2023-05-18 21:57:54
Prince Harry will testify in June in a London court against the publisher of the Daily Mirror. He accuses her of illegally accessing his phone calls for years. It is one of the three cases that the prince has decided to take to the end against the British tabloids to expose the practices that affected hundreds of people and for which the publishers have paid, usually discreetly, millions of pounds since the first phone and answering machine hacking scandal in 2009.
The last time a member of the British royal family appeared in court to testify was in 1891 when Bertie, the son of Queen Victoria and future King Edward VII, had to testify over a card game scammed by a friend.
Now Prince Harry, son of the current king, Carlos III, is one of the complainants against the Mirror who will present evidence in court for dozens of articles published between 1996 and 2011 in three headers of the group that contain private information suspected of having been obtained. intercepting telephone answering machines or other illegal practices. In addition, Harry has also denounced the Daily Mail group and Rupert Murdoch’s group, which publishes the Sun and edited News of the World, which closed for having accessed the phone of a murdered schoolgirl. That scandal also ended with the arrest of the former director of News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, who was later acquitted in 2014 and returned to Murdoch’s company. The scandal opened years of tabloid victim complaints.
Journalist Nick Davis published his first articles on tabloid phone hacking in the Guardian in 2009, and both he and then-editor Alan Rusbridger faced threats alone while the press regulator at the time and police ignored the allegations. complaints. The scandal inescapably broke for the public and the police in July 2011, when the Guardian revealed the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl murdered in 2002. Those who worked for the News of the World had even deleted messages of his answering machine thus interfering in the police investigation. Within days of the Guardian scoop, Murdoch announced the closure of the News of the World amid the advertiser drain.
Since then, tabloids have paid out-of-court settlements for illegally accessing the phones of victims of terrorism, relatives of dead soldiers, actors or other news actors. Since 2009, at least 1,845 lawsuits for these practices have been resolved out of court and Murdoch’s company alone has paid more than 1.2 million pounds (almost 1.4 million euros) in compensation, according to Byline Investigates, a independent medium specialized in these scandals. Among those lawsuits settled with secret money is one from Prince William in 2020. But no one had come to a public trial with the intent and ability to reach a verdict against the tabloids.
“Prince Harry has the money, the power and the energy to go against them. And that is what has been missing for the last ten years”, explains Alan Rusbridger, the director of the Guardian who dared to publish the first scandal and is now director of the political magazine Prospect and president of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. “There are big risks in taking this to court because you could end up paying millions in costs. That is the importance of Prince Harry. The fact that he is a very controversial figure in British public life at the moment also gives the story a mass audience that it might not have without him.”
Harry has filed the lawsuit with other plaintiffs, including singer Cheryl and relatives of the late George Michael. The actor Hugh Grant, who is a member of an organization calling for the reform of the British press, Hacked Off, also assures that he is determined to go all the way in his denunciations against the Sun.
The prince, who is officially no longer a working member of the royal family, has often criticized the tabloids, blaming them for ruining several romantic relationships for him and even the death of his mother. A spokesman said Wednesday that paparazzi had chased him and his wife, Meghan Markle, in a car in New York and had come close to causing several crashes and run-overs. Diana of Wales died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 while being chased by speeding photographers.
Testimony from former Mirror journalists has already put its editors on the ropes as many of those currently in charge try to distance themselves from what happened, even if they are led by the same people at the publishing companies.
At the start of the trial, which began in early May and runs for six weeks, the Mirror’s publishing company publicly apologized to Harry for collecting private information about him since he was a teenager, but did not acknowledge the wiretapping and hid behind the scenes. years since then. The company already assumes that it will have to pay compensation, but in the process there may also be consequences for some famous journalists, in particular Piers Morgan, who was the director of the Mirror and who, according to witnesses, boasted of the access he had to answering machines. private. A colleague testified that he was laughing in the middle of writing while posting a message that Paul McCartney had left for her girlfriend singing the Beatles song And I Love Her. Another journalist, and now Harry’s biographer, said that Morgan spoke naturally of the messages of the singer Kylie Minogue. Morgan acknowledged having listened to private messages with the excuse that those affected did not change the pin code of their answering machine. Morgan is now the star host of a Murdoch-owned streaming opinion channel, TalkTV.
