had no knowledge of any alleged hacking. a basic mistake that murdoch and his allies made with us is that they attacked us with such ferocity that in addition to the original journalistic motive of wanting to tell the truth about the story, they pushed us into a second motive which was that we had to keep publishing in order to defend our own credibility. basically nobody else in the world of news in the uk wanted to pick up the story and run with it, so alan did a very unusual thing he contacted bill keller, the editor-in-chief at the new york times and said, look, we ve got this amazing story. i was longing for an american paper to come and do what american journalists at their best do really well. to his credit, bill keller didn t hesitate for a second and he put three reporters on a plane who came to the uk and more or less stayed in the uk for the next six months.
the news of the world was the number one english paper at that time. it prided itself on being the best newspaper in the world. it was astonishingly influential. when you join the news of the world, you re basically on call 24 hours a day. all s you ve got to do is get the story. the first reporter to knock on the door was the reporter most likely to get the story. as soon as you got in that door, they were going to fold under questioning. if you can catch someone who s instantly grieving and in shock, they ll do anything you want them to. there s a period during the early 2000s when day after day, week after week, the murdoch papers are breaking these insane stories. soccer star david beckham s secret affair. saddam hussein in his skivvies. brittney spears still fodder for the tabloid. and people in the uk are kind of scratching their heads, and wondering how s this possible? murdoch s company is profit-hungry. that gets passed down from the headquarters in new y
a popular defense for murdoch supporters was, we weren t the only ones doing this, everyone was doing this, which in fact might be true, but that didn t make it any less illegal. i mean it was a patent violation of journalistic ethics as well as the law. the editor is the most important person in the building. and the reporter who actually goes out and does the story. oh yes, but it s the editor who appoints him and finds him and trains him. rebekah brooks first came to news international as a secretary. she quickly developed a reputation for her tenacity as a journalist. rebekah brooks is in some ways the sort of archetypal murdoch executive. she s climbed all the way up becoming editor of the news of the world, editor of the sun, and chief executive of new uk which is the holding company for the newspapers. all right, i think it works. it s all in the four-pager, it s highlighted. she was aware of the dark arts. she was a bully, just like
executive indicates that this is the nightmare scenario. that there s damning information in the court documents that could really get the company in trouble. they have to shut this down. and ultimately, james does decide to settle. to pay a million pounds was an enormous amount. and it suggested real fear in the murdoch castle. to put it in plain language, that had to be hush money. when i ve got the first story ready to print, which was on the gordon taylor case, i went to see alan rusbridger, the editor of the guardian. and i said to him, okay, i ve done this story that involves taking on the biggest media company in the country. and alan s very good in a situation like that. he said, okay. it was obvious from the moment he outlined the story that this was going to be huge. it was going to be uncomfortable. it was going to be difficult and
dead. us publishing the story turbocharged the phone hacking scandal. it changed everything. it was just astonishing. there is outrage in britain this morning. how low will a tabloid go? it is the intrusion into the voicemail of milly dowler that has outraged a nation. it was the lighted match that was dropped into six years of reporting. before the milly dowler story emerged, james murdoch actually told colleagues that he thought that the worst of it was behind them, and then this whole thing explodes. the family of milly dowler is planning to sue the news of the world. i think this takes it to a completely different level. there s no words that could describe how awful this is. the most immediate thing that happens is that advertisers for the news of the world say that they are going to boycott the paper. in james s mind this is just a third rate sunday tabloid that