...continued
The tabloid ecosystem and crimes against society
journalists. Operation Motorman was underway, and the vast cache of detailed documents seized at Whittamore’s premises proved the detective’s practice, which involved a network of associates, “was not just an isolated business operating occasionally outside the law, but one dedicated to its systematic and highly lucrative flouting”.28 Three hundred and five individual journalists working for thirty-one different publications were identified as “driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information”;29 the scale of journalists’ activity in this trade, according to the ICO’s analysis, places them ahead of four other categories of “customers” for such unlawfully obtained data that includes, in fifth place, “criminals intent on fraud, or seeking to influence jurors, witnesses or legal personnel”.30
Whittamore’s journalist clients had requested 13,343 separate pieces of information, 11,345 of which the ICO “classified as…either certainly or very probably in breach of the Data Protection Act”.31 Information – such as tracing addresses from telephone numbers, details of vehicles and their owners, details of criminal records, locating people across a wide area, company/director searches, ex-directory telephone numbers, itemised telephone billing and mobile phone records, driving licence details, and information on “friends and family” – had been illegally procured from numerous confidential databases, including the Police National Computer (PNC), the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), and telecommunications companies.32 The ICO analysed data concerning the ten most active journalists and “found that between them they had paid Whittamore to obtain 3,291 pieces of information which were certainly or probably illegal, costing them an estimated £164,537.50”.33 A BBC television documentary broadcast in March 2011 presented in a stark light Whittamore’s enterprise in providing the British press with illegally gathered private data and described it as one that operated “on an industrial scale”.34 The BBC was not the first to employ the term “industrial scale” in this context.35
The ICO compiled a table of press titles, transactions and numbers of journalists in the order of most prolific use of Whittamore’s services. Topping the list of titles was the Daily Mail with fifty-eight known journalists linked to 952 positively identified transactions; the Mail on Sunday was fourth on the ICO’s list, making a total of at least ninety-one journalists linked to at least 1,218 transactions for the two mid-market tabloids.36 The Trinity Mirror publishing group had three red-top titles in the top six – the Sunday People (now the People), the Daily Mirror, and the Sunday Mirror – that together accounted for 120 journalists linked to 1,626 positively identified transactions. The ICO’s initial statistics put the News of the World in fifth place, with nineteen journalists linked to 182 transactions.37 Although the ICO stated that its list was “dominated by tabloid publications”, it also acknowledged that “[c]ertain magazines feature prominently and some broadsheets are also represented”.38 However, the dominance of tabloid newspapers involved in the illegal trade in personal data can be seen in these figures: of the 305 journalists initially identified by the ICO, approximately 263 were associated with red-top and mid-market tabloids and their associated daily and weekend magazines.39 Of the remainder, thirty were associated with six standalone popular magazines; twelve were identified with three Sunday broadsheets.40
Seeing beyond official reports and bringing down to ground level the statistics and other information brought to light by investigations is important in order to arrive at an understanding of the gravity of tabloid invasion of privacy. In this respect, the words of a Daily Mail “veteran” are instructive: “If the Mail go for you, they get every phone number you have dialled, every schoolmate, everything on your credit card, every call from your phone and from your mobile. Everything”.41
Paul Dacre, who became the Daily Mail’s editor in 1992, was unexpectedly given an opportunity to deny any lawbreaking on 18 July 2011 when he gave oral evidence to a parliamentary Joint Committee on a draft defamation bill. The question was clearly inspired in light of a raging NotW phone-hacking scandal that was in the process of also becoming a police-bribery and computer-hacking scandal, and, perhaps, in light of a renewed interest in Operation Motorman. The question was: “…under your editorship, has the Daily Mail ever published a story that you knew at the time, or subsequently came to know, was based on a hacked message or any other source of material that had been obtained unlawfully?” Dacre’s answer: “Absolutely not”.42
Piers Morgan, a former NotW editor (1994–95) and editor of the Daily Mirror 1995–2004, was also drawn into the phone-hacking and related scandals, but with some specific accusations – particularly regarding former Beatle Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, and allegations made by Louise Mensch MP at a sitting of the parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Committee.43 Described on BBC Radio 4’s “Desert Island Discs” in 2009 as “a Fleet Street editor…[who] pioneered a style of journalism that fed off the day-to-day lives of celebrities”,44 Morgan has emphatically denied any knowledge of illegality, from his first denials on CNN and Twitter – “I’ve never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone”45 – to “[a]s I have said before, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone”.46 Morgan’s later qualification, “to my knowledge”, appears to be a key phrase in a process of distancing himself from illegal practices should an official inquiry uncover stories published by Trinity Mirror publications that utilised such practices.
Both Dacre and Morgan were editing their respective titles during the period that at least fifty-eight Daily Mail and forty-five Daily Mirror journalists were regularly using Whittamore’s services; but, unlike Scotland Yard’s three current investigations into phone hacking, police bribery and computer hacking that have seen two former NotW editors arrested despite their long-standing denials of any knowledge of lawbreaking while they were at the helm – and despite mounting evidence of repeated attempts to effect a coverup by News Group Newspapers and News International – Operation Motorman saw no journalists arrested, senior or otherwise. Prosecutions of Whittamore and others in the networks that procure and supply illegally obtained personal information failed, principally because the ICO was not sufficiently resourced to either investigate, or then to bring to trial, “the paymasters” – that is, the journalists who had commissioned the gathering of personal data.47
Furthermore, not only were no journalists arrested, but, revealingly as far as the UK press industry’s integrity is concerned, no journalist, and no representative from any of the titles on the Motorman list contacted the ICO to seek further information or express concern about potentially illegal activity in which they or their staff may have engaged or commissioned.48 The Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, which operates under the auspices of the UK press industry’s self-regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), failed to adequately respond to what was clear evidence of a crisis of ethics in the popular press; the PCC, now under siege for failing to act decisively when NotW phone-hacking first came to light in 2006, officially urged the press to act within the law but did nothing to seriously discourage lawbreaking in the industry it supposedly regulates.49 No national newspaper except the Guardian ran a story about the ICO’s cases against the information supply networks; it was, as the Guardian investigative journalist working on the Motorman, phone-hacking and related cases, Nick Davies, described it, “as if no journalist had ever done anything wrong”.50
The tabloid ecosystem
The popular press has accrued a reputation that serious writers and journalists internationally regard as unenviable, with the perception of one American journalist illustrative when he referred to “Britain’s attack-dog tabloids, notorious for their relentless pursuit of celebrities”.51 Such notoriety is well deserved. Cultivating celebrity culture and an iconoclastic populism is at the heart of UK tabloid publishing and is openly flaunted within the popular publishing industry, including by the most senior and influential figures in that industry; Paul Dacre, for example, declared in a parliamentary committee meeting that he is part of “a sector of the media in which robust cut and thrust, tail-pulling and mickey-taking are part of a long tradition – the robust tradition of popular newspapers in Britain”.52 Others, such as former NotW news editor Greg Miskiw, at least in less public forums, dispense with the romanticism in favour of a more direct account of the tabloid modus operandi: “That is what we do – we go out and destroy other people’s lives”.53
