Hack Attack by Nick Davies - Gordon McLauchlan applauds a fine piece of writing

Hack Attack by Nick Davies (Chatto and Windus, $40.00).

 The most valuable lesson a topflight print journalist can pass on to writers of any non-fiction genre is the power of direct, simple, forward-slanting English, how persuasive it can be and how it carries with it the loud ring of truth.

          It’s with this thrust of directness that The Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, tells the full story of the great phone-hacking scandal and other criminality that involved British tabloid journalists, police and, peripherally, politicians. He should know about all this because it was he who lifted the lid on it.

          Davies is one of the best journalists working for one of the world’s great newspapers, The Guardian. There is a lesson here too. Because the The Guardian is run by a trust it can afford to play the long game in journalism, standing back from the daily shock-and-horror of the tabloids.

          Interested New Zealanders followed the hacking story in the media, mainly through coverage of the Leveson inquiry and its aftermath. However, Davies pulls it all together and gives a complete picture of how pervasive the scandal was. He makes it clear that no one who takes part in any form of public life can now assume their private electronic communications are, indeed, private. I had thought hacking phones needed the deep expertise of an IT expert but Davies explains how simple it is to tap into voice mail.

          The book demonstrates too that hacking is a two-way street. It can involve those whose intention is to deceive and those who intention is to reveal, and that leaves open to endless discussion when hacking can be the right thing to do because of the public interest.

Davies follows the scandal from its beginning along its tawdry course but the story is never dragged down by its detail. Most readers will be astonished, as I was, to find that an anonymous, Watergate-style Deep Throat, whom Davies has called Mr Apollo, guided him on his journey through the dirt.  The scale of the corruption is horrendous and exacerbated by the intensity of the competition among tabloid newspapers in the British publishing environment. Readers will be left with the feeling that assaults on privacy have not gone away.

Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland- based writer and commentator and a regular reviewer on this blog.