Phone Hacking at the Mirror in 1998: Read Paddy French’s Scoop and Pre-buy his Piers Morgan Biography

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Over at Byline, veteran investigative reporter Paddy French has an exclusive which concludes the Mirror Group, and by implication Piers Morgan, knew about phone hacking well before it became standard practice by Glenn Mulcaire at News of the World.  Below is just an excerpt from the full damning in depth piece.

But this is just a taster. Paddy is pitching on Byline a full unauthorised biography of Piers Morgan:

Morgan is one of the most important members of the cast of the phone hacking scandal. He was the first of a long line of Murdoch editors forged in the crucible of the Sun’s show business column “Bizarre”. One of his proteges was Andy Coulson.

Morgan was singled out by Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie as a future editor and it was his patronage that led to his appointment as News of the World editor at the age of 29. There Morgan singled out a young reporter and promoted her to Features Editor: her name was Rebekah Brooks. Morgan was destined to edit the Sun but when Daily Mirror boss David Montgomery — a former News of the World editor — offered him the editorship of the Mirror, Morgan accepted.

By 2003, the troika of Morgan (Mirror), Coulson (News of the World) and Brooks (The Sun) had an iron grip on Britain’s tabloids. Morgan was at the Mirror for nearly ten years — a decade that saw the paper embrace the “dark arts” of illegal news-gathering.

The plan is to produce a readable, balanced picture of a talented but flawed individual.

I’m a retired television producer so I don’t need to be paid for my time.

But researching, writing and publishing a book as ambitious as this one does not come cheap, especially since it needs to be read for libel.

I hope you will support the venture.

For a taster of the article, more below

Mazher Mahmood, Murdoch, and the NCA – The Regular Contributor

Inforrm's Blog

‘Why don’t the police chase proper criminals instead?’‘They should be out catching paedos and looking at dodgy blue chip firms not journalists just doing their job’ Paraphrasing an often heard criticism, the view is that police priorities are all skewed. And they’ve got a good point.

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How the Guardian was Got At but the News of the World Got Away With It

Crossposted from Byline – the No 1 Journalist Crowdfunding site. Please chip in to support my work there.

15 years ago the Met’s Operation Two Bridges exposed a lucrative illegal trade between corrupt police officers, private investigators and Fleet Street. Nothing was done. But what happened to two Guardian journalists who were writing about police corruption at the same time?

As Joe Public has revealed on Bellingcat, ‘How The Metropolitan Police Covered-Up For Rupert Murdoch’s News International’ senior Metropolitan police officers knew back in 1999 that there was a phenomenal trade in illegal information atNews of the World which predated phone hacking.

A secret probe in the premises of Southern Investigations, ostensibly part of a third inquiry into the murder of former founder Daniel Morgan, caught many connections between the corrupt detective agency and senior Fleet Street journalists.

Exploding the Rebekah Brooks Myth about investigating the Daniel Morgan Murder Inquiry

Crossposted from Byline – the No 1 Journalist Crowdfunding site. Please chip in to support my work there.

Sometimes the truth is hidden in plain sight.

Cited in Joe Public’s stunning collation of evidence of police collusion in News of the World’s various crimes published on Bellingcat is some detail from a Nick Davies article from July 2011.

At this point in 2002, Dave Cook was the public face of a covert fourth investigation into the prime suspects in the murder of private detective Daniel Morgan. 

7 Suppressed Investigations into News of the World in 7 Years – why Leveson II is Needed

English: London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Crossposted from Byline – the No 1 Journalist Crowdfunding site. Please chip in to support my work there.

Joe Public at Bellingcat has some startling new revelations about the long term connections between high profile employees of News International and suspects in the murder of Daniel Morgan in the private detective company Southern Investigations. These connections were reported to the Metropolitan Police 15 years ago. As Joe says:

“The Yard’s 1999/2000 Operation Two Bridges had surveillance on Mahmood in The Victory pub, in Thornton Heath, south London by CIB3 officers (also known as the Ghost Squad), who were working from London’s Belgravia police station. An intelligence report dated 26th September 1999 damningly states:

“While in the company of Rees, ‘Maz’ was with a plain clothes officer aged about 45 – officer was selling a story to Maz about inter-race marriage and the payment in dowry in the form of livestock”

 

Breaking Bad BBC – Taking the Corporatism out of the Corporation

English: James Murdoch, who is the son of Rupert Murdoch, speaking at Verge, the digital media event co-managed by Ogilvy and Unilever (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Crossposting this from Byline as the problems of the BBC are in some way related to the monopoly issues in the rest of the media….

During the phone hacking scandal that erupted in the summer of 2011, prompting Rupert and James Murdoch to close the News of the World and abandon their bid for the remaining shares of BSkyB, it rapidly became apparent that the political ramifications were more to do with over-concentrated ownership than press regulation. Owning then nearly 40% of the press, and on the verge of taking over Britain’s biggest broadcaster in terms of revenues, Rupert Murdoch was more powerful in media terms than Berlusconi (and the Italian media mogul is at least a citizen of the country he dominates). It was a glaring example of market failure and what Adam Smith calls the ‘special problem’ of monopoly.

Some other reasons why Rupert Murdoch may be stepping down from 21st Century Fox

Please support help crowdfund my regular work on the Criminal Media Nexus by crowdfunding a regular column at Byline

More on the Mirror Group, the Dark Arts, and Daniel Morgan Murder Suspects

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Last month’s civil ruling about Mirror Group phone hacking has revealed valuable new information about the industrial scale of voice mail interception at the newspaper group, and following some forensic leads, Paddy French at the Press Gang has begun to put a picture together of the industrial levels of intrusion into personal records commissioned by the Mirror Group.

The whole account ought to be read in full because it proves phone hacking was the more innocuous tip of a much darker iceberg, and once again explains how central Southern Investigations was to the corruption of Fleet Street: as a senior police officer once told me “without doubt the cradle where the dark arts were born.”

The following extract shows that, like News of the World, the Mirror Group were not only tracking celebrities but also political targets.