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“There’s something terribly exciting about getting at the truth when powerful people are trying to conceal it,” Nick Davies told Hollywood on the Potomac about being an investigative reporter. Davies is an award-winning special correspondent for The Guardian and his book “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch” is being made for the silver screen by George Clooney.
“It’s about the pivotal role the newspaper played in exposing the British phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid The News of the World, and cast an unforgiving light on the incestuous ties among the country’s most powerful media conglomerate, the police and the political elite.” New York Times “I guess they usually conceal it,” Nick added about powerful people, “because they’re abusing their power. It’s very satisfying to expose abuse of power I suppose.”
“Essentially I’m lucky because I’m freelance. Nobody tells me what to try and sniff out. It’s just a question of what appears to be important at any one time. I went through a phase of being very shocked about the scale of poverty in England. I ended up spending years writing stories about poverty in England and doing a whole book about it. Other times I got worried about the decline of our state funded schools. I spent several years on that. The war against drugs I thought was a very bad thing so I tried to expose that.
This book actually started like ten years ago. After the invasion of Iraq, I was frustrated by the fact that when it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction, new organizations reported that as though it was a problem created by governments and intelligence organizations. Whereas, clearly, the misinformation had a third player which was news organizations. I started looking at why news organizations produce so many stories which are false or distorted. I wrote a book about that called Flat Earth News. While I was doing that, which involved talking to reporters from other papers about the stories behind stories, some of them started telling me about illegal things they had been doing to get their stories. That then led on to looking at the illegality which produced the whole phone hacking scandal,” Davies explained.
Nick Davies – Photo credit: www.telegraph.co.uk
We wondered why news outlets would risk such behavior – higher readership, sensationalism?
“You have a highly competitive newspaper market in the United Kingdom because we have sixty-million people crammed into a small space. For a hundred and fifty years newspaper organizations have been able to reach them all with overnight trains. Sixty- million people in one single market. The competition for those readers is very intense because there are so many titles chasing them. So the popular newspapers have tended to become very ruthless; then add into that the fact that the Internet has been breaking the business model of news organization. They’re trying to get huge stories at the same time as they’re laying off staff because they can’t afford to keep so many reporters working for them. If the technology that arrived allows you to take a shortcut, and get big scoops without serious investments of time, it’s an extremely attractive option. Of course it’s terribly easy to hack somebody’s voice mail messages, and terribly successful as a way of getting stories. The more they did it, the more they enjoyed it, the more they wanted to do it,” explained Davies.
We also asked Davies what was the first indicator that it was a story he wanted to follow.
“Well actually, the easy answer to that is that I was on BBC radio in February 2008 talking about that book I mentioned, Flat Earth News,” he said. “As an opponent in the radio studio, they had the then managing editor of The News of the World Newspaper, a man called Stuart Kuttner. When I briefly talked about illegal activity in news organizations on the radio, Stuart Kuttner attacked me verbally. He said that he didn’t know what planet I was living on, and that it had happened just once at The News of the World, with just one reporter and he had gone to prison. Well, that was fantastically wrong. So much so that it provoked somebody who I had never heard of into contacting me a few days later. That person became a kind of guide through the story and revealed the extent of the real climate at News of the World.”
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We also wondered about his safety. What happens to you during this process? Do you get threatened, sued, what is the response from the outside?
“Yeah. There was a two year period, no actually a four year period, when I was digging up information, publishing stories. When I did the first big story, which was in July 2009, within a couple of days, first of all a very senior operative from Scotland Yard, the police, came forward and made a public statement effectively saying that my story was rubbish. Then the following day, Murdoch’s UK company, News International, released a statement which said that we’d actually been deliberately misleading the British people. That’s scary if you’ve done a big story, to be denounced publicly by the police and by the subject of the story.
“It was that pressure all the way through, the constant attacks. The police ended up visiting my editor over a period of time twice.: The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and on another occasion an assistant commissioner, to tell him to tell me to stop on the grounds that I was wrong. My editor very decently, and bravely, ignored them. At the same time the Murdoch company was continuing to say that we were running rubbish. This is the same impression they gave also in their own newspapers. There’s all that kind of resistance. As time went along some very good lawyers became involved who represented some of the victims of the phone hacking, and also some politicians started to speak out. We now know that Murdoch’s company reacted by hiring a private investigator who specializes in following people and videoing them without them realizing he’s doing it. He followed certainly two of the lawyers and one of the politicians in order to try to find out who they were having sex with so that they could try and punish them and deter them. I’m not aware of him having done anything like that to me, but certainly there was this constant feeling of aggressive opposition, and potential threat from, so to speak, the other side.” said Davies.
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We, of course, wanted further clarification: Isn’t is unusual, or is it inappropriate, for police to get involved in making such statements?
“Two different things,” he answered. “First of all, Murdoch’s newspaper certainly was paying cash to serving police officers in order to bribe them to disclose information. That’s one thing. When it came to the very senior officers who absolutely failed to tell the truth about the crime that they knew was occurring at News of the World, that’s a different thing. That’s to do with the power of Murdoch’s newspapers. People are frightened by his newspapers. They’re frightened first of all with the newspapers may expose their private lives, which is a very terrifying thing if they do it. And they’re frightened by the organization. The newspaper might start attacking them. It might start attacking Scotland Yard and destabilize them by running one front page after another accusing them of X, Y, and Z. Once an organization and its senior people are in fear of a powerful person, they will do whatever they can to make themselves feel safe. You don’t have to bribe them. You don’t even have to tell them to do a particular thing. They will take the initiative and try to make sure that everything stays peaceful and they don’t get attacked. That’s what was happening.”
