Episode 9 The Phone Hacking Inquiry

reports on a week that saw Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General,

and Lord Patten give evidence to the Inquiry.

Favour of talking to editors and journalists... We made the wrong

decision. We committed contempt of court. Probably the gravest

editorial error that the PA has made in the whole time I have been

For months, the failings of the press have been debated in here and

reported on the web and on the television. Milly Dowler's parents

talk about the moment they discovered their daughter's

voicemail had been hacked. This week, a change of focus. As those

broadcasters arrived here to face questions of their own. First up on

day 29 news of the BBC investigation into its own affairs.

You tell us in July of last year, when the hacking scandal broke, you

decided to commission a review to see whether the BBC's procedures

were robust and also to go further and to investigate whether amongst

other things there was any evidence of hacking in the BBC? To get it

out of the way - it is right, isn't it, that the review found no

evidence that phones had been hacked by BBC staff? That is

correct. No hacking didn't mean there would be no awkward questions.

The BBC had spent in excess of �300,000 on private detectives over

six-and-a-half years. On one occasion, a private investigator

was used to discover the details of the owner of a vehicle from a

numberplate? Then you go on to assert that was in the public

interest. My first question is would you accept that in order to

ascertain the details of the owner of a vehicle from a numberplate one

has to involve illegal conduct because it requires getting

confidential information from the DVLA? At the time this programme

was some -- at the time - this programme was some years ago - at

the time this investigation took place, there were many

organisations which had access to the DVLA, including many private

investigation companies had direct access to the DVL A-day that base.

There were many different ways in which this information could be

obtained. This organisation is used to criticism. It gets 240,000

complaints every year. Many of the issues that come up don't have

serious consequences. But some do. Like deceiving audiences in public

votes, radio shows with fake competitions and a misleading

preview tape for a documentary about the Queen. I believe that as

quickly as possible, when you are clear that you or someone who has

been working with you has made a mistake, as quickly as possible you

should tell the public directly that you recognise that the BBC has

made a mistake, and that we are sorry for letting them down and

that we will do everything in our power to make sure that that kind

of mistake doesn't happen again. That was the spirit of the way we

responded both to the competitions and the Queen documentary. In the

wake of those problems, the BBC has changed its rules, the Director-

General said, but it didn't think the way it was regulated would work

for newspapers. I think it is quite valuable in terms of plurality of

media that the press are not as regulated and constrained as a

broadcast media whose power is more, whose reach is broader and more

immediate... Mark Thompson has spent his career in the broadcast

media. The chairman of the BBC Trust has not. Lord Patten was once

a Tory Minister, chairman of the Conservative Party, seen here

campaigning in 1992, and the Governor of Hong Kong. So while he

had advice for the BBC... I do have an instinct which is not borne out

by a wealth of statistical evidence that we should learn to say sorry

quicker. He also had stories to tell, like the one about his book

on a less than placid relationship with the Chinese authorities in

Hong Kong which was to have been printed by one of Rupert Murdoch's

companies, HarperCollins. Murdoch took the view that

publishing a book which was critical of the Chinese leadership

would not improve his chances, so he instructed HarperCollins drop

the book on the grounds that it was no good. Which plainly, there was

much evidence to suggest that that wasn't the view of the main editor

at HarperCollins. Although now a BBC Trust man, he was keen to

balance that view. I wouldn't want anybody to think that I have a

vendetta about Mr Murdoch. I think it is probably the case that there

are some newspapers which still exist in this country because of

him. But in general, politicians tended to regard newspaper bosses

rather too highly. I think age of political parties and their leaders

over the last 25 years have often demeaned themselves by the extent

to which they have paid court on proprietors and editors. Of course,

I am in favour of talking to editors and journalists but I'm not

in favour of grovelling. I think that politicians have very often

laboured under - I'm reminded of something I said by the documents

you asked me to look at - I think that politicians have allowed

themselves to be kidded by editors and proprietors that editors and

proprietors determine the fate of politicians. More news about Milly

Dowler's voice messages. A letter from Surrey Police to the committee

of MPs says the News of the World did have recordings of her voice

messages and the paper got hold of her phone number and the PIN number

for that phone from school-children. On day 30, an argument that the

press might not be too powerful but too weak with this anecdote from a

former financial times reporter about a fiery encounter with a

spin-doctor. It was 1996 and he was giving me a story about a new

business initiative and literally dictating pretty much the story to

me down the phone, you know, then Tony Blair will say this, this

happened, this happened, and I just asked him a couple of questions

like, "But didn't you say that last week? Doesn't this contradict

something else?" To which I got the response to which I will always

remember which is, "Shut up, take it down if you want more from where

this came from in future." Westminster lobby journalists were

extraordinarily pliant at the time. Then tales of the sort of

journalism that was guaranteed coverage in some papers. This is in

The Star. And there are many things you could say about this. So

essentially it's Charlotte Church at 15. The commentary is important

here. She's a big girl now. "Child singing sensation shows just how

quickly she's grown up after she turned up at Hollywood bash looking

chest swell." Clearly, an emphasis on a 15-year-old woman's, young

woman's breasts. The inquiry heard those who objected to the way

papers treated women were taking a risk like Clare Short who

campaigned in the '80s against the topless photos on Page 3 of The Sun.

