What a sad story this News of the World business in the UK has been, and I mean this from the concept of the whole media circus around the world. Newspapers everywhere are already battling valiantly for survival to have to contend with such hideous scandals that foment political intrigue, criminal acts and disgraceful decisions that punish a majority of good, hard-working journalists making an honest living.
I consider what has taken place at the News of the World as a terrible crime against democracy and free speech. What has been committed in England and elsewhere in the world by that shameless Australian, Rupert Murdoch, is a major disservice to world journalism, not that he has ever lost an hour of sleep over it. The News of the World (NOTW) had its faults but for Murdoch to turn an intentional blind eye to that scandal is wrong on so many levels. Unless he himself stage-managed it so that he could have a reason to shut down the company and overrule the unions without causing a public outcry.
He kept the manager Rebekah Brooks, a former editor, he employed because she is a family friend. Incredibly, she was chief executive of News International and editor at the time of the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone and, more incredibly, she admitted paying money to the police who colluded with her in the dirty deeds. Is it any surprise there was a “lynch mob” reaction when she announced to the staff that they had all lost their jobs because of the paper’s wrongdoing, while she herself, as the main offender, was keeping hers?
As an old friend and an astute observer of the media scene in Murdoch’s own Oz told me after watching the breaking news of the old NOTW’s closure, “if he gets BskyB then I am living in a world whose ethics I no longer understand. I am taking a great liking to John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister in the Blair administration, who is the only parliamentarian who is game enough to criticise the Murdochs.”
He told me in an irate e-mail, “I know that the News of the World was a tabloid newspaper with a mixed baggage, but such tabloids do indeed have a place in a democracy, providing hundreds of jobs and keeping politicians and bureaucrats on their toes every hour of the day. Their actions of tapping telephones is absolutely unethical, more so in the case of a dead girl’s phone, but if you are going to shut them down for that reason, well then so be it, but the Murdochs are sneaky and have no regard for people as long as they have power. And their hunger is more power driven than money inspired. After all they have more money than they can ever spend in their lives. If power corrupts, let this be a classic case for students of human behaviour. Rupert Murdoch is a shameless Australian.”
I am in a quandary as to how to deal with the unenviable position that the outgoing editor of the NOTW finds himself in. His melodramatic walkout, together with his proud staff, from their editorial offices made good, instant-coffee television, while his last edition of the paper entitled “Thanks & Goodbye” became an overnight collector’s item.
I first met Colin Myler in Malta way back in the late 70s when, as an up-and-coming reporter for the Daily Mail, he came to cover (a somewhat glorified verb, considering how the UK media treated anything connected with Mintoff’s Malta) events leading to the historic closure of the British military base. Internet was still a figment of the imagination of authors of popular sci-fi literature and Malta was still struggling with an erratic telephone service, but someone in then Fleet Street had given him my number.