An entire industry has evolved around exploiting the private life of those who are in, or are thrust into, the public eye. The reputations and careers of these individuals are targeted; if necessary, as Miskiw so inelegantly put it, the very lives, or, as with the Fritzl children, the sanity, of tabloid subject matter will be disregarded in the quest for sensational stories. Celebrities and “public figures” are the standard targets: high-profile personalities are more likely to boost sales, circulation and website hits. Tabloid veterans from the highest echelons to the lowest have been adept at preying on celebrities. A number of these veterans are now in the news themselves: Piers Morgan, for example, has “won a fistful of awards for his scoops that exposed [celebrities’] extramarital affairs”.54 When the News of the World’s James Desborough won “Showbiz reporter of the year” at the 2009 British Press Awards, the judges praised him for his “uncompromising scoops which mean no celebrity with secrets can sleep easy”;55 Desborough, on 18 August, became the thirteenth person to be arrested under Operation Weeting.56
Tabloids promote the cult of the celebrity as enthusiastically as they expose and denigrate the popular icons that they, together with the public relations and marketing industries, have been instrumental in creating and maintaining. Voyeuristic readerships have been carefully cultivated over decades to be insatiable consumers of a product that is simultaneously moralistic and prurient. To a great extent this cycle is a complete and self-sustaining ecosystem of gossip, titillation and moral outrage within mass culture.57 Public figures, whether genuinely deserving of “public” status or whether that status is exaggerated or even imagined in the interests of commodified sensationalism, are part of this ecosystem. At the end of the celebrity and public-figure food chain is commercial profit for the business concerns that produce the tabloids and tabloid product. In the foreword to the first of the ICO’s pair of 2006 reports, “What price privacy?”, the information commissioner at the time saw fit to mention celebrities as the first category of person whose personal information was likely to be at risk of illegal exploitation.58 The report summarises in this way: “Journalists have a voracious demand for personal information, especially at the popular end of the market. The more information they reveal about celebrities or anyone remotely in the public eye, the more newspapers they can sell”.59
The investigative journalist and author, Chris Horrie, used the outcome of Max Mosley’s much-publicised, July 2008 breach-of-privacy action against the News of the World to illustrate more precisely the commercial mechanism of the tabloids’ celebrity-and-public-figure ecosystem; on the day that Justice David Eady found in favour of Mosley, Horrie wrote:
The cost of the legal action…will be set against the additional revenue generated by the story. Some in the industry believe that a scoop such as Mosley could have added as many as 200,000 sales in the first week. The paper will have been busy in the distribution industry with promotions to make sure that it hangs on to as many of these new or returning readers as possible. Depending on the half-life of the story – the time it takes for the boost to circulation to decay – it could easily add £1m to the bottom line in terms of increased sales and advertising revenues.
The News of the World has built its business by calculating that the additional revenues from really sensational invasions of privacy will outweigh the costs of doing these stories. Until recently the main cost had been payments to informants. It was suggested that the News of the World may have paid £300,000 or more for kiss-and-tell revelations from Rebecca Loos about her alleged affair with [English international soccer star] David Beckham. The paper’s business model works on the basis of having massive scoops from time to time, and then trying to hang on to those new readers with all kinds of free offers and promotions until it is time to claim another big scalp.
Thus, on the day after the Mosley verdict [after the News of the World had almost £1 million damages and costs awarded against it], the paper took full-page advertisements in the trade press to boast about the positive commercial effects of the story and the ruling. “Mosley’s not the only one getting a spanking,” the paper gloated. “We’ve been beating our rivals for 165 years.”60
“Gloating” is an apt description of the advertisement, which featured the word “domination” printed over a graphic of the back of a woman wearing a corset.
The overarching circumstances that give the British tabloid press cause for such “gloating” and general hubris – and for an utter contempt for privacy and, now clearly, even for the law – are outlined in written evidence given to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee in January 2009 by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF). The CPBF argued that the damages awarded to Mosley and others who had suffered life-altering invasions of privacy and libel at the hands of the tabloid press “were nothing less than derisory”, and that “[g]iven the incomes of the papers in question, and, more particularly, given the increases in sales which these stories generated, these damages (and the associated costs) were little more than pinpricks and were no doubt simply laughed off by the editors concerned”. The CPBF advocated exemplary financial penalties for offending publications that would go well beyond “ensur[ing] merely that newspapers cannot profit from their crimes”.61
While the editor of the News of the World at the time of the Mosley exposé, Colin Myler, may not be on the public record as having “laughed off” the costs of legal defeat at Mosley’s hands, less than a year later he declared to a parliamentary committee investigating press standards, privacy and libel that “I think everybody understands what the News of the World is about. Some people might sneer… but we are who we are and I make no apologies for publishing that story… None at all”.62
However, whether rightly or wrongly designated as such, it is not only “celebrities” and “public figures” who are victims of the popular press’ insatiable appetite for material that can be spun into sensationalised “news” and entertainment stories. So while July 2011’s avalanche of revelations about, and evidence of, NotW lawbreaking “[drove] home the realization that nobody, not even the most powerful and protected people in the land, had been beyond the reach of news organizations caught up in a relentless battle for lurid headlines and mass circulation”,63 it was indeed the realisation that nobody was safe from tabloid privacy invasion and nobody’s confidential personal information was safe from violation by the popular press that brought about the multiple scandals that played out so dramatically in public forums, including parliament.
Although it took news of the hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile phone to ignite public outrage, the threat that the tabloid ecosystem represented to privacy and confidential personal information on a society-wide basis had been acknowledged for years. The ICO’s Operation Motorman in 2003 had decisively proved that victims of privacy violation instigated by the press could very well be “people caught up in the celebrity circuit only incidentally”, and “individuals [with] no obvious newsworthiness or [that] had simply strayed by chance into the limelight”.64
Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University, London, and a former journalist, has valuably contributed to the unmasking of “professional privacy invaders” – those who effectively pose as journalists or in other ways work as part of the tabloid ecosystem. In a thought-provoking article he argues that “the privacy intruders” – as opposed to “actual journalists, as traditionally understood” – insist that public figures, usually wealthy and/or influential, hide behind concepts of privacy to conceal their abuse of power, privilege and a tabloid-defined morality. These professional privacy invaders, Cathcart writes, like to tell us that “the protection of privacy is a confidence trick designed to conceal from us the wrongdoing of top people”. But, “[t]his is a con trick in itself. It just happens that editors aren’t usually interested in intruding upon the privacy of the poor, but when the time comes that they are – say in the case of victims of crime or with bereaved families – they often show no mercy. Rich or poor, they will stitch you up if it suits them”.65
Cathcart cuts to the core of the tabloid ecosystem:
Invading people’s privacy for the purpose of publication does not do good, though it may make money. In that industry, deception and payment for information are routine, not exceptional. The subject matter is almost never important – except to the victims, whose lives may be permanently blighted – and while a story may entertain, it does so only in the way that bear-baiting and public executions used to entertain. The whole activity exists on the border of legality, skipping from one side of the line to the other at its own convenience and without sincere regard for the public interest.66
It is this “skipping from one side of the [legal] line to the other at its own convenience” that provides an important clue to the broader tabloid ecosystem. There are two significant factors to consider in accounting for why large sections of the press have found it so convenient and profitable to straddle “the border of legality”.
