Red Top Dead, No Redemption: 10 years on the News of the World's corpse still stinks
Murdoch killed the 168 year old tabloid with unseemly haste but its disease still infects News UK.
Previously: The Mate of Murdoch shield: Gove gets an easy ride while The Sun hits Angela Rayner with old insinuations
Rupert Murdoch owned The News of the World for just 42 years of its 168-year life, having seized control of the paper in 1969 after a tussle over it with fellow monster Robert Maxwell. Its run as the country’s most popular and reliably rotten scandal sheet came to a premature end in 2011 when Murdoch, in an attempt to contain the toxic fallout from the phone-hacking scandal, abruptly shuttered it.
The News of the World did not become malign when Murdoch beat Maxwell’s bid to take it off the hands of its then owners the Carr family; it appealed to Murdoch precisely because it was already malevolent and had been since its earliest days.
Beginning in 1843, The News of the World’s founder and first publisher, John Browne Bell, identified a winning formula — filth, fury, crime and vice — which despite the paper’s first slogan (“Our motto is the truth, our practice is fearless advocacy of the truth…”) required only a loose relationship with reality.
By the 1920s, with the same formula still at its heart but with a healthy dollop of sports coverage added to the mix, the paper was selling 3 million copies and boasting, “All human life is here.”
The News of the World’s popularity didn’t bring respectability. In his book The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette (1950), J.W. Robertson Scott recounts a conversation between then News of the World owner Lord Riddell and Frederick Greenwood, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette:
Frank Greenwood met in his club one day Lord Riddell, who died a few years ago, and in the course of conversation Riddell said to him,
“You know, I own a paper.”“Oh, do you?” said Greenwood, “What is it?”
“It’s called the News of the World — I’ll send you a copy,” replied Riddell, and in due course did so. Next time they met Riddell said, “Well, Greenwood, what do you think of my paper?”
“I looked at it,” replied Greenwood, “then I put it in the waste-paper basket. And then I thought, ‘If I leave it there the cook may read it’ — so I burned it!”
Establishment disdain for The News of the World continued into the Murdoch era but politicians increasingly felt they needed the country’s biggest Sunday newspaper on their side. It was not just The Sun that led Tony Blair to do his infamous deal with Murdoch.
Similarly, David Cameron gave disgraced ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson a “second chance” by appointing him as his communications director because he bet the benefits of closeness to News International would outweigh the controversy. As with so many of Cameron’s bets, it did not pay off.
When The News of the World closed in 2011, it was still selling an average of 1.2 million copies, more readers than the other Sunday tabloids — The Sunday Mirror, The People and The Daily Star Sunday — combined and 50% higher than The Mail on Sunday. News UK claimed 15% of British adults read the paper.
Rupert Murdoch didn’t close The News of the World because it suddenly wasn’t profitable. He shut it down because he thought he could contain the toxicity of the phone-hacking scandal by burying the paper in a shallow grave. There were only crocodile tears from News International management. Web domains for the News of the World’s successor — The Sun on Sunday — were registered 5 days before its final issue was published on 10 July 2011.
That final copy of The News of the World ran with the lachrymose headline ‘Thank You & Goodbye’ on the front page and on the back it featured one quote apparently from a News of the World reader and another from George Orwell:
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World.
It’s appropriate that one of the final two quotes printed by a newspaper whose relationship with the truth was as faithful as Boris Johnson has been to wives.
The Orwell quote comes from his essay The Decline of British Murder — published by Tribune in 1946 — and Orwell’s intention was not to convey some nostalgic love for The News of the World. Instead, he was contrasting the bucolic Sunday with the paper’s contents:
In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers…
The News of the World, finally felled by the revelation that it had hacked the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl, Millie Dowler, was twisted Orwell’s words to make itself sound like a cosy cornerstone of British life. It was still pushing a line used by Stafford Somerfield, the News of the World’s editor at the time of Maxell’s attempted takeover, that the paper was “as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”
But The News of the World was always a toxic meal and the fact that former employees still attempt to claim it was a force for good is just a sign of their industrial-grade arrogance. Editors like Rebekah Brookes — who went on to edit The Sun and is now Chief Executive of News UK — used The News of the World as a weapon for Rupert Murdoch, threatening and cajoling weak ministers into policies made not by experts but by the prejudices and obsessions of the tabloid leader column.
Last night on Radio 4, an edition of Archive on 4 titled Thank You & Goodbye, presented by The Guardian’s Media Editor Jim Waterson, and associate produced by former News of the World staffer Tom Latchem, told the story of the paper’s fall. It took a wry and relatively light approach to the story — studded throughout with pop music from the years of the scandal — as befits a story told by insiders leaning on quotes from insiders.
In the programme, Greg Miskiw — the former News of the World News Editor who served six months for his role in phone hacking at the paper — said:
I was using an agency to trace people and one of their staff worked exclusively for The News of the World and one day during a conversation he said, ‘You do realise that I can listen to people’s voicemails.’ And I said, ‘Wow! That’s astonishing, we might use that service.’ When I was in charge of the news department, I would choose my targets very, very carefully. By the time I left, the people in charge were just hacking everybody and that’s how it eventually unravelled.
Miskiw, a man who once said of his word at the tabloid “that is what we do — we got out and destroy other people’s lives”, was able to present himself as the ‘responsible’ one, the hacker who didn’t take it too far but was let down by the greedier hackers who followed in his footsteps.
The unnamed staff member in Miskiw’s quote was Glenn Mulcaire, who was also convicted of phone hacking, an investigator and former non-league footballer who was hired by Lord John Steven’s security and intelligence company Quest just three years after his first phone hacking conviction.
Funnily enough, Lord Stevens, a former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, became a News of the World columnist on £7,000 per article immediately he left the force. He only stepped down as one of the country’s best-paid freelancers after the phone-hacking scandal broke.
