Hack Attack by Nick Davies

Author:Nick Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780865478824
Publisher: Faber and Faber, Inc.

10. March 2010 to 15 December 2010

Reporting is not a spectator sport (no matter what they teach in college). You can’t sit and wait for the information to present itself like a postman knocking at your door – not if you’re interested in doing something more than recycling press releases for a living; not if you can begin to understand why the best stories are the ones which someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know. You have to get in there and make it happen; use every last devious ounce of imagination to find ways of forcing the miser to let go of the gold.

In the spring of 2010, Alan Rusbridger came up with a neat manoeuvre. Reversing the normal convention under which editors grab hold of stories and keep them for their own pages, he started contacting other journalists to give them our work to encourage them to take it further. Since Fleet Street was clogged with self-interest, he tried broadcasters, approaching senior executives at the BBC and Channel 4. Both decided to make documentaries, for Panorama and for Dispatches respectively; and I briefed the people involved. He spoke also to Peter Oborne, a conservative columnist on the Daily Mail who had a reputation for plain-speaking and who, Rusbridger calculated, was one of the very few conservative journalists who might be brave enough to take on Coulson. I met him in a wine bar in Victoria and tried to explain the background. He went off to do his own research.

Most important, Rusbridger spoke to Bill Keller, executive editor of the mighty New York Times. It can’t have been hard to get him interested. It was not just that Rusbridger was offering him a story which involved the royal family, tabloid hacks and private investigators as well as politicians and police officers apparently colluding with power. Better than that, it was all about the man who had taken over the Wall Street Journal and who was attempting to use it as a weapon of mass-media destruction against Keller’s beloved paper. Keller moved fast.

Three days later, on 15 March, three New York Times reporters arrived in London and came straight to the Guardian office. That evening, Rusbridger and I spent four hours briefing them. I then followed up a day later with another four-hour session in their London office. Rusbridger introduced one of them, Don Van Natta, to our source the Emissary. I introduced Van Natta to the detective Karl (a strange encounter, in the haut bourgeois surroundings of the piano lounge of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Karl unravelled the grubby world of Jonathan Rees and his circle of bent cops). I kept pumping them with background and contacts. It felt weird to be handing over reams of hard-won information to other journalists. It also felt dangerous: for all I knew, they would find that we had got the whole story wrong and publish something that would wipe us out; but we were isolated and we needed support. Plus

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