Firstly, the “tabloid” ecosystem is not restricted to the actual tabloid press – as the presence of the Observer and the Sunday Times on the ICO’s Operation Motorman table indicate – but claims as participants any media organisation or aspect of its operations or content that involves the exploitation of private life, the violation of confidential personal information, celebrity culture and populist iconoclasm. In other words, it has proliferated, and any official authority charged with keeping track of doubtful media practices is confronted with an increasingly difficult task. In fact, the task has become an almost impossible one because of the second factor: the tabloid ecosystem is not limited to the media, and thus is more extensive, and even more insidious, than just the populist, mass-cultural product and consumption that has become known as “tabloid culture”.
The tabloid ecosystem has been allowed to function and propagate with virtual impunity by its ability to draw in key elements of the political system and institutions of state, including the police. This has occurred to the extent that both politicians and police have become vital components of the broader ecosystem; decades of the acquiescence to, and collusion with, cavalier and lawbreaking media figures and organisations on the part of British politicians and police have been demonstrated with the developing NotW phone-hacking, police-bribery and computer-hacking scandals.
A clear point of reference on the collusion of politics is when, in July 2007, then-Opposition leader David Cameron employed Andy Coulson as the Conservative Party’s director of communications less than six months after Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World over the Goodman–Mulcaire royal family phone-hacking case. That Cameron, as prime minister, went on to take Coulson into government after winning the general election of May 2010 illustrates the increasingly overt power relations between the highest levels of British politics and the popular media.67 These power relations did not, of course, begin with Cameron, and are not restricted to traditionally conservative political parties or politicians; nor, indeed, are they restricted to the political sphere, as news of former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s close personal relationship with Rupert Murdoch makes clear.68 Referring more to the acquiescence of politicians rather than their collusion, Timothy Garton-Ash, the distinguished professor of modern history at the universities of Oxford and Stanford, writes that “the apex of British public life” deferred to the growing influence and de facto political power of the tabloids with “a self-deceiving cowardice that cloaked itself in silence, euphemism and excuse”.69
The collusion of police is more shadowy. There is now little doubt about a long history of police collusion with the popular press, and, as the NotW scandals have revealed, with News International in particular. Furthermore, there appears to be strong evidence for the suggestion that some elements of London’s Metropolitan Police have acted in coverups of tabloid lawbreaking, and also that the state has suffered from a chronic failure to redress inappropriate and corrupt relations between British police and the popular press.70 Whether the current police investigations and judicial inquiries into the NotW-centred scandals overturn any of the established patterns remains to be seen.
Scotland Yard, especially, has consistently caused consternation and outrage, most recently with an application on 16 September 2011 for a court production order against the Guardian and one of its journalists to reveal the sources of their phone-hacking stories. In a statement claiming that neither public interest nor investigative reporting were evident in the stories that resulted from “unauthorised leaking of information” by police to Guardian journalists – including the Milly Dowler phone-hacking revelation published on 4 July – Scotland Yard said the Official Secrets Act could be invoked in “an investigation into the alleged gratuitous release of information that is not in the public interest”.71 The action was dropped four days later amidst sustained uproar over what was indeed a thinly disguised attempt to punish the Guardian and stifle future, legitimate investigative reporting.72 However, the court production order was not be the first time the Metropolitan Police had sought to apply pressure on the Guardian over the NotW phone-hacking affair,73 a fact that lends credence to the assessment of the award-winning journalist and author, Jonathan Freedland, who wrote of the failed attempt to move against the Guardian as “entrenching [the force’s] image as the outsourced security department of News International, jealously guarding that company’s secrets and lashing out at those who break them”.74
A campaign against privacy
Unlike Scotland Yard’s legal manoeuvres to force Guardian journalists to reveal their sources of information about NotW phone-hacking, a law designed to protect the unwarranted intrusion into private life where no genuine public interest is involved is not likely to impede legitimate investigative reporting. Unsurprisingly, however, while remaining largely silent over the police action against the Guardian,75 the UK tabloid press has campaigned aggressively against a privacy law to the point of campaigning against the very concept of privacy. This is an entirely consistent position for the popular press to assume given the central role of privacy invasion in the tabloid ecosystem, and given the way the methodology of this ecosystem is employed against the whole of British society, and has possibly been employed in the United States.76
It was, in fact, Mosley’s breach-of-privacy suit against News Group Newspapers that became a lightning rod for press anger and angst over the implications the outcome allegedly had for a judge-developed privacy law and freedom of media expression. Mosley’s success unleashed a storm of protest and lamentation from the popular press, and, indeed, from many associated with “serious” journalism.