The Archive on 4 programme began with Latchem recounting the final day at The News of the World, talking about the ‘moving’ speech given by its last editor Colin Myler before the staff left the office for the final time. Though the show was well made and effectively presented by Waterson, it skipped lightly over the depths of the corruption around The News of the World and the extent of its relationships with police and politicians.
The recent report by the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel has put the issue of police collusion with the tabloids back into the spotlight. It didn’t feature in the documentary despite the fact that Jonathan Rees — Morgan’s partner in the private detective firm Southern Investigations — was at one point earning £150,000 a year from the News of the World to supply illegally obtained information about people in the public eye.
At points, the Radio 4 show felt like listening to a reporter who had wandered into the Cantina at Mos Eisley, offering to let the patrons of that hive of scum and villainy the chance to tell their side of the story. After a section about how the ‘Fake Sheik’ Mazar Mahmood — later convicted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice — had set up the model Emma Morgan in a contrived cocaine ‘sting’, Waterson narrated:
But this wasn’t a paper that was only about scandal and gossip. The same methods that ruined lives like Emma Morgan’s and drove Chris Bryant to contemplate suicide were used to finger violent mobsters, to reopen cold cases, and to expose perjuring politicians like Jeffrey Archer.
It was a line we’ve heard from former News of the World hacks often and it’s perilously close to that old chestnut “the ends justify the means”. The doc then moved on to discussing ‘Sara’s Law’, with an audio collage of former News of the World hacks saying the phrase.
The existence of ‘Sara’s Law’ — more properly known as the child sex offender disclosure scheme (CSODS) — is what News of the World used to justify its “naming and shaming” campaign. That ‘crusade’ began with Rebekah Brookes tasking Paul McMullan — such a grotesque caricature of a tabloid hack that he resembles a man being embalmed alive on instalment plan — to find and publish a list of “50 paedophiles”. McMullan achieved that by, in his own words, “blagging the Boy Scout movement into handing over their database [of newspaper cuttings]… and just picking 50 paedophiles”.
The campaign which now uses ‘Sara’s Law’ — named after eight-year-old Sarah Payne who was killed in 2000 — as its post-hoc justification, included such responsible headlines as “Hang them! 10 victims and 48,000 readers demand child sex killers must die” and led to the hounding of innocent people.
The documentary recounts how David Blunkett “the elected cabinet minister initially pushed back” on ‘Sara’s Law’ but “Brookes the unelected tabloid editor insisted.” Waterson continues:
Both claimed to be speaking for the public but it was sometimes unclear where the power really lay. Eventually, after a decade, a version of Sara’s Law was passed.
Blunkett, later shamed himself by the tabloid over an affair, defends the paper in the documentary:
We actually learned something by having a dialogue with them… sometimes they did something beneficial.
Curiously, Blunkett still writes regularly for The Sun. I’m sure that has no bearing on his willingness to let bygones be bygones.
Rupert Murdoch was secretly recorded in 2013 telling a News UK staff meeting that he was effectively pretty relaxed about how police officers had been paid for information and that bribery was just a fact of life:
I would have thought 100% — but at least 90% — of payments were made at the instigation of cops saying, ‘I’ve got a good story here. It’s worth 500 quid’ and you would say, ‘No, it’s not’ or ‘We’ll check it out’ or whatever and they’d say, ‘Well, we’ll try The Mirror’… it was the culture of Fleet Street.
The ‘death’ of the News of the World — more like a brief sleep before it was reincarnated in the clean ‘respectable’ flesh of The Sun on Sunday — did not really chasten Rupert Murdoch, despite his famous “most humble day of my life” speech to a parliamentary committee. He still meets senior politicians regularly and they still go to pay homage to him.
Nick Davies, The Guardian journalist who played a central role in exposing the phone-hacking scandal, says in the Radio 4 documentary that he didn’t want to see the News of the World close and told the Press Gazette this week:
It was a typically cynical and opportunistic act by the Murdochs. We know this because of the emails that were disclosed at the time of the hacking trial. They wanted to move public opinion on in a way that would allow them to complete the takeover BSkyB. It wasn’t because of the boycott by advertisers – it was simply about greed.
It’s one of the few things that he and James Weatherup, the former News of the World News Editor who plead guilty to phone hacking, agree on. In the documentary Weatherup tells Waterson:
One school of thought is that the paper was closed because some people felt some of the problems might go away if the paper closed itself. And obviously, they didn’t. Some people may think that some people were thrown under the bus… but I’m afraid due to legal reasons I can’t go into that any more.
The phone-hacking scandal has cost Rupert Murdoch over £1 billion to date and the bill will rise even further. But Murdoch is worth over £20 billion pounds. The demise of The News of the World — at his hands — and the subsequent legal cases were really only a flesh wound. While Murdoch wrote down The Sun’s value to zero earlier this year — in part due to the pandemic’s effect on advertising revenues but also due to long term trends — the paper felled a cabinet minister last month, using conveniently acquired CCTV footage.
The stench from The News of the World’s corpse is still there though. It seeped under The Sun’s door again last month when the settlement in the Simon Hughes case became the first time that News UK paid out over claims of phone hacking specifically at that paper. We’ve come a very long way in the years since News International tried to claim that the News of the World’s Royal Editor, Clive Goodman, was simply one “rogue reporter”.
There were and are lots of rogues at News UK. Some of them got to have their say on Archive on 4 last night. It’s not surprising that people who still work in the orchard are happy to accept the idea that The News of the World was one bad tree from which the rotten apples fell. But picking through the tabloids and their rarely less reactionary broadsheet siblings on a daily basis as I do, you can still the same rotten roots that the News of the World grew from.