“It’s bad news if you work for the Daily Mail, the Mirror or Murdoch’s newspapers. Most journalists just want this story to go away, insisting it is from many years ago. If it were a case of the chemical sector or the banks, I can’t imagine the newspapers saying that bygones are bygones,” says Rusbridger.
In the case of the Mirror, until now there was little information about their actions and part of the statements will bring to light other cases even if they have been resolved out of court.
“The scale of the illegal activity and the number of lives affected is becoming clearer. This case is the tip of the iceberg because only these people can afford to fight these cases”, explained to elDiario.es Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media at Goldsmiths, University of London, writer and co-founder of the Media Reform Coalition. , a group of activists and academics. Fenton is writing a book on how the media can support “a healthy democracy.”
The first scandal that ended with the News of the World also produced an attempt to regulate the press, in particular to limit the abuses of the tabloids, and which was reflected in the recommendations of the official report commissioned to Judge Brian Leveson in 2012.
The then regulator was replaced by another, the independent journalistic standards organization (IPSO), which now collects thousands of complaints from readers and viewers, makes reports on their relevance and recommends rectifications. But the new regulator does not have the authority Leveson claimed and has not followed most of the recommendations, which are instead followed by another, smaller organization called Impress, which owns local and independent publications on a voluntary basis, but not the big ones. media. Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to halt some of the legal reforms and the second part of the report, which sought to investigate the tabloids’ connections to the police and politics, was never made. Cameron’s spokesman when he came to power in 2010, Andy Coulson, had been a director of the News of the World and was found guilty of hacking phones in 2014.
Professor Fenton believes that Cameron’s resistance exposed “the entanglement between political elites and media elites.” “The media are not being held accountable, they are not being properly regulated because politicians won’t do it for fear of getting bad press and then not being re-elected. So there’s a vicious cycle,” she says. She also believes that the revelations about the tabloids “tarnished” the entire press, including the newspapers and radio and television stations that did his job.
Trust in the media in the UK is down, although tabloid behavior and a lack of regulation have not been the only factors. Trust in the news in this country has dropped 16 points since the 2016 Brexit referendum “amid increasingly polarized debates about politics and culture,” according to the report on the state of the press by the Reuters Institute. Even the BBC, the medium with the highest levels of trust, has suffered this effect: in 2022, 26% of users said they distrusted public broadcasting compared to 11% four years earlier.
Rusbridger acknowledges that Leveson’s proposed regulation has failed, but does believe his reporting following the Guardian revelations was “a wake-up call” that changed the tabloids’ most sinister practices. “I would be very surprised if there is still criminal behavior now. The Mirror spent over a million pounds a year on private detectives. And I think those criminal methods are not used anymore, ”she says. “The combination of our stories and the Leveson report cleaned up the British press. It was starting from a very unethical place and I think the press has been forced to clean itself up even if it hasn’t gone as far as Leveson wanted it to.”
Fenton is less optimistic, believing that even if there are no more private detectives and unauthorized calls to the answering machine, the tabloids may be applying other unethical methods. “As technology changes, there are new tactics and new ways to hack. Until we know that newspapers are being held to account for their activity by a fully independent and effective regulator, these practices will emerge one way or another,” he says. He also believes that if the pressure from falling confidence is an economic threat this may be a factor in the media accepting more self-regulation.
Although this trial against the Mirror is not going to end in as dramatic a result as that of the News of the World, it can mean an explicit recognition of the practices of the recent past and greater pressure for the tabloids and the next government, which will probably be Labor .
Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate will have to face a succession in the coming years and whoever heads the group will have to decide the course of his media in a context marked perhaps by the outcome of these trials and a new public debate. It is not clear if his children and co-owners of the company, James, Elizabeth and Lachlan, have the same vision, but this experience, like the allegations against Fox News in the United States, can mark them.
Rusbridger says he remains optimistic about the future, commenting: “I hope British journalism can break that obsession with celebrity and write about things that matter, and the public learns to trust again.”
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