Colin Myler lost no time repeating his newspaper’s slurs against Mosley and declaring a virtual state of emergency for UK press freedom. On the steps of the High Court immediately after Justice Eady delivered his judgment, Myler announced a “creeping law of privacy” and declared that “our press is less free today after another judgement based on privacy laws emanating from Europe”, and that “our media are being strangled by stealth”.77 Later that year he told the Liverpool Press Club that “the insidious way in which a privacy law is being imposed on the British press through the back door is shameful”,78 and the following May he told the parliamentary committee to whom he was giving evidence that “a series of privacy rulings culminating in the judgment by Mr Justice Eady in the case of Mosley v News Group Newspapers have dangerously tipped the balance away from press freedom”.79
Eady, however, had preempted such allegations in his judgment:
It is perhaps worth adding that there is nothing “landmark” about this decision. It is simply the application to rather unusual facts of recently developed but established principles. Nor can it seriously be suggested that the case is likely to inhibit serious investigative journalism into crime or wrongdoing, where the public interest is more genuinely engaged.80
And in denying Mosley’s “plea of exemplary damages”, Eady’s judgment stated that awarding exemplary damages in a privacy case:
…could not be said to be either “prescribed by law” or necessary in a democratic society. That is to say, I was not satisfied that English law requires, in addition to the availability of compensatory damages and injunctive relief, that the media should also be exposed to the somewhat unpredictable risk of being “fined” on a quasi-criminal basis. There is no “pressing social need” for this. The “chilling effect” would be obvious.81
Yet Eady was subjected to such a ferocious attack by journalists, editors and media commentators that a number of Britain’s leading lawyers took the “unprecedented” step of defending him in public.82 One, a senior media lawyer, said “[a]s usual, with certain organs of the press, they hand-pick the facts that suit them, select a convenient hate-figure and attach to him all their woes about the privacy law”.83
Much of this rallying to Eady’s side was in response to attacks by Paul Dacre, who came “close to libelling the UK’s top media law judge”, according to one report of Dacre’s opening lecture for the 2008 Society of Editors’ annual conference in November 2008.84 In that lecture, Dacre spoke of his “deep concern that the newspaper industry was facing a number of very serious threats to its freedoms”. He narrated how he, and News International executive chairman Les Hinton and Telegraph Media Group chief executive Murdoch MacLennan, had dinner with Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2007 to lobby him on a number of those “threats”, including, successfully, to drop the more severe penalties advocated by Information Commissioner Richard Thomas for gratuitous breaches of the Data Protection Act that were then at an advanced stage in the lawmaking process.85
However, according to Dacre, there was “one…threat to press freedom that…may prove far more dangerous…than all the [other] issues” – a threat that is “undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market”: the imposition on the British press of a privacy law that is “insidiously… coming from…the arrogant and amoral judgements…of one man…Justice David Eady who has, again and again, under the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act, found against newspapers and their age-old freedom to expose the moral shortcomings of those in high places”.86
With the fervour of an evangelist, Dacre then proceeded with a tirade against Eady and privacy law that occupied nearly three pages of his lecture’s text. Referring to Max Mosley’s “squalid purgatory” and “unimaginable sexual depravity”, Eady’s judgment in Mosley’s NotW breach-of-privacy case was one of the examples Dacre used to illustrate the threat that Eady and developing privacy law allegedly represent to press freedom and society’s moral fortitude.87
The Daily Mail has reflected its editor’s views from the time of the 2008 Mosley judgment, and continues to be an especially vociferous critic of a British privacy law, of Eady, and of the judiciary in general, as these headlines indicate: “No-one has voted for a privacy law – but that is exactly what we’re getting”; “A good day for the grubby and corrupt”; “As cold as a frozen haddock, Mr Justice Eady hands down his views shorn of moral balance…”; “Judges are unelected, out of touch and shockingly arrogant”.88
Popular commentators in other forums have ensured the Daily Mail has not been alone. There are a great many examples, but two will serve to illustrate the sentiment and manner of delivery from this quarter.
Three days after Eady’s judgment, magazine editor and Daily Mirror columnist Fiona McIntosh, apparently seriously, wrote:
Mosley says the exposure of his sordid double life has left his family devastated. Shame he didn’t think about that before he took a belt to a tart’s bottom…
As a prominent public figure – and with the legacy he still carries from his father’s name – he was a stupid and arrogant fool to think he could get away with that stuff…
Justice Eady, who handed down the judgement, has effectively championed the right of the rich and famous to carry on however they like, without any decent code of morality.89
And earlier this year, less than two months before Nick Davies and Amelia Hill broke the Milly Dowler phone-hacking story, the broadcaster, talk-show host and former tabloid gossip column editor, James O’Brien, appeared alongside Max Mosley on a popular BBC television programme. O’Brien lost little time delivering a scathing, populist opinion with a fervour rivalling that of Dacre’s. Beginning by declaring that he considers Mosley’s “peculiar tastes” to be “much more of a problem than homosexuality”, and criticising “rich, powerful men” who betray an image of “a paragon of family values”, he concluded with these comments: “And the problem is, if you don’t want to see it printed, don’t do it!”.90 O’Brien’s last point, delivered with a theatrical finality, is one commonly asserted by those working in the media who apparently do not accept even the concept of personal privacy.91
One media academic observed that “[i]t appears that the majority of journalists believe [the Mosley judgment] will inhibit press freedom”.92 This supports the charge that significant elements of the media across a wide spectrum have adopted a similar position as the popular press; this is, in fact, the case, albeit with coverage that is less overtly vindictive and shrill in tone.
The Daily Telegraph, for example, ran numerous stories giving prominence to spurious views equating the principle of privacy as protected under the Human Rights Act – at least when applied in court as Eady did – with restricting the freedom of the press.93 The veteran lawyer–journalist, legal commentator, founder of the BBC’s “Law in Action” programme and Telegraph legal affairs editor at the time, Joshua Rozenberg, also chose to interpret Eady’s judgment according to this equation.94
Even the BBC was not averse to the argument that freedom of the press was all but indistinguishable from the press’ freedom to invade privacy at will.95 And later, in a campaigning comment on Eady’s alleged performance in libel cases that would not be out of place in a tabloid, the journalist, writer and political activist, George Monbiot, referred to “Eady’s reign of terror”.96 Monbiot, who condemned the entire profession of journalism in the United Kingdom in light of the News International-centred phone-hacking and related scandals, might have been expected to speak some words in favour of the right to privacy, albeit subject to genuine public interest exceptions, but instead ignored issues of privacy altogether in furious laments over the virtual non-existence of journalism’s free speech.97
Another common thread running through the alarmist arguments is a tendency to confuse – or to deliberately equate98 – spurious, tabloid-style “kiss-and-tell” stories with investigative reporting of a genuine public interest. Much of the press coverage of Mosley’s application to the European Court of Human Rights for a UK press pre-notification requirement also followed this pattern.99 And a characteristic of the attacks particularly of Myler and News Group Newspapers, and of Dacre and the Daily Mail, has been the unfounded assertion that European privacy law is being undemocratically imposed on the press by the judiciary using the Human Rights Act.100
The parliamentary select committee investigating press standards, privacy and libel felt compelled to address the press-generated controversy surrounding Eady in its 2010 report. In a section dedicated to “Mr Justice Eady and privacy law”, the report refers to Eady as “much-maligned”, and concludes with “[t]he focus on this one judge regarding the development of privacy law…is misplaced and risks distracting from the ongoing national debate on the relationship between freedom of speech and the individual’s right to privacy”.101
Although not directly engaging with his detractors in public, Eady has addressed various aspects of the controversy in the course of his public engagements. One such occasion was the speech he delivered to mark the opening of the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City University London, in March 2010, where he said reports of the effects of European law on the English press “were exaggerated”, and that “[m]ost applications in privacy cases concern sexual shenanigans…[where] there is no public interest argument available”.102 He also cited a Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report, which he said received little coverage in the press: “There is no evidence of the courts exercising a ‘chilling’ effect on responsible journalism in the public interest, but there is a challenge for newspapers and magazines who build a business model solely on infringing privacy through intrusive photographs or ‘kiss and tell’ revelations”.103 Ultimately, according to Eady in the judgment that precipitated so much outrage, “[i]t is not simply a matter of personal privacy versus the public interest. The modern perception is that there is a public interest in respecting personal privacy. It is thus a question of taking account of conflicting public interest considerations and evaluating them according to increasingly well recognised criteria”.104
While Cathcart perceptively reasons that the professional privacy invaders do everything they can “to blur the line” between what they do and genuine journalism, and “to muddy the water” around issues of press freedom and the public interest, because it is in the interests of their pernicious trade to do so, others in the legal profession are similarly unmasking the tabloid ecosystem and the critical damage it is doing to public and cultural life. One example, Barbara Hewson, a London barrister, has written “the courts have acknowledged that the media’s own assessment of what is in the public interest often tends to be confused with its own interest”, and on Eady’s judgment in the 2008 Mosley case: “a damning exposé of standards in tabloid journalism… [the] stark lesson for tabloids is that publications whose sole aim is to gratify public curiosity as to details of a person’s private life, however famous, are not in the public interest”.105
Such words almost make certain of Mosley’s own comments on these topics appear benign: “The average media person is so horrified at the thought of any kind of regulation, that they cease to think rationally about it”.106
While the News of the World scandals were consuming News International, the Metropolitan Police and the British political establishment, Paul Dacre spoke on behalf of the entire tabloid ecosystem when, on 18 July 2011, he made this declaration to a parliamentary joint committee: “I passionately believe that newspapers should be free to interest the public and not necessarily act in the public interest”.107 One of the most powerful, influential and wealthiest editors in the United Kingdom, Dacre knew exactly what he was saying. 