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Hollywood on the Potomac threw out some visuals for a knee-jerk reaction: The scene where Wendy Murdoch is just after the water was being thrown in his face. What is your reaction to that?
“Technically it wasn’t water. It was shaving cream. It was a paper plate that this idiot was trying to push into Rupert Murdoch’s face. What was my reaction? Well, I thought it was being really really stupid, this idiot with the shaving cream, because we had spent years trying to make Murdoch accountable. There he was, finally, sitting in front of the Committee of Elected Politicians, and that idiot interrupted the whole proceeding and, undoubtedly pushed the sympathy in the direction of an elderly man who was being stupidly assaulted. I was sitting there in the room. I was about two yards away when this happened. I just felt sorry for Murdoch because he was being attacked in that way. I felt angry at the idiot who was doing it. That’s about it. Wendy, she was rather amazing. She did pretty well.”
We asked Nick if Murdoch ever try to contact him personally? Did you have any interaction with him?
“No. You know that we have this big hacking trial, which finished in June of this year with Andy Caulson and Rebekah Brooks? Towards the end of that trial I was trying to negotiate to go and interview him in New York. My understanding from people close to him was that he, himself, was willing to do it, but his advisers evidently persuaded him that it was a bad idea. I’ve never met him. The closest I got to him was when he was in that Parliamentary Committee Meeting where he was attacked.”
From The Guardian: Rebekah and Charlie Brooks: Rupert Murdoch funded their heavyweight defence team. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex Features
We wondered if he agreed with the verdicts and whether there were people that should have been tried and weren’t.
“The police inquiry is still continuing. Where Piers Morgan is concerned, Piers Morgan has been interviewed by Scotland Yard as a suspect. That’s because there is some evidence which could suggest that he’s guilty. That doesn’t mean that he is guilty. It doesn’t even mean that he will be charged. It just means that he is on the radar with the police to the point where they have actually questioned him. I don’t know whether anything else will happen in his case or not.
Yeah, I thought the verdicts were fair enough. There were eight people charged with voice mail hacking. Five of them pleaded guilty before the trial began. One of them, Andy Caulson, was convicted during the trial. Then, too, Stuart Kuttner, who was the man on the radio years ago, and Rebekah Brooks, they were acquitted. That was fair enough. The evidence against them wasn’t very strong. It was a good trial. Very good judge and jury. The evidence wasn’t there to justify convicting her. You don’t want to live in a society where the state can lock people up without being able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. It wasn’t there. That was a fair result.”
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Since hacking is a blood sport these days from NSA to phone companies to Internet breaches, we asked Davies to tell us how he felt about all the ‘hacking’ going on apart from newspapers.
“Privacy is invisible, and therefore rather hard to defend. I think it’s very important to defend it. Whether it’s against profit hungry news organizations who think that it would be okay to make a lot of money by invading your privacy, or from governments who think they can achieve some sort of advantage politically or militarily, by invading your privacy. That invisible boundary, which each of us needs, has got to be defended. The more the technology allows the penetration of that boundary, the more important it is to defend it.”
We also question invading privacy while doing investigative reporting. Is that okay? Isn’t it the same thing?
“I would say that I certainly don’t want to invade people’s privacy and I don’t think I need to in order to do my job. I think that hasn’t been a problem for me, the question of invading other people’s privacy.”
From the Guardian: George Clooney said: ‘Nick is a brave and stubborn reporter and we consider it an honor to put his book to film.’ Photograph: Jason Merritt/Getty Images
This takes us to the last question and the article headline: Clooney’s Flick – he bought the rights to “Hack Attack”
“I’m really pleased that he’s involved because I actually met him in London three years ago. He first got in touch and said that he was interested. But at that stage, of course, I hadn’t written the book. I was very impressed by him. He’s a serious guy. He can recognize there are important issues in here and so he wants to make a film that explores them. I’m up for that. Let’s make a great film which says important things. Perhaps we haven’t really said the most important thing on the way through which is that okay, so you have this crime being committed by journalists – that’s quite interesting – and you have the failure of the police which is more interesting. But what’s most interesting is when you look at governments and you look at our government, or yours, or anywhere in the world where people like Rupert Murdoch operate, those governments react with fear of people like Murdoch. Just like the police did,” he noted.
“In the book, and potentially in the film, what it does is to take you into the corridors of power and shows you what really goes on behind closed doors and the way in which that beautiful idea of democracy is diluted, almost to the point of destruction, by the behavior of very powerful people who provoke a fear in government. It’s quite unusual, this story, because in one way or another you’re able to get in there, in the corridors of power, and tell the story in enormous detail, really unusual detail. I don’t know where George wants to go with it, but there’s some really interesting areas to get into. It’s a blank sheet of paper at the moment. It’s just happened very, very recently. Ultimately, the reason it’s worth pursuing this story is because what it tells you about power and the abuse of power. It isn’t just about a bunch of tabloid journalists in London doing silly things. It’s much bigger than that. That’s why Clooney’s interested. That’s why I think it’s been worth the six and a half years working on it.”
