New ‘Hacked Off’ campaign to call for public phone hacking inquiry

jtownend — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 22:46:50 +0000

A new campaign led by the Media Standards Trust will call for a public inquiry into phone hacking, Brian Cathcart has revealed. In an article for Index on Censorship, he reports:

For the past few weeks I have been working with others, notably the Media Standards Trust, to set up a public campaign, called Hacked Off, to demand an inquiry.

The campaign will launch on Wednesday [July 6] and in the meantime they have published this holding page: http://hackinginquiry.org.

We will have a manifesto, a petition, dozens of distinguished supporters and soon a programme of public events, but what we will need most of all is your support. Please go to the site on Wednesday or soon afterwards.

The announcement follows the Guardian’s report that the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages were intercepted by News of the World. Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University, says:

The vested interests here are tremendously powerful and winning this inquiry, even after these latest allegations, is not like to be easy.

Media law and ethics » hacked off

New ‘Hacked Off’ campaign to call for public phone hacking inquiry