Britain’s phone-hacking trials may have resulted in the conviction of former editor of the News of the World Andy Coulson, for conspiring to hack phones, but the Crown’s failure to convict his predecessor, Rebekah Brooks, on the same charge (and for corrupting public officials, and conspiring to conceal evidence) is probably what will be remembered when other memories of the years-long saga have faded.
Even before the trials started it was clearly established that journalists at Rupert Murdoch’s leading newspapers had hacked the phones of more than 5,000 people, including senior political figures and members of the royal family. The conviction of a single former editor, albeit one subsequently hired to oversee communications for the prime minister, seems a remarkably small return for the time, money and attention allocated to the trials. Much of this may be due to the complexity of the evidence, but the quality of Brooks’ legal representation cannot be discounted. Several observers at the trial noted how well her lavishly funded defence team – the legal bills reportedly exceed US$8M – sifted through the vast trove of evidence to make compelling presentations that repeatedly wrongfooted the under-resourced prosecutors.
If the Coulson and Brooks verdicts do mark the end of Murdoch’s capacity to intimidate British public figures, the former editors’ self-righteousness is revealing. Both complained about the difficulty of receiving fair trials after being vilifed in the press. They did so as though neither had contributed to the low tone and sharp practices which characterise so many British tabloids. Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke the phone-hacking story, writes that: “As tabloid newspaper bosses, Brooks and Coulson ruined lives. They did it to sell newspapers, to please Murdoch, to advance their own careers. The singer’s mother suffering from depression; the actor stricken by the collapse of her marriage; the DJ in agony over his wife’s affair: none of their pain was anything more than human raw material to be processed and packaged and sold for profit. Especially, obsessively if it involved their sexual activity.”
In retrospect it seems inexplicable that people who trafficked in such prurient fare could have held the power to shape British politics. But evidence of their influence is beyond question. The Leveson Inquiry questioned Brooks about no fewer than 185 meetings with prime ministers and senior politicians, many in settings that blurred the line between professional and social intercourse. Davies recalls that while Brooks moved through this world, her newspapers cheerled “policy which suited the ideology of the Sun and of its owner – crime, immigration, public spending and notoriously Britain’s membership of the European Union.”
Despite her acquittal, it should be recalled that Brooks often used her publications to settle scores, particularly when these involved criticism of News International. One well-known target was the Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, outed as an adulterer after taking the organization to task for phone hacking. For more than a decade News International journalists pursued former prime minister Gordon Brown, secretly procuring details of his mortgage, conning his lawyers into disclosing personal information, and ferreting out details of his infant son’s medical history.
William Randolph Hearst, the fons et origo of ‘yellow journalism,’ would have recognized Murdoch as a fellow spirit and admired Brooks’ tireless service of his amoral free-market absolutism. In Murdoch’s world principles do not impede profits and politics is usually little more than a means to cultivating business. In 1998, when News International was courting China, Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, wrote a book that was deemed too critical of the People’s Republic. Murdoch’s response was characteristically sly. He ditched Patten’s book and pressured HarperCollins executives into claiming that the manuscript was “substandard.” Such bad faith is typical of the tabloid culture Murdoch imposed on a large portion of the British press and this Machiavellian aspect of his legacy may well prove to be ineradicable. If it is to be overcome, Britain’s tabloids will require not only the findings of the Leveson enquiry, and the mixed verdicts of the recent trials, but also an extended period of self-examination and a principled resolve to operate with at least a modicum of professional integrity in the future.