What we have here is Clare Short's face was superimposed on to a Page

3 model and the headline is "fat, jealous Clare brands Page 3 porn".

They likened Clare Short to the back of a bus. And they told jokes

about - well jokes in inverted commas - that making her in a Page

3 Girl would be a Mission Impossible. Clearly, the sort of -

if it wasn't their purpose, the effect has been to essentially

close down free speech in relation to groups and individuals, feeling

free to speak out and make a critique against these newspapers.

The inquiry had already heard about one title running a series of anti-

Muslim stories, the next witness gave some examples. Sometimes I

come across some disturbing headlines which seem to us to be

aimed at fermenting prejudice against Muslims, rather than

reporting facts. Thank you. And in relation to that, in the briefing

paper, although it is not in front of us now, you give some examples

of headlines. Muslim schools ban our culture, Muslims tell us how to

run our schools, Britain has 85 underlined Sharia courts and BBC

put Muslims before you. Then to the way science was handled. It was a

full page in the Sun. Breast cancer risk all over shops' shelves. What

the story is saying that commonly- used chemicals that are all around

us in products are linked to breast cancer. It is a classic example of

an article that should not have been given this prominence or this

headline. It was a very small study. It has several flaws in it. It was

in a relatively obscure journal. It showed that traces of these

chemicals are found in the breast tissue of women with breast cancer

but it didn't test the breast tissue of women without breast

cancer, healthy women. It didn't do a control. It is interesting the

traces of these chemicals were found, many toxicologists would

expect them to have been found. It is not terrifying and there is no

evidence that the chemicals cause the cancer. Neither has there been

any study ever before showing that these chemicals cause breast cancer.

I am aware that three major cancer research charities wrote to The Sun

about this. Broadsheets like the Financial Times are also at fault,

she said, despite some fantastic Science Reporters, the problem

was... That the disjuncture between the scientific community and your

average newsroom is that within science extraordinary claims demand

extraordinary evidence. Within a newsroom, I actually think it is

the opposite. The more extraordinary, the more shocking,

the more sensational, the more the rush to publish. The extraordinary

coverage of Christopher Jefferies, an innocent man arrested during a

murder inquiry saw eight papers pay him damages. The Mirror is

appealing against the fine. One of its reporters offered a personal

defence. As a reporter, I am happy with the way I conducted myself on

this particular story. I tried to present as balanced an article as

possible. And the decisions that are made at an editorial level are

out of my hands. I can only advise my content desk as to which

direction I feel the story is going. From the man who edited part of The

Sun's coverage... I readily accept what we did publish was too strong

but we attempted, I attempted with the lawyer, and the night lawyer

when he came in, to try and strike a balance between what we could say

and what would keep us the right side of the law. Obviously, those

decisions were wrong. We made the wrong decision. We committed

Since he was appointed he's brought more contempt of court cases than

were brought in the previous ten years I believe. And he has

certainly changed our attitude to how we report arrests and we have

changed the culture of the paper on the back of the Jeffreys case. I

know it's been described as a watershed moment but it genuinely

is in our newsroom. On day 31 we heard from but weren't allowed to

say Mazher Mahmood, the former News of the World "fake sheikh", who

said he resigned after he tried to cover up a mistake he made in the

story. He's since been reemployed by the paper. And a rail union boss

who got a lift to work on a scooter when the London Underground was

suspended. His commute made the news on Sunday. He's picked me up

on waving to my young daughter upstairs in the bed room and I off

to go to King's Cross station to attend a meeting in Newcastle with

the regional council. It wasn't just the picture which mattered but

how the newspaper managed to track down the identity of the owner of

that scooter from its numberplate. The union first got an idea of what

might have happened when there was a knock on the door of Bob Crow's

assistant. Two police officers from the corruption unit asked did his

scooter break down in the Wandsworth area of London. He

categorically remembered he had never been to Wandsworth with his

scooter. He said but your scooter broke down in Wandsworth? He said

no, it never broke down in Wandsworth, all we can say is

someone phoned up at this moment in time, the DVLA in Swansea on a

particular date, which he gave to Mr Scott, and said your scooter is

broken down and he wanted to know who the owner was. That information

that they got from DVLA was then supplied to Mr Whitmore who then

supplied it to the Daily Mail or Sunday mail and produced the

article. No action was taken by the police against the newspaper as a

result of obtaining that information. Steve Whitmore was

later found guilty of data protection offences. Bob Crow was

stopped on his way to work next to a bus during a tube strike.

stories are just to humiliate you, to say you shouldn't be going on

holiday and you shouldn't be going shopping and you shouldn't be

having a private life in general, how dare you have a holiday?

freelanceer for the Sunday Times even went through bins looking for

inabout the union. Earlier on in this inquiry I heard an editor or

deputy editor say they don't go on fishing trips for that newspaper.