An extended version of this article will be available for download from the SomethingDark website.
Footnotes
28 ICO, What price privacy? The unlawful trade in confidential personal information, Information Commissioner’s Office (UK), 10 May 2006, pars 5.2, 5.3. 
29 ICO, What price privacy now? The first six months progress in halting the unlawful trade in confidential personal information, Information Commissioner’s Office (UK), 13 Dec. 2006, pp. 8–9; This data has been updated since the ICO’s report in 2006; the number of identified journalists has since increased to at least 314, and the number of publications they worked for stood at thirty-five as of March 2011. For some updated figures on journalists, see Nick Davies, Flat Earth News, London: Chatto & Windus, 2008, p. 260, and House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), QQ1880–3, p. 354. A BBC television documentary put the number of publications associated with these practices at thirty-five: BBC One “Panorama”, Tabloid Hacks Exposed, 14 March 2011 [from 15:04].
30 ICO, What price privacy?, par. 5.5.
31 Davies, Flat Earth News, pp. 259–60. See also ICO, What price privacy?, par. 5.8.
32 ICO, What price privacy?, pars 5.2, 5.3, 5.7, 5.9, 5.35.
33 Davies, Flat Earth News, p. 260. For a break-down of some of the fees Whittamore paid to certain of his accomplices to procure confidential information, and how much he charged his journalist customers, see ICO, What price privacy?, par. 5.35; see par. 5.4 for a diagram constructed by the ICO of how Whittamore’s network interacted in “providing illegally obtained information to the press”. Davies describes the “cluster of networks” dealing in black-market private information: Davies, Flat Earth News, pp. 260–2; see also Nick Davies, “Jonathan Rees’ empire of corruption”, Nick Davies Journalism and Books (NickDavies.net), 12 March 2011.
34 BBC One “Panorama”, Tabloid Hacks Exposed [from 14:25].
35 See, for example, oral evidence given to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 5 May 2009 by the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, and on 2 September 2009 by committee member Tom Watson MP (House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), Q891, p. 193; and Q1843, p. 350).
36 ICO, What price privacy now?, p. 9. Nick Davies cites sixty-three Daily Mail journalists making 985 requests for information (Davies, Flat Earth News, p. 260).
37 ICO, What price privacy now?, p. 9. The data on NotW journalists and transactions were updated after publication of this ICO document to twenty-three identified journalists and 228 transactions (see House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), QQ1880–3, p. 354).
38 ICO, What price privacy now?, p. 8.
39 The figure of 263 tabloid journalists was obtained by tallying the number of ICO-identified journalists who were working for standalone magazines and broadsheets – forty-two – and subtracting them from the ICO’s total of 305 (see: ICO, What price privacy now?, p. 9). The figures, which reflect several years of Whittamore’s operation, are not straightforward as some journalists work across titles in a publishing group’s stable; others may change jobs to work for different titles or different employers; and some of those using Whittamore’s services were clients acting on behalf of journalists – possibly twenty-nine of the total of 334 individuals represented in column 3 of the ICO table, considering the ICO had identified 305 journalists.
40 See: ICO, What price privacy now?, p. 9. The Guardian’s sister title, the Observer, a Sunday broadsheet, was ninth on the ICO list, and the Sunday Times was eleventh.
41 Davies, Flat Earth News, p. 273.
42 House of Lords & House of Commons Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill, 18 July 2011, Q766, p. 32 (see also Q753, p. 23).
43 BBC, “Heather Mills ‘told she was phone-hacking target’”, 3 Aug. 2011; Jon Swaine, “CNN’s Piers Morgan ‘told interviewer stories were published based on phone tapping’”, Daily Telegraph, 27 July 2011; Lisa O’Carroll, “CNN statement denies Piers Morgan connection to phone hacking”, Guardian, 28 July 2011. See Morgan’s column for the Daily Mail, in which he wrote of hearing a recording of a personal message left by McCartney on Mills’ voicemail: Piers Morgan, “I’m sorry, Macca, for introducing you to this monster”, Daily Mail, 19 Oct. 2006. On the gathering momentum of suspicion surrounding his Daily Mirror editorship in particular, see Jamie Doward, “Piers Morgan under pressure as phone-hacking scandal widens”, Observer, 6 Aug. 2011.
44 BBC Radio 4 “Desert Island Discs”, Piers Morgan, 7 June 2009 (from 0:00:14).
45 See, for example, Jill Serjeant, “CNN’s Piers Morgan denies role in UK hacking scandal”, Reuters, 19 July 2011.
46 Emphasis added. See, for example, Lloyd Grove, “Morgan admits dodgy practices”, Daily Beast, 26 July 2011; CNN, “McCartney to contact police over possible phone hacking”, 5 Aug. 2011. Grove’s Daily Beast article carries embedded audio of the relevant, now-infamous segment of Morgan’s “Desert Island Discs” interview.
