“[Nick] Davies’s work…has gained no traction at all in the rest of Fleet Street, which operates under a system of omerta so strict that it would secure a nod of approbation from the heads of the big New York crime families” Peter Oborne, The Observer, April 2010

“There seemed to be some omerta principle at work that meant that not a single other national newspaper thought this could possibly be worth an inch of newsprint” Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, Newsweek, 2011

Tom Watson MP grabbed headlines last November when he accused James Murdoch of being a “mafia boss” and operating a code of silence, but he wasn’t the first to use the “media omerta” analogy in the phone hacking scandal.

The media’s treatment of developments had been markedly selective. Curiously, it was not just the News International titles that avoided certain avenues of inquiry, following The Guardian’s 2009 revelation of widespread voicemail interception.

In a chapter of a new book about phone hacking we examine Oborne and Rusbridger’s assertions that the press significantly under-reported the phone hacking scandal – a news story which would eventually lead to the demise of the News of the World, several high profile resignations and the ongoing Leveson Inquiry.

Despite significant revelations in July 2009 about the possible extent of phone hacking at the News of the World, coverage of the issue in the press was minimal. Exempting The Guardian and The Observer, a trawl of the articles published in the UK’s major national press titles between 10 June 2006 and 10 November 2011 reveals a failure to report the phone hacking scandal in a sustained and systematic manner.

As shown in our graphs here, there are distinctive patterns in levels of coverage and angles chosen by different national newspaper titles. Coverage only picked up after an investigation by the New York Times at the end of 2010 and the revelations of July 2011.

The story warranted very little newsprint before the major developments in 2011. Whereas The Guardian had written 237 articles by the end of 2010, The Independent had 83, the Daily Telegraph 46, and The Times 43. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tabloids gave the story barely minimal coverage. By the close of 2010, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday had written 38 articles, The Sun 17, and the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror a mere 11 [more on methodology here].

At various times between 2006 and 2011, aspects of the phone hacking story were simply not reported by British journalists. In the words of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, they were apparently ‘blinded’ to ‘the significance of the issue’.

In our chapter we look deeper into the ways media covered the story. We argue that explanations for the non-reporting of the phone hacking scandal need to delve beyond simplistic, if valid, assertions of industry cover-up.

To understand why the majority of national newspapers didn’t regard phone hacking as newsworthy, it is necessary to unpick a tangled web of contributing factors.

We explore competing professional, political and commercial interests; the failure of other organisations – particularly the Metropolitan Police – to investigate the matter thoroughly; and the intimidating power of News International.

On this occasion, a large part of the media failed to deem its own industry’s scandal ‘newsworthy’ enough to warrant proper attention, which has ramifications far beyond the phone hacking scandal.

The inclination for journalists not to regard a scandal within their own industry as ‘newsworthy’ is hardly surprising, but other stories might also be suppressed for a similar combination of professional, political and commercial interests – a fact that ought to be considered by Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry and other bodies considering the question of press regulation.

The vigour of journalism and healthy democratic debate is not merely dependent on the effective regulation of what is reported, it is also dependent on ensuring that harmful illegal activity is regarded as sufficiently ‘newsworthy’ to be investigated and reported.

A new system of regulation should not only end the abuse of self-regulation by the News of the World, it should also consider whether newspapers ought to be independently held to account for their editorial decisions regarding ‘newsworthiness’.

Our full chapter is available on the Social Science Research Network here. It is an extract from The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial, edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Mair (Arima 2012). The book was launched at an event in London on Tuesday 7 February.

“To this [civil] liberty, the greatest danger is always posed by those who are the most powerful in the country by dint of their positions, estate, or wealth. Not only can they easily abuse the power they hold, but also constantly increase their rights and strength, so that the other inhabitants must fear them more and more,” Peter Forsskål, §4 Thoughts on Civil Liberty.

Peter Forsskål’s words, written in 1759, seemed particularly pertinent during yesterday’s Select Committee hearing in Parliament. MPs asked determined and powerful questions [PDF link] to News International CEO and chairman James Murdoch about media power, management and secrecy.

Forsskål was a very early freedom of information campaigner, during Sweden’s “age of liberty” in the 18th Century. He paved the way for Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act in 1766. The botanist Carl Linnaeus, chose to name the stinging nettle after his former pupil, Forsskål: Forskålea tenacissima. “This may have reflected his personality – but freedom of information often stings too,” reflected a modern day FoI specialist, Martin Rosenbaum in 2009.

Two years ago, Forsskål’s pamphlet, Thoughts on Civil Liberty was published in English for the very first time, a project led by David Goldberg and involving Gunilla Jonsson, Helena Jäderblom, Gunnar Persson, Thomas von Vegesack and David Shaw.  You can access it via http://peterforsskal.com/ and buy the book here.

Forsskål also said, in §.8 of the text:

Divine revelations, wise fundamental laws and the honour of private individuals cannot suffer any dangerous damage by such freedom of expression. Because truth always wins when it is allowed to be denied and defended equally.

The text again felt relevant as Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger last night described the development of the phone hacking scandal and how Guardian’s reporter, Nick Davies

…was threatened, lied to and ignored, but he did what good journalists do: tracked people down; won their confidence; verified what they told him; checked it with others; and, over time, painstakingly built up irrefutable evidence of what had gone on inside the News of the World. The eventual truth was revealed to the public, not by the police or parliament or the courts or any regulator. It was revealed by a reporter.

