Phone Hacking, Piers Morgan and the Sunday Mirror

So News International were involved in phone hacking. The whole world went nuts. Everyone cancelling their Sky subscriptions. People claiming to have never read The Times or even an online story on The Sun. Lefties scrambling to show the reading world that they had never even touched a Murdoch tainted product. One person even tweeted that she had never even seen a TV with Sky on it. I laughed so much I had a rectal prolapse*

So as we sit here today with the rumours swirling around the Mirror Group and lets be honest most of us are pretty darn sure that phone hacking was rife amongst all newspapers in the late 90s and up to the recent day then why am I not reading tweets and blogs from everyone saying how they are boycotting all the newspaper industry these days? Whilst their is no hard evidence yet against any other newspaper the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. We know that people who did phone hack worked for other newspapers and when Piers Morgan says in a 2007 interview that Clive Goodman was just a ‘fall guy for an investigative practice that everyone knows was going on,’ and went on to say in a Desert Island Discs programme when asked about it:

‘To be honest, let’s put that in perspective as well. Not a lot of that (staff on newspapers phone hacking) 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.’

Now of course Piers Morgan is not going to come out and say that he knew directly of it now as it’s a shit-storm out there and he has a huge payday stateside that would be in jeopardy should he admit it but we all know deep down this practice was widespread. However the vitriol is not coming out anyone so there can only be two reasons for this. Either the story has blown itself out (which I do not believe) or that the media and government are so busy trying to take down the Murdoch’s that they have lost perspective on the actual crime.

The crime isn’t about one incident of hacking Milly Dowler’s phone It is about the culture of an industry and not just News International. If you want to take down News International and are using this as a crux then you have to attack other media outlets too because if you don’t then that’s just not cricket. If you are waiting until the hard evidence comes out against the other newspapers (which it will) then fair enough but I shall sit here watching the twittersphere and blogs with intent over the coming days, weeks and months.

The smoking gun has lots more smoke to blow before this one is over and if it doesn’t encompass the majority of Fleet Street then I’ll be shocked. Shocked.

*That actually didn’t happen.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. Please leave any comments or contact me directly via the E-Mail Me link on the Right Hand Nav. You can stay in touch with the blog following me on Twitter or by liking the blog on Facebook. Please share this content via the Social Media links below if you think anyone else would enjoy reading.