47 ICO, What price privacy?, pars 6.7, 6.8. Nick Davies provides more detail (Davies, Flat Earth News, pp. 263–5). See also evidence given to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 2 September 2009 by the current information commissioner, Christopher Graham, and the ICO’s investigations manager, David Clancy (House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), QQ1804, 1806, 1809, 1836, pp. 343–5, 349–50).
48 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), QQ1807–8, 1861, pp. 345, 353.
49 See ICO, What price privacy?, pars 7.19, 7.20; ICO, What price privacy now?, p. 19; Davies, Flat Earth News, pp. 284–5. The Editors’ Code of Practice Committee was at the time chaired by Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International. Hinton was succeeded at the Editors’ Code Committee by Paul Dacre in April 2008 after Hinton was appointed chief executive officer of News Corp-owned Dow Jones & Company, in New York; Hinton resigned from Dow Jones on 15 July 2011 as a consequence of the NotW phone-hacking scandal (see, for example, Lisa O’Carroll, “Les Hinton resigns from News Corp”, Guardian, 15 July 2011).
50 Davies, Flat Earth News, pp. 264–5. The ICO’s second report lamented the press coverage afforded to its first report: only broadsheets gave it any space at all (ICO, What price privacy now?, p. 10.)
51 John F. Burns, “Trial about privacy in which none remains”, New York Times, 9 July 2008.
52 House of Lords & House of Commons Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill, Q745, p. 19.
53 Telegraph, “Pottergate: we publish the secret tapes”, 6 Sept. 2002. On the application in practice of Miskiw’s tabloid ideal, see Peter Burden, “Vanessa Perroncel challenges the News of the World to restore her reputation”, Public interest or private profit? (PeterBurden.net), 24 Aug. 2010. As noted above, Miskiw was arrested on 10 August as part of Operation Weeting (see, for example, Josh Halliday, “Phone hacking: NoW’s Greg Miskiw released on bail”, Guardian, 11 Aug. 2011; also Davies, “Jonathan Rees’ empire of corruption”). On other, more serious allegations concerning Miskiw that would more likely fall under the remit of Operation Elveden, see Paul Lewis, “Phone hacking: Met police to investigate mobile tracking claims”, Guardian, 21 July 2011; John F. Burns & Jo Becker, “Murdoch tabloids’ targets included Downing Street and the Crown”, New York Times, 11 July 2011.
54 BBC Radio 4 “Desert Island Discs”, Piers Morgan (at 0:00:24).
55 Press Gazette, “British Press Awards 2009: the full list of winners”, 1 April 2009.
56 Amelia Hill, “Phone hacking: News of the World Hollywood reporter is arrested”, Guardian, 18 Aug. 2011.
57 Such a model is well documented. See, for example, Anita Biressi & Heather Nunn, “Celebrity”, in The Tabloid Culture Reader, eds Anita Biressi & Heather Nunn, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008, pp. 135–40. For a valuable inside view of the editorial-office component of the tabloid ecosystem, albeit of the now-defunct News of the World, see Georgina Prodhan & Kate Holton, “Special report: inside Rebekah Brooks’ News of the World”, Reuters, 16 July 2011.
58 Richard Thomas, “Foreword from the Information Commissioner”, What price privacy?, p. 3.
59 ICO, What price privacy?, par. 5.6 (see also pars 5.6, 5.9, 5.10, 7.4). See also ICO, What price privacy now? (“In the news”), pp. 6–7; Davies, Flat Earth News, pp. 260–1.
60 Chris Horrie, “A canny kiss and tell”, Guardian, 28 July 2008. See “Max Mosley’s war for privacy is now a nation’s”, in this issue of SomethingDark for a full account of the NotW exposé of Mosley and its aftermath.
61 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), written evidence submitted by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, pars 5.1–5.3, p. 401.
62 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), Q763, p. 175. Myler replaced Andy Coulson as NotW editor when the latter resigned in January 2007 over the Goodman–Mulcaire royal family phone-hacking case, and was still the Sunday red-top’s editor when it was closed in July. For a concise but instructive profile of Myler at the time of the Mosley case, see Leigh Holmwood & Stephen Brook, “Max Mosley case: Profile of News of the World editor Colin Myler”, Guardian, 24 July 2008.
63 Burns & Becker, “Murdoch tabloids’ targets included Downing Street and the Crown”.
64 ICO, What price privacy?, pars 5.9–5.11. See also, for example, Laura Tyler & Phil Hartley/Schillings Lawyers, “Fleet Street phone-hacking scandal: a legal perspective”, In-House Lawyer, 8 March 2011.
65 Brian Cathcart, “Code breakers”, Index on Censorship, 30 June 2011. See also the comment on Cathcart’s article left by “Maria”, 6 July 2011.
66 Cathcart, “Code breakers”. Cathcart also uses the Mosley exposé as one of his case studies to illustrate the difference between the work of professional privacy invaders on the one hand, and that of genuine journalists on the other hand.
67 On broader Conservative Party–News International relations, see the Guardian, “The Tories and Murdoch: who met whom when” (graphic), 27 July 2011; Channel 4 News (UK), “Phone hack scandal: Who are Rebekah Brooks’ friends?” (graphic), 8 July 2011. A more comprehensive network of relationships is presented by the BBC: BBC, “Phone-hacking scandal: Who’s linked to who?” (interactive graphic), 13 Sept. 2011. See also BBC, “Phone hacking: PM’s defence of Coulson over the years”, 20 July 2011.
68 The October issue of British Vogue magazine carried an interview with Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, who revealed that Blair attended the christening of her and Murdoch’s two daughters, and is a godfather to them: “[Deng’s] conversation was peppered with famous names: her closest friends include [actor, Hugh] Jackman, Nicole Kidman and Tony Blair (all of whom are godparents to the couple’s children, all of whom attended the christening garbed in white, as the guests of Queen Rania, on the banks of the river Jordan)…” (Fiona Golfar, “Wendi, darling”, Vogue (UK edition), Oct. 2011, p. 293). For reporting on this erstwhile little-known close personal relationship, see Anita Singh, “Tony Blair is godfather to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter”, Telegraph, 4 Sept. 2011; Dan Sabbagh, “How Tony Blair was taken into the Murdoch family fold”, Guardian, 5 Sept. 2011. For comment, see Henry Porter, “Tony Blair is godfather to Murdoch’s daughter? Now it all makes sense”, Guardian, 5 Sept. 2011 (the Guardian edited the article after requests from Blair that clarifications be made; the original commentary remains unedited on Henry Porter’s website: Henry Porter, “Tony Blair is godfather to Murdoch’s daughter? Now it all makes sense”, Henry Porter on Liberty (Henry-Porter.com), 5 Sept. 2011). See also the very serious implications of the Blair–News International liaison suggested in Jonathan Freedland, “The new Met chief’s U-turn is welcome – he had made a gross misjudgment”, Guardian, 20 Sept. 2011.