I am not the first to use Forsskål’s text to think about the phone hacking debacle. In John Lloyd’s short book ‘Scandal!’, a Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism publication, he quotes Forsskål’s last passage:

Finally, it is also an important right in a free society to be freely allowed to contribute to society’s well-being. However, if that is to occur, it must be possible for society’s state of affairs to become known to everyone, and it must be possible for everyone to speak his mind freely about it. Where this is lacking, liberty is not worth its name. Matters of war and some foreign negotiations need to be concealed for some time and not become known by many, but not on account of proper citizens however, but because of the enemies. Much less should peacetime matters and that which concerns domestic wellbeing be withheld from inhabitants’ eyes. Otherwise, it might easily happen that only foreigners who wish harm find out all secrets through envoys and money, but the people of the country itself, who ideally would give useful advice, are ignorant of most things. On the other hand, when the whole country is known, at least the observant do see what benefits or harms, and disclose it to everybody, where there is freedom of the written word. Only then, can public deliberations be steered by truth and love for the fatherland, on whose common weal each and everyone depends.

The significance of the 1766 Swedish legislation, influenced by Forsskål, “was its prodigious embrace of the concept that citizens had the right to see the fundamental decisions of their state – until then, assumed to be the eyes of the elite only,” argues Lloyd (p.23).

And that has helped develop our 21st century right to hold powerful commercial organisations to account. As many of us watched the live stream from Parliament yesterday afternoon we were doing just that. It was not just for the eyes of the elite.

Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, rightly discussed the law’s relationship with journalism in context of the wider media picture, including, the phone hacking saga (and the PCC’s “feeble” attempt to investigate it).

“Can all these discussions all take place in isolation from each other? Can you really discuss libel and privacy without also asking whether self-regulation actually works? Can you pull at the tangled issues of libel without considering how you define the public interest in privacy cases?”

On privacy he was measured, resisting the current super injunctions hysteria, and it was satisfying to hear him acknowledge the difference between injunctions whose existence  you cannot report and basic anonymous privacy injunctions (as I’ve been helping the Inforrm blog to establish). Rusbridger said:

“The Guardian has never yet been sued under any kind of privacy law. There have been general injunctions, which bind us, like anyone else. There have been actions over confidence. And I stand ready to be outraged at the first time someone sues us over an invasion of privacy. But, as I say, it hasn’t yet happened.”

Nonetheless, Rusbridger is clearly concerned by the privacy muddle. He also touched on the newspapers’ fickle approach to the public interest (something to do with rivalry between titles, I suspect…):

“… indeed, it’s worth asking: where was the front page outrage when a judge ordered the blatant tax-avoiding strategies of a major bank to be taken off the web? What about Trafigura’s attempt to gag parliament? It made it to p 21 of the Times and p14 of the Telegraph. We sometimes send confusing signals about what we really care about.”

I’ll leave you with one of his props: the political register of William Cobbett; a hobby of his is “to collect reminders of that British struggle – a universal struggle, of course, but one that began here.”

“I keep these books in my office as a reminder of the power of journalism – how, when properly deployed, it can be the most amazing challenger of power and agent of change. Think, 200 years on from Cobbett, to the disruptive power of WikiLeaks.”

Further coverage:

• Jon Slattery
• The Guardian
• WannabeHacks

• Listen to BBC Radio 4 Media Show at this link

Morgan, who edited the Daily Mirror from 1995-2004 before being sacked over a hoax photo scandal, denies all knowledge of illegal voicemail interception activity although told the BBC Radio 4 Media Show that he “heard a lot of rumours that this was more widespread than people were letting on”.

“…I don’t think any newspaper editor in Britain has a clue of what half his journalists are up to,” he told the show’s host Steve Hewlett.  “I remember having dinner with the Great Bishop Alan Rusbridger where he had no idea what was on his front page that night, at all. It wasn’t his department he said – it was his home affairs editor.”

Once again, he used the opportunity to defend former News of the World editor Andy Coulson who resigned as the Prime Minister’s media adviser in January 2011:

“Editors don’t know the half of it. I feel very angry for a friend. Let’s forget Andy as a journalist. For a friend who has now lost two incredibly high powered jobs on supposition – not fact. Not a shred of evidence has come forward against him…”

“I don’t know the facts because I haven’t been involved in it – at all. What I can tell you is that it wouldn’t surprise me at all that stories get into papers every single day on all types of newspaper, where the editor doesn’t know anything about them and it gets done at a lower level by executives…”

Morgan said he believed it was wrong for the Guardian to publish the Wikileaks story:

“The interesting thing about phone hacking for me is the very curious moral and ethical position of the Guardian, who have appointed themselves these great bishops of all things moral in the print trade, and yet they quite happily published Wikileaks day in, day out and they based it in absolute knowledge – unlike Andy Coulson who has denied any knowledge of what was going on in terms of the material coming into the paper from alleged illegal methodology – in  the Wikileaks case, the Guardian editor knew, absolutely, where the Wikileaks were coming from. “

“I would like to know the moral and ethical distinction between an editor who denies knowing that he knew material was gained illegally and it got published in his paper and an editor who openly says I know these documents were gained illegally.”

He questioned the public interest in the Guardian’s story about Colonel Gaddafi’s [alleged] lover/s, calling it a “good old fashioned tabloid sex romp revelation”. [NB: I can't find a story to match the one he described].

Back on phone hacking, he ended tangentially, asking what would have happened if News of the World had intercepted messages about a terrorist plot:

“Do I think this [phone hacking] is the greatest crime in the world? What would have happened, for example, if the News of the World had been hacking Osama bin Laden’s phone and had heard him planning another atrocity like 9/11? It’s just a simple question – would that have been permissible even though technically it breached the latest data protection laws?  It’s an interesting question to throw out there.”