N.Y. TIMES
HACK ATTACK
The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch
By Nick Davies
Illustrated. 430 pages. Faber and Faber. $27.
There is an emerging subgenre of British nonfiction in which journalists from The Guardian fearlessly recount their own derring-do in David-and-Goliath battles waged against omnipotent state interests in the pursuit of Big Important Truths.
David Leigh’s “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy” showcased how The Guardian “defied the world’s biggest superpower” and released a torrent of American military and diplomatic secrets. More recently, Luke Harding’s “The Snowden Files” detailed how the “famous newspaper” took on “some of the most powerful people on the planet” to expose the surveillance state.
Now comes Nick Davies, an award-winning special correspondent for The Guardian, with “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch.”
This book, too, is a Guardian-centric tale: in this case, 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.
Lawyers who won court orders forcing the disclosure of information that underpinned much of The Guardian’s early reporting on The News of the World’s widespread use of voice mail interception to land front-page “splashes” are supporting characters in this telling. So, too, is Tom Watson, a member of Parliament whose relentless inquiries helped keep the story alive. For their trouble, they found themselves under surveillance, their private lives laid bare in reports commissioned by the News of the World’s parent company, News International. The whistle-blower Sean Hoare risked jail when he became the first former News of the World reporter to go on the record to say that phone hacking was endemic in the newsroom and encouraged by top editors.
That said, if any one person deserves to place himself squarely at the center of this tale, it is Mr. Davies, who spent three years chipping away at a tower of lies, enduring attacks on his credibility and overcoming stonewalling of the first order to produce his account of tabloid criminality and British officialdom’s role in covering it up.
In 2007, The News of the World’s royal reporter and a private investigator the tabloid employed pleaded guilty to intercepting voice mail left for the royal family. The editor at the time, Andy Coulson, resigned, but he and the company insisted it was an isolated incident involving a rogue reporter. Two years later, Mr. Davies landed several scoops that suggested otherwise, but the rest of the British press didn’t seem to care, even though Mr. Coulson was now the chief spin doctor for Prime Minister David Cameron. Though “a blind man in a dark room could see that these people were lying,” Mr. Davies writes, a Parliamentary inquiry into the matter had produced a whitewash.
Frustrated, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor in chief, reached out to Bill Keller, then the executive editor of The New York Times. Send a team of reporters, and do your own investigation, Mr. Rusbridger urged, which is how I came to meet Mr. Davies and his editor a few days later in The Guardian’s offices.
“Reporting is not a spectator sport,” Mr. Davies writes in “Hack Attack.” “You can’t sit and wait for the information to present itself like a postman knocking at your door.” Instead, “you have to get in there and make it happen.”
If that meant briefing reporters from another newspaper on everything he had managed to dig up so far, in the hope that they would be able to turn up something new, so be it. (Mr. Davies graciously credits The Times with breaking new ground and reinvigorating the story.)
In the United States, the mainstream news outlets like to portray themselves as observers, content to let events play out without interference. But in Britain, where crusading journalistic campaigns are part of the tradition, it is far more acceptable for reporters to become active participants, with a specific outcome in mind.
Mr. Davies writes of plotting strategy with lawyers whose clients had been stalked and tormented by The News of the World, of “feeding information” to Labour Party politicians who had “shown signs of wanting to get to the truth,” and even giving evidence to Parliament, all in the name of breaching “Murdoch’s castle” instead of “watching him and his court feasting.” His blow-by-blow approach occasionally bogs down with unnecessary detail about peripheral characters and story lines, and his efforts to protect sources can border on obfuscation. Mr. Davis is at his candid best writing about moments of self-doubt and mistakes made along the way, as when he learns that he most likely got a crucial detail wrong in the story — about the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl’s phone messages — that finally brought The News of the World to its knees.
As Mr. Davies pursues his quarry, readers are introduced to the seamy underside of Fleet Street, a brutally transactional place of “casual treachery” where people volunteer “to sell the secrets of those who most trust them.” Scotland Yard muckety-mucks sit on mountains of phone-hacking evidence, as they are wined and dined by the powerful editors and reporters they are charged with investigating. Bent cops are put on the tabloid’s payroll, while dodgy private eyes, some with criminal pasts, lurk about. Nothing is sacred; medical records, even a person’s precise location at any given moment as determined by cellular tower triangulation technology, can be had for a price. Politicians, fearful of the enormous power wielded by the Murdoch press, cower in corners.
It’s journalism noir, and it’s not surprising that last week George Clooney announced that he plans to direct a film version of “Hack Attack.”
Still, Mr. Davies did not get the Hollywood ending he clearly wanted. The News of the World closed, and Mr. Murdoch’s company has been forced to settle hundreds of hacking lawsuits at a cost that, combined with legal fees, could exceed $1 billion. But despite his best efforts, Mr. Davies was unable to prove complicity within the highest echelons of Mr. Murdoch’s empire. Mr. Coulson was convicted, along with reporters and midlevel editors, but Rebekah Brooks, the most senior member of News International to be charged, was acquitted. Mr. Murdoch’s son James once at the center of the scandal, was never charged.
The “brief humbling of Rupert Murdoch seduced us into thinking that we had won a great victory, that truth had caught up with power,” Mr. Davies writes, when, in fact, as “the scandal slipped into the past, the elite simply took back their power, as if we had never challenged it.”
And that, in the end, is the moral of the story. As Mr. Davies puts it, “Power enjoys secrecy, because it increases its scope.” It takes tenacious muckrakers like Mr. Davies to upend that dynamic.