NEWS INTERNATIONAL has questioned charges made by the Leveson Inquiry into British press standards that 28 News of the Worldreporters had commissioned private investigator Glenn Mulcaire to hack mobile telephone voicemails.
Accepting that phone-hacking was not the work of one “rogue reporter”, Clive Goodman, the company’s barrister, Rhodri Davies insisted that the worst breaches had been stopped after Mulcaire and Goodman were jailed in 2007.¨ Though he could not guarantee that it had not happened afterwards, Mr Davies, using a phrase adopted by the inquiry’s counsel, Robert Jay on Monday, said that if it continued later it was not “the thriving cottage industry which existed beforehand”.
On Monday, News International was stunned by the charge that 28 reporters were implicated since it had believed up to then that only five reporters’ names were found in Mulcaire’s notes when they were seized by police.
Then the inquiry was told that the investigator had carried out 2,266 "taskings" for the News of the World: "We have never seen the whole set of Mulcaire notebooks. I believe the only people who have are the police," Mr Davies said yesterday.
However, the News International lawyer did not question allegations that MPs sitting on the House of Commons inquiry into phone-hacking had been put under surveillance, saying it was unacceptable and adding: “It wasn’t journalism at all.”
Meanwhile, Associated Newspapers, which owns the Daily Mail,opposed the decision to allow journalists to give evidence anonymously: "If (they) have important evidence to give, we would encourage them to give evidence as openly as possible."
Though she did not deal with the issue of anonymity, the National Union of Journalists’ general secretary, Michelle Stanistreet, urged journalists to make submissions to Leveson: “It is vital that the newspaper bosses are not allowed to dominate this inquiry.”
In his statement, Jonathan Caplan said there was no evidence that Daily Mailjournalists had broken the law when they hired a private investigator, who was convicted in 2005 for breaches of the Data Protection Act, to secure private information.
An inquiry by the UK’s information commissioner found that the investigator, Steve Whittamore, had handled thousands of such requests from newspapers, local authorities, banks, solicitors, debt collection agencies and other bodies; though nearly 1,000 came from the Daily Mail.
However, Mr Caplan argued that the Daily Mailhad hired Whittamore to get addresses and ex-directory telephone numbers which could have been obtained by other, perfectly legal means "if the individual had had the time".
Defending the Daily Mail's reputation, Mr Caplan said celebrity and entertainment stories appealed to readers and helped to make the newspaper commercially viable: "(The) readership will stop buying those newspapers if they feel that they cannot trust its integrity or its accuracy."
A poll yesterday found that 58 per cent of the British public had lost trust in newspapers.