On The Nation:
Lisa Owen interviews investigative journalist and Hack Attack author Nick Davies

Lisa Owen: Not many have taken on the powerful media empire of Rupert Murdoch, but Nick Davies is one of them. His book ‘Hack Attack’ details a world of crime, cover-up and phone hacking and, in fact, forced the News of the World to close down. This is a copy of the last edition that they ever put out. So has anything changed, and given he’s also worked with Julian Assange on the WikiLeaks stories, are there situations where hacking can be justified? Well, Nick Davies is in New Zealand for the Dunedin Writers Festival this weekend and the Auckland Writers Festival next week. Thanks for joining us this morning, Nick. Appreciate your time.
Nick Davies: Hi.
Hi. Can we start at the end of this saga? You invested years in this phone-hacking investigation, and you saw the News of the World shut down, so in the end what was at the heart of this story?
Actually, it’s got two hearts. The first one is that you had a newspaper run by a very ruthless organisation which was itself so ruthless, the newspaper, that it was routinely breaking the rules and breaking the law, committing crimes. But what made the story really interesting was that the police from a very early stage had detailed evidence about the crimes being committed by that newspaper, the News of the World, and they chose not to act on it, and that gives you the clue to what the story’s really about, which is that it’s about power. And when you follow it through, you see our democratically elected government doing the same as the police, which is to say kowtowing to this very powerful media mogul and not doing the job they’re supposed to do. That’s what makes it significant – the abuse of power.
And that is an enormous story, but in terms of unpicking it, there were very few big splashes, were there? It was death by a thousand cuts for this paper and this organisation.
Okay, because what really dragged it all out was we probably did about a hundred stories over a two-year period, and for most of that time, the other newspapers in Britain refused to pick it up and run with it, in spite of its clear importance. And that was partly because those newspapers may have been owned by Rupert Murdoch and also because they were themselves committing the same crimes. So it was like a secret story; only the Guardian readers knew about it. And then, you know, we did this story after about two years which showed that one of the victims of this voicemail hacking that the News of the World were doing was this poor 12-year-old schoolgirl called Milly Dowler, who’d been abducted and murdered. And when we did that story, I think the idea of boozy old journalists listening to this poor girl’s parents and friends calling her voicemail and imploring her to get in touch, it was just too disgusting, and it broke through. And at that point, the newspapers who’d tried to so hard not to cover this story were compelled to join in, and then the whole thing finally took off.
Yeah, I think you talk about it as a white explosion or something along those lines when you printed that story. In your book, I had to chuckle to myself, you talked about investigative journalists being plagued with doubt, and you called it ‘stomach-burning anxiety’. So at what point in this process did you think to yourself, ‘I’m right, and I know I’m right’?
Actually, it was a little bit of a gift, because from the word go, I had an amazing source who got in touch with me and who knew the whole story. What was scary and produced the stomach-burning anxiety in this case was that even though we knew what we were saying was true, we were up against some very aggressive dishonesty from the Murdoch company in the UK, News International, and also, alarmingly, from the police, who were being very high profile in misleading the public and Parliament, so we began to feel extremely isolated because the world was being told that we were wrong, that we screwed up and couldn’t do our job properly. And that was the difficulty – was to drag out evidence to prove the truth of what we knew.
You talked about Rupert Murdoch and the power of the Murdoch empire. Politicians are lobbied all the time, though, aren’t they? People try to influence their decisions all the time, so how was and is Murdoch different?
It’s about fear. And primarily- It’s an interesting about Murdoch and fear, actually. Ordinary people aren’t the slightest bit frightened of Rupert Murdoch. A lot of them hold him in contempt because he’s just pathologically greedy. But the people who are scared of him are the people in the power elite. So if you look at our House of Commons in London, you’ve got whatever it is, about 650 MPs, members of parliament. And they all know one or two people who have had their sex lives exposed and dragged out on to the front pages of Murdoch’s papers, and they’ve seen the humiliation and pain and the destruction that that produces. And so they’re all frightened it might happen to them. It’s a little bit like the power of a playground bully, that the bully only has to beat up a couple of kids, and all the other children in the playground get the message – don’t get into a fight with that person. That’s the core of Murdoch’s power, and there’s something you can see that’s terribly wrong with that, because it has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of arguments that his newspaper might be supporting. It distorts the entire process of democracy.
Incidentally, what influence do you think those Murdoch publications had on the British election result?
Well, it’s a fantastically complicated subject to work out the extent to which a newspaper’s coverage changes its readers’ vote and then the extent to which those changing votes actually changes the outcome. But what you can see was that those newspapers, particularly The Sun, behaved outrageously. So- it’s legitimate for a newspaper to say, ‘Okay, we support this candidate,’ and to run leader comments in support. But what isn’t legitimate is to engage in the kind of blizzard of falsehood distortion and spite, which Murdoch’s daily, The Sun did. And I think people will be asking very serious questions about why it is that that newspaper continues to behave so badly, because even if the experts say, ‘Well, you can’t prove that the newspaper is making a difference,’ it’s reasonable for us to point out that newspaper wouldn’t be making such an effort to behave so badly if they didn’t think it was going to make a difference. And they may have had, really, quite significant impact on the outcome yesterday.
So, in terms of your hacking story, you’ve obviously exposed journalists who were using stolen material to write stories. But you also were part of orchestrating the early WikiLeaks stories, which used military documents which were taken by Private Bradley Manning. So where is the line, do you think, for journalists? Where is that line?