They don't go on fishing trips but they certainly go on bin trips

because the man had his head in a bin like the character Top Cat. The

information was obtained illegally to use against and slur the RMT.

Online publishers were rather less reckless. This lawyer, journalist

and blogger argued. When there was a great deal of excitement because

superinjunctions were being broken on Twitter, and indeed somebody set

Apple Twitter account which somehow some way managed to list 7 or 8

superinjunctions with relevant details, yes that was taken forward

by people on Twitter and it caused excitement. But how did that

information get to social media in the first place. That relationship

between traditional and new media wasn't always happy. I showed you

before you started giving evidence that ert letter that the inquiry

has received from the Times, from the editor Mr Harding dated 19th

January this year. The letter followed a Times report confirming

that one of the paper's journalists had hacked into an e-mail account.

It said the journalist told his managers what happened and they

insisted he used legitimate means. He said that's what he did to get a

story it believed was in the public interest. The reporter was

disciplined by David Allen Green said the court should interest been

told when applying for an injunction to protect the blogger's

privacy. At the time it wasn't key to the managers the role that the

hacking had taken place. The Times said they weren't clear of the role,

but they were sure that it had been above board. My concern is this

should have been put before the court at the injunction application.

The boss of a big press agency on which media outlets rely told the

inquiry about an error in a court report which confused the

identities of two men with the same men and the consequences that

polled when it was published. Probably the gravest editorial

error the PA has made in the whole time that I've been there. We wrote

a story about the wrong person. As soon as it was drawn to our

attention, we corrected it. Obviously apologised for it. I

think in the subsequent settlement it was described as an honest

mistake. The error was made by a journalist who had been covering

courts for us for about 30 years. Was such a trusted and reliable

member of staff that they trained junior reporters in the art of

court reporting. The reporter concerned was so ashamed by what

they had done that they resigned. Lord Justice Leveson's

consideration of who should get special core participant status saw

some unexpected faces. That's why subjectively I don't want to be

subjective, I would prefer to be objective about my evidence as a

witness. But as a core par tant victim... The music producer

Jonathan King was jailed in 2001 for four indecent assaults and

other offences. He wasn't granted There's been so much fever

Ishaktivity over the past two years in relation to this with the

various newspaper groups, with investigative journalists, with the

books being written, with the campaigning groups, if the best

that critics can do is to turn up further evidence of what was going

on between 1999 and 2003 doesn't amount to much. He had a blunt

response when News International's lawyer argued against extending

data protection penalties for journalists. How much of a good

deal do you guys want? You fought the, excuse me, Sir, for being

heated about this, but you fought everyone to a standstill in 200 6-

07, you can it again in 2009-10. You've got so much privileges and

exemptions it is perfectly possible for journalists to do a decent job

legally. Google's staff explained they would remove links from their

searches if told sites defamed people or breached copyright. He

said they had acted on complaints from a previous witness, Max Mosley.

I can tell you in his case we've removed hundreds of URLs, another I

agree that you referenced him going to the individual sites and trying

to get them down. Because Google isn't the internet, taking it down

out of our search results doesn't make it disappear. Facebook said

its users include over half the 13- year-olds in the entire country,

the sort of figures that newspapers can only dream about. But how did

you make sure that many different people all behave themselves when

they are online? So we have systems precise throw try and pick that up.

We don't want those people on our platform. We don't want those

identities on our platform. Yes there are some systems in place. We

find the strongest protection is the community of users. We have an

800 million-strong Neighbourhood Watch community of people who will

happily report to us if they think someone has a fake identity or is

acting strangely. The site acted on privacy or defamation complaints

within two days, it says. This is a different right. Popbitch sends out

a gossipy e-mail to 350,000 subscribers a week. Popbitch is an

entertainment product. Therefore we are trying to do no more than poke

fun at people in the world of celebrity. And how familiar was she

with the press complaint commission code of practice? We take advice

from media lawyers who have at times given us aspects of the code

they think would be relevant to us. So you don't have it on your desk?

I don't read it every day. Sorry? don't read it every day. Have you

read it at all? From cover to cover no, but I've read the bits where we

were told it is relevant to us. Lord Justice Leveson's brief is to

examine the press, but what's the point of doing that if websites get