure of its widespread use of phone-hacking triggered a scandal that has engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper group News International, its New York-based parent company News Corp, and Britain’s political classes and police.

Brooks, one of two top Murdoch executives who resigned on Friday, has maintained she neither sanctioned nor knew about the phone hacking.

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Four former employees of Britain’s best-selling Sunday tabloid have told Reuters that Brooks’s denials are simply not credible. They say people on the paper’s newsdesk, the hub that directs news coverage, were regularly grilled about the top stories by Brooks and later by her successor Andy Coulson, who resigned over the phone-hacking scandal in 2007 and went on to become Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman.

“They went in and they were cross-examined for two hours every day. And it was all about the genesis of all the stories,” the first ex-reporter, who worked at the paper for seven years, told Reuters.

The News of the World’s reporting methods were first questioned when it published a story about an injury to Prince William’s knee in 2005, prompting fears his aides’ voicemail messages were being intercepted. The royal family complained to police. More than a year later the paper’s royal editor Clive Goodman and private detective Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for six months for conspiracy to access phone messages.

Coulson, by then the newspaper’s editor, resigned immediately, although like Brooks he has repeatedly denied any knowledge of phone-hacking. Until recently, the paper continued to maintain that the hacking was isolated to Goodman.

Former employees say that’s hard to believe, not only because of the story approval process, but also because budgets were so tightly controlled that payments for such services would not have gone unnoticed.

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When Brooks became editor, at age 31, she had a brief to broaden the paper’s appeal by intensifying the focus on celebrity and showbusiness news and publishing fewer of the harder stories the paper had been known for — politicians caught taking illegal drugs or footballers caught with their pants down.

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At the same time, the pressure to get exclusive stories was so intense that dubious practices were barely questioned. “They were ‘dodgy business HQ’. I’m not sure if people even realized it was illegal. It was a don’t-get-caught culture,” said the reporter of seven years’ standing.

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“It was no place for anyone to pipe up and say: ‘This doesn’t seem ethical to me.’ That would have made you a laughing stock.”

Journalists didn’t explicitly ask for private investigators to get involved in their work, but help would be provided if a reporter got stuck on a promising story. “How it arrived on your desk was a bit of a mystery. You didn’t know and you didn’t ask,” said the reporter.

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A fifth former News International employee who worked with News Of the World journalists at this time said its reporters were under “unbelievable, phenomenal pressure,” treated harshly by bosses who would shout abuse in their faces and keep a running total of their bylines. Journalists were driven by a terror of failing.

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“The News of the World was much more secretive than the Sun. At the Sun, you knew what was going on, what people were working on. In the News of the World you never knew what anyone was working on. They’d send you out to a job and wouldn’t tell you what it was for. It’d be: ‘You’re going to meet a man. Don’t ask his name and whatever you do don’t get him excited. Just take his statement and leave,'” he said.

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Charles Begley, an ex-News of the World reporter, has spoken out about the bullying culture. He said he felt close to breaking-point when, three hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York’s twin towers, he was ordered to appear at the paper’s daily conference dressed in a Harry Potter outfit he had been given to help the tabloid capitalize on the craze for the books about the boy wizard.

“At that time, we were working on the assumption that up to 50,000 people had been killed,” he said then, according to tapes published in 2002 by the Daily Telegraph of a conversation between him and assistant news editor Greg Miskiw. “I was required to parade myself around morning conference dressed as Harry Potter.”

It was during this conversation that Miskiw made a comment that was to become notorious in Britain: “That is what we do — we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”

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Contrary to a popular perception that the tabloid threw large sums of money around to get stories, the news budget was extremely tightly controlled, the journalists said.

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This is another reason it was hard to believe senior editors were not aware of phone hacking and other expensive illegal services provided by outsiders, the ex-reporters told Reuters. Mulcaire, the private investigator later jailed for phone hacking, was paid more than 100,000 pounds a year by the News of the World.

“No newspaper editor would not know what a 102,000 pound budget was used for. They knew about every 50 quid,” said the long-term freelancer.

Eavesdropping on voicemail or obtaining call logs was initially a money-saving measure, according to the former employees. Rather than committing a reporter to stake out a venue for as long as it took to catch out a couple having an affair, for example, voicemails could first be scrutinized to establish the time and place of a rendezvous, saving the reporter time and the paper money.

As its uses became apparent, it was employed more and more. The general news reporter said he was first shown how to listen in to people’s cellphone voicemail by a colleague in the 1990s.

“It became the course of first resort rather than last,” the long-term freelancer told Reuters.

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Editors would […] often use damaging stories as bargaining chips, trading them for future access to public figures or to build relationships with stars. Often, the paper would drop the story they had altogether and publish something more sympathetic.

“It would be things like: ‘We know you were sleeping with your secretary but we’ll keep it out of the paper if you give us the story about how you were given away as a child,” said the long-term freelancer.

“They used to call stories ‘levers’,” said the general news reporter. “They weren’t necessarily interested any more in using the story you’d proved or got past the lawyers. They were interested in using the story as leverage in order to get a different story.

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“It was relationship-building for them. Basically, she (Brooks) was trading in your hard work to be friends with influential PRs. They used the stories to bank credit with influential people. It then made the whole raison d’etre of the place something different.”

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It became practically a matter of honor not to use respectable journalistic methods, the reporters said.