Okay. It’s actually a very blurred line, and it makes it very difficult to be sure about what’s right and what’s wrong, if we’re honest about it. It is difficult. But roughly speaking, you head for this concept of public interest, that if you’re producing a story where you can genuinely say the people out there need to know about this, then the justification for doing something which would otherwise be regarded as wrong begins to appear on the horizon. It’s tricky stuff. So even if you go back to the area where I’ve been very hostile about hacking into voicemail, I think the reality is there could be stories where that’s justified. If you discover that a senior government minister is involved with an organised crime group but the only way you can finally nail it is to get inside his voicemail, I would say the police and the prosecutors and reasonable people would say, ‘Okay, you’re going to have to do this. We can’t have a criminal running the government.’ So it’s a blurred line. You’ve got to be really honest with yourself to try and check out whether what you’re doing is right. You know, when we were doing the WikiLeaks stuff with Julian Assange, there were huge rows between the journalist at The Guardian and Julian as to what exactly we should disclose from the material that he’d got. And we were trying to fillet it. That’s partly for moral reasons. We didn’t want to publish stuff that would get people on the ground hurt or killed. But it was also – if we’re honest about it – for political reasons that we didn’t want to hand a stick to the White House so that they could beat us all over the head if we published something that got somebody hurt, right? But Julian comes from a different background, that hacker background, and he had a much, kind of, purist view, which is that the public need to know everything. So there was a lot of conflict there, and it’s a very difficult argument to win for either side, because there isn’t a clear line. It’s about judgement.
Isn’t that the point that you just made there; that it’s not always journalists that are involved? Sometimes it’s bloggers or hackers or other people who have that information.
Yeah. So for example, it must have been about six months ago, Sony Pictures had all their email archive hacked allegedly by North Korea. That material has just been taken by Julian and WikiLeaks and put online in a searchable form. It raised exactly the same issue. There are points in that material where you can say this is really significant. You can see a corporation and the way that it operates politically, so it’s worth knowing about that. Equally, there are extremely private messages in there which a lot of us think shouldn’t have been published. Do you see? So it’s a question of discriminating and just being honest with yourself as you go along.
Well, I want to use a New Zealand example here. Last year, a book was published just before the election called Dirty Politics. Now, it exposes activities of a cabinet minister, political lobbyists and even a prime ministerial staffer, and their relationship with a right-wing blogger. And it also disclosed that someone had been digging around in the opposition party’s computer, gaining information from that. But the evidence for this book was based on documents that had been hacked from the blogger’s account. So the police are investigating it as a theft, but is it okay for the journalist who wrote the book using that material to use it knowing it’s stolen?
Okay. Position number one, journalists are not above the law. We are just civilians with press cards. Position number two kind of goes back to what we’ve already started saying, which is- again, look at the position of an ordinary civilian. There are times when people are allowed to break the law. If you’re driving somebody who’s pregnant and about to give birth to hospital, you can go through the red traffic light and nobody’s going to bust you for it. Everybody understands there’s a powerful reason for doing it, and the same applies for journalists. So I’m familiar with the story you’re talking about, but I don’t know its detail. But if what is being disclosed by these stolen emails is really significant and important for people who want to understand what’s going on in the power elite in New Zealand and what government is up to, then I think an awful lot of people would say it’s justified on that same measure; there are occasions when you can bust the red light. That doesn’t mean that everybody has some kind of licence to start stealing information just because they’ve got a press card in their pocket.
On the same note, Nick, there was a series of stories about spying. Now, this was based on information from Ed Snowden. Now I know you’re not familiar with the specifics of that, but I’m interested in the fact that the prime minister deflected those stories, saying the leaks were partial, out of date, even fake, and he refused to comment on them for security reasons. Is it realistic for politicians to expect privacy and to keep secrets in this day and age, following WikiLeaks and the like?
There are two different issues in there. Official secrecy; governments always and everywhere extend the boundaries of secrecy far too wide, and insult us, the people in whose name they’re acting. The area of secrecy which is really legitimate is tiny compared to that which governments constantly claim, but you used a different word in there, which was privacy. And it worries me that newspapers, in their desire to sell more copies, have invaded the privacy of public figures in a way that’s not justifiable. So I think, for example, it’s very hard to understand why any public figure’s sex life needs to be exposed. I can’t see how it reflects on their ability to be a government minister or a captain of industry that they might be sleeping with somebody else’s wife. It’s nobody else’s business. So I just think they’re different concepts. Official secrecy is one thing. Personal privacy, I think we need to defend it. We need to defend personal privacy, actually; partly against rapacious newspapers who think it’s very clever to ransack people’s lives to make money out of it, but also, of course, against government surveillance. The privacy issue there is extremely significant. I worked on the Ed Snowden material in London, and it’s scary when you look at it. Just the absolute universality of what they’re trying to grab – everything. That is scary. So that when you’re tootling around on your computer, it feels private, but the damn government can be in there if they want to. That isn’t right. So I think we really need to defend privacy but challenge official secrecy.
All right, thank you so much. Fascinating to talk to you and so much more we could talk about, but unfortunately we’re out of time. Thank you, Nick Davies, for joining us this morning.
Okay. Good luck.
Transcript provided by Able. www.able.co.nz

© Scoop Media