The CNN host and former editor of the now-disgraced and defunct News Of The World and then the Daily Mirror has recently emphatically denied that he had anything to do with phone-hacking while running some of the most notoriously unethical papers on Fleet Street. This denial is about as water-tight as it gets:
I've never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone. I am not aware, and have never seen evidence to suggest otherwise, that any Mirror story published during my tenure was obtained from phone hacking.
But in comments for years, his remarks have been, well, far less definitive. Let's review the record, shall we?
Here he is earlier this year when asked about the hacking of royal phones under his watch at NOTW:
Well, I was there in 1994-5, before mobiles were used very much, and that particular trick wasn't known about. I can't get too excited about it, I must say. It was pretty well-known that if you didn't change your pin code when you were a celebrity who bought a new phone, then reporters could ring your mobile, tap in a standard factory setting number and hear your messages. That is not, to me, as serious as planting a bug in someone's house, which is what some people seem to think was going on.
So we know he didn't really believe the ethics were improper. He went on to edit the Daily Mirror, another tabloid in an industry where, according to Morgan, "almost every paper" was hacking phones. In his own diary, he joked about how anyone's phone was vulnerable, including his own:
"Apparently if you don't change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don't answer, tap in the standard four digit code to hear all your messages. I'll change mine just in case, but it makes me wonder how many public figures and celebrities are aware of this little trick."
His "scoop of the year" – revealing an extra-marital affair by the England team football manager was allegedly based on phone-hacking, according to Brit-blogger Guido Fawkes. And in June 2009, this was his response to a question asking him about this unethical practice, a quote that just emerged today:
“To be honest, let’s put that in perspective as well. Not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work. I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to, and I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do. I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide, and certainly encompassed the high and low end of the supposed newspaper market.”
My italics. What exactly were the things "I used to get up to"? Here is Morgan four years ago lamenting the imprisonment of a phone-hacker who hacked into the royal family's mobile phones:
“As for Clive Goodman, I feel a lot of sympathy for a man who has been the convenient fall guy for an investigative practice that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years.”
Almost every paper except, amazingly, the News of the World and the Daily Mirror? At the weekend James Hipwell, a Daily Mirror financial columnist between 1998 and 2000, said that illegal phone hacking was “endemic” during Mr Morgan's editorship. "You know what people around you are doing,” he said. Money quote:
“Many of the Daily Mirror’s stories would come from hacking into a celebrity’s voicemail.”
The Mirror's skills were extremely advanced. From Morgan's diary/memoirs:
"I just got back to the office to learn that Kate Winslet, having indicated she would come to our Pride of Britain awards toorrow, is now saying she can't. Someone had got hold of her mobile number – I never like to ask how – so I rang her … "Hello" she said, sounding a bit taken aback. "How did you get my number? I've only just changed it. You've got to tell me, please. I am so worried now."
He was an editor of the paper where he "never liked to ask how" his reporters knew of the just-changed mobile phone numbers of major celebrities. His defense may well be Murdoch's: apparent ignorance of how his own paper got scoops. Here's what we know for sure. Morgan was untroubled by phone-hacking in the past. As his Wiki bio puts it:
He quickly gained notoriety [at the News Of the World] for his invasive, thrusting style and lack of concern for celebrities' right to privacy, claiming that they could not manipulate the media to further their own ends without accepting the consequences of a two way deal.
Then this:
A 2006 parliamentary inquiry found "681 instances in which the Mirror at some point paid a private investigator, Steve Whittamore, to allegedly obtain illegally private information on celebrities and other targets."
And this:
Most damningly, the Mirror employed Jonathan Rees, a private investigator whose office was bugged by London police from 1999 onward in an investigation of officers suspected of taking bribes. The police recorded Rees paying police for information and then selling it to the Mirror and the NOTW. Morgan was editor of the Mirror between 1996 and 2004.
Given this reputation, given the accounts of others, given his own acknowledgment that phone hacking was very widespread, I have to say that Morgan's blanket and total denial of everything may be, shall we say, an over-reach.
The Dish 