69 Timothy Garton-Ash, “Phone-hacking scandal: Britain should seize this chance to break the culture of fear at its heart”, Guardian, 13 July 2011. See also the opening speech in the House of Commons emergency debate on phone hacking by Labour MP and former Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee member, Chris Bryant, in which he said “the whole political system has failed” to rein in what he effectively described in some length as the tabloid ecosystem (BBC Democracy Live, House of Commons emergency debate on phone hacking [video], 6 July 2011 [from 0:00:40]; the Guardian published an edited version of the speech: Chris Bryant, “Phone hacking: ‘The whole political system has failed’”, Guardian, 6 July 2011).
70 See, for example: Don Van Natta, “Stain from tabloids rubs off on a cozy Scotland Yard”, New York Times, 16 July 2011; Brian Cathcart, “Police tiptoed around News International as if in the presence of a sleeping baby”, Index on Censorship, 5 Sept. 2010; Graeme McLagan, “We’ve known about News of the World payments for years”, Guardian, 8 July 2011. For a day-to-day reporting perspective of issues concerning the police, see, for example: Peter Jackson, “Phone hacking: Police-media relationship scrutinised”, BBC, 6 July 2011; Sandra Laville & Vikram Dodd, “News of the World paid bribes worth £100,000 to up to five Met officers”, Guardian, 7 July 2011; Nick Davies, “Phone hacking: police hand over evidence they claimed did not exist”, Guardian, 17 July 2011.
71 Metropolitan Police statement, “Phone hacking: Metropolitan police statement”, published in the Guardian, 17 Sept. 2011. There is no suggestion that Guardian journalists bribed police for information, as is the case with the News of the World. For reporting on this development, see David Leigh, “Hacking: Met use Official Secrets Act to demand Guardian reveals sources”, Guardian, 16 Sept. 2011; Raphael G. Satter, “Paper: London police wants source of hacking story”, AP/Salon.com, 16 Sept. 2011. Guardian journalist Amelia Hill had earlier been questioned under caution by police: Dan Sabbagh, “Press freedom fears as police question Guardian reporter”, Guardian, 7 Sept. 2011. For an indication of the reaction amongst free speech advocates, see Geoffrey Robertson, “Threat to press freedom”, Guardian, 16 Sept. 2011; John Kampfner, “Index on Censorship letter to Metropolitan Police commissioner”, Index on Censorship, 17 Sept. 2011. One media academic at Columbia University has described the police action as having “strong undertones of a Berlusconi state” (see Ian Dunt, “Fleet Street in uproar as Met uses Official Secrets Act over phone-hacking”, Politics.co.uk, 16 Sept. 2011). Chris Bryant also made reference to Berlusconi in his House of Commons speech (BBC Democracy Live, House of Commons emergency debate on phone hacking [at 0:20:40]; Bryant, “‘The whole political system has failed’”). For an indication of the political pressure generated as a result of Scotland Yard’s action, see Nicholas Watt & Vikram Dodd, “Pressure on attorney general to block Met move against press freedom”, Guardian, 19 Sept. 2011.
72 Owen Bowcott & Vikram Dodd, “Metropolitan police drop action against the Guardian”, Guardian, 20 Sept. 2011; Dan Sabbagh, “Phone hacking: how the Met came to the Guardian looking for evidence”, Guardian, 20 Sept. 2011; Guardian, “Met police action against the Guardian: what the other papers said”, 20 Sept. 2011.
73 See Vikram Dodd, “Phone hacking: Met police put pressure on Guardian over coverage”, Guardian, 15 July 2011.
74 Freedland, “The new Met chief’s U-turn is welcome – he had made a gross misjudgment”.
75 The Guardian reported the extraordinary police production order on the afternoon of Friday 16 September (Leigh, “Hacking: Met use Official Secrets Act to demand Guardian reveals sources”). By the next day, the Daily Mail was the only major tabloid to mention the story on the front page of its website: Stephen Wright, “‘Vindictive’ Met uses Official Secrets Act to force paper to reveal source on hacking stories”, Daily Mail, 17 Sept. 2011. Wright’s story was not accompanied by commentaries about threats to freedom of speech until 20 September, the day Scotland Yard dropped its threat against the Guardian, a remarkable observation in light of the mid-market tabloid’s long-standing and strident characterisation of developing privacy law as such a threat. When such commentaries did appear, one columnist nevertheless did not conceal contempt for the Guardian, and the editorial used the occasion to warn against “the sweeping powers of the Data Protection and Bribery Acts” and against the dangers of press regulation (respectively: Richard Littlejohn, “No, I’m not kidding. We really have to defend the Guardian”, Daily Mail, 20 Sept. 2011; Daily Mail, “Sinister threat to the public’s right to know” (editorial), 20 Sept. 2011). On the evening of Sunday 18 September, the Guardian published a summary of critical press comment on Scotland Yard’s resort to the Official Secrets Act: of six quoted sources, which included the News International-owned Sunday Times, only one was from a tabloid, the Daily Mirror (Guardian, “Met’s Official Secrets Act gambit: what the other papers say”, 18 Sept. 2011). Harold Evans, the former editor of the Sunday Times acclaimed for his public interest campaigns and services to journalism, commented that “…there is curious reticence among the press in making common cause against a common threat. It was notable that newspapers were amazingly slow to follow the Guardian’s hacking stories until the Milly Dowler scandal made coverage inescapable. I do not hear much of a din about this assault on sources. Maybe the news travels slowly in some parts of the media” (Harold Evans, “Harold Evans: A free press has always had to contend with police officers waving the Official Secrets Act”, Observer, 17 Sept. 2011).
76 See, for example, Jerry Markon & David S. Hilzenrath, “FBI opens inquiry after report that News Corp. tried to hack phones of 9/11 victims”, Washington Post, 14 July 2011; William K. Rashbaum, “F.B.I. opens inquiry into hacking of 9/11 victims’ phones”, New York Times, 14 July 2011; Ed Pilkington, “FBI widens News Corp inquiry after alleged computer hacking by subsidiary”, Guardian, 4 Aug. 2011. Doubt also surrounds the activity in America of former NotW Los Angeles-based US editor, James Desborough, who was arrested by Scotland Yard on 18 August (see Hill, “Phone hacking: News of the World Hollywood reporter is arrested”).
77 Guardian, “Max Mosley case: News of the World statement”, 24 July 2008. The statement that Myler delivered made out-of-context use of selected extracts from Eady’s judgment to restate the tabloid’s affectations of a sense of superior morality and social responsibility as opposed to Mosley’s alleged “depraved and brutal…behaviour”.
78 Chris Johnson, “Colin Myler: ‘Media being strangled by stealth’”, Press Gazette, 1 Dec. 2008.
79 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), Q752, p. 174. For a serious and more learned interpretation of the development of UK privacy law, see JDG Chambers, “Private versus public – two senior lawyers discuss the rise of privacy law”, LegalWeek.com, 12 May 2011.
80 Max Mosley v News Group Newspapers Limited. Approved Judgment before the Honourable Mr Justice Eady, High Court of Justice (Queens Bench Division), Royal Courts of Justice, London, 24 July 2008
( [2008] EWHC 1777 (QB) ), par. 234.
81 Max Mosley v News Group Newspapers Limited, par. 173.
82 Frances Gibb, “QCs defend Mr Justice Eady as newspapers accuse him of privacy law rulings”, Times (London), 11 Nov. 2008.
83 Gibb, “QCs defend Mr Justice Eady as newspapers accuse him of privacy law rulings”.
84 Dominic Ponsford, “Greatest hits of outgoing top privacy judge David Eady”, Press Gazette, 15 Sept. 2010.
85 Paul Dacre, Speech by Paul Dacre, editor in Chief of the Daily Mail at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol, 9 Nov. 2008.
86 Dacre, Speech by Paul Dacre, editor in Chief of the Daily Mail at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol.
87 Dacre, Speech by Paul Dacre, editor in Chief of the Daily Mail at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol.
88 Stephen Glover, “No-one has voted for a privacy law – but that is exactly what we’re getting”, Daily Mail, 25 July 2008; Daily Mail, “Daily Mail comment: A good day for the grubby and corrupt” (editorial), 25 July 2008; Quentin Letts, “As cold as a frozen haddock, Mr Justice Eady hands down his views shorn of moral balance…”, Daily Mail, 25 July 2008; Stephen Glover, “Judges are unelected, out of touch and shockingly arrogant”, Daily Mail, 21 May 2011.
89 Fiona McIntosh, “Max Mosley won £60k, but the cost to his family is priceless”, Daily Mirror, 27 July 2008.
90 BBC One, “Question Time”, 12 May 2011 (at 27:25 & 29:04).
91 See Cathcart, “Code breakers”; Davies, Flat Earth News, p. 265.
92 Roy Greenslade, “Mosley part two: Is the privacy judgment a genuine threat to press freedom?”, Guardian, 30 July 2008.
93 See, for example, Andrew Pierce & Caroline Gammell, “Max Mosley orgy ruling will allow ‘adultery without fear of exposure’”, Telegraph, 24 July 2008; Ben Farmer, “Max Mosley orgy ruling: the scandals that would have remained unexposed”, Telegraph, 24 July 2008; Brian MacArthur, “Max Mosley verdict tightens chains on the press”, Telegraph, 24 July 2008.
94 Joshua Rozenberg, “Max Mosley verdict will stifle journalism”, Telegraph, 24 July 2008. Rozenberg presents a better “balancing act” of his own after he interviewed Eady at length in April 2011 (Joshua Rozenberg, “Mr Justice Eady on balancing acts”, Index on Censorship, 12 June 2011).
95 Torin Douglas, “Will Mosley case affect the media?”, BBC, 24 July 2008.
96 George Monbiot, “How our senior libel judge stamps on free speech – all over the world”, Guardian, 19 Oct. 2009.
97 George Monbiot, “This media is corrupt – we need a Hippocratic oath for journalists”, Guardian, 11 July 2011.
98 See Cathcart, “Code breakers”.
99 See, for example, Kevin Rawlinson, “Mosley case on privacy laws ‘is being fast-tracked’”, Independent, 26 Feb. 2010.
100 See, for example: Guardian, “Max Mosley case: News of the World statement”; Tom Crone, oral evidence presented to the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 5 May 2009, (House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 2: Oral and written evidence), Q848, p. 184); Dacre, Speech by Paul Dacre, editor in Chief of the Daily Mail at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol; Glover, “No-one has voted for a privacy law - but that is exactly what we're getting”; Daily Mail, “Daily Mail comment: A good day for the grubby and corrupt”; Glover, “Judges are unelected, out of touch and shockingly arrogant”. For a summary of the application of the European Convention on Human Rights in Mosley’s breach-of-privacy suit against the News of the World and in his subsequent application to the ECHR, see this feature’s companion piece, “Max Mosley’s war for privacy is now a nation’s”, in this issue of SomethingDark. For the ICO’s summary of the Convention’s application in British law through the HRA 1998, see ICO, What price privacy?, par. 3.1. See also Greenslade, “Mosley part two: Is the privacy judgment a genuine threat to press freedom?”.
101 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, “Press standards, privacy and libel”, second report of session 2009–10 (vol. 1: Report, together with formal minutes), UK Parliament, 24 Feb. 2010, ch. 2, pars 68–76 (pp. 25–7). The cited extracts are from pars 69 and 76.
102 Afua Hirsch, “Eady: ‘unpredictability and uncertainty’ of law harming press freedom”, Guardian, 11 March 2010. Eady had only begun commenting at such public engagements late in 2009: see Afua Hirsch, “Judge in Max Mosley trial hits back at criticism over privacy cases”, Guardian, 1 Dec. 2009.
103 Steven Whittle & Glenda Cooper, Privacy, probity and public interest, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford: 2009, p. 95, cited by David Eady and reported in Judith Townend, “Mr Justice Eady: ‘The law of privacy is a new creature requiring a terminology and language of its own’”, Journalism.co.uk.
104 Max Mosley v News Group Newspapers Limited, par. 130.
105 Barbara Hewson, “Mosley’s racy sex life is none of our business”, Spiked, 28 July 2008.
106 Lucy Kellaway, “Max Mosley fights back”, Financial Times, 4 Feb. 2011.
107 House of Lords & House of Commons Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill, Q771, pp. 37–8.
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Tabloid newspapers dominated the illegal
trade in confidential personal information.
'That is what we do,
we go out and destroy
other people's lives.'
An entire industry has evolved around exploiting the private life of those who are in, or are thrust into, the public eye.
It was indeed the realisation that nobody was safe from tabloid privacy invasion and nobody’s confidential personal information
was safe from violation
by the popular press
that brought about
the multiple scandals
that played out so dramatically in public forums, including parliament.
The Metropolitan Police action was dropped amidst sustained uproar over what was indeed a thinly disguised attempt to punish the Guardian and stifle future, legitimate investigative reporting.
The judge was subjected to such a ferocious attack by journalists, editors and media commentators that a number of Britain’s leading lawyers took the 'unprecedented' step of defending him in public.
Even the BBC has not been averse to the argument that freedom
of the press is all but indistinguishable from
the press’ freedom to invade privacy at will.