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 news 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 all of us, except she was the editor.
urgent, pressing need to do whatever you ve got to do to keep the money coming in. so what you did is you, you used the dark arts. the dark arts is a phrase that journalists use among themselves to describe things which are not technically legal. i was known as the prince of darkness because i was probably the first, if not amongst the first, to start the hacking and the surveillance and all that sort of stuff. hacking people s mobile phone messages, hacking their land lines, and that s why we used private detectives, people like glenn mulcaire, because they had ways of finding people. the bottom line was the law didn t really matter really, as long as you got the story. a popular defense for murdoch
who left his cell phone number and said, call me. but whatever you do, don t leave a voicemail message. we started calling him mr. apollo . i met up with him in a hotel room in london. and he was able to give me quite a detailed outline of how murdoch s news of the world newspaper was engaged in industrial scale criminal activity to get information for stories. this whole scandal begins with a small story buried inside news of the world about prince william and a soccer injury. the palace immediately realized as the only way that the paper could know this is through some kind of leak. security staff figured out that the information could only have come from voice messages left on mobile phones. apparently the accessing or hacking into possibly of the prince of wales s personal voice messages.
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. britney 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 york to every part of the empire as this
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 of 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.