The vile behaviour of the press
Nick Davies Chatto, 408pp, £17.99,

Peter Oborne writing in The Spectator - thanks to Roger Hall for bringing this to my attention.

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Peter Oborne on Nick Davies' new book

This book exposes newspapers to the same merciless, lethal and sometimes unfair scrutiny which the press itself has long shone on politicians, the royal family and numerous other targets. The results are devastating. Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law.

It is hypnotically readable, commands attention right to the end and has troubled me profoundly ever since. No journalist with any sense of decency can read this work without at times feeling anger and personal shame. I have worked for 25 years as a reporter and thought I understood the business fairly well. But again and again Davies provides fresh jaw-dropping evidence that journalism in Britain today is bent. If the practices he discloses were present in any other walk of life, they would have been exposed long ago, public outrage would have followed and criminal charges brought.

But newspapers have an unwritten compact that they never, under any circumstances, expose each other — one reason why Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black remained in business for so long. Over the last few decades only Private Eye (which is serialising this book — presumably no paper would do so) has made it its business to draw attention to press corruption and hypocrisy.

This code of omerta is very widespread. Davies shows that no paper will ever expose the illegal practices of rivals because they are all at it. For example, newspapers are able to obtain, within minutes, possession of a wealth of personal data about British citizens — credit-card statements, bank statements, driving licence details, ex-directory phone numbers, itemised telephone billing etc. Davies shows that it is not just tabloids that do this.

So-called broadsheets are also guilty.
All this information is obtained through bribery, trickery and deception. As a whole, newspapers are careful not to carry out this furtive work themselves. It is sub-contracted to third parties. Davies claims, for example, that the Sunday Times at one stage hired a reporter on the explicit basis he was not on the paper’s books. ‘The object was for him to handle the dark arts,’ asserts Davies, ‘and just in case he got caught doing something illegal, they could deny their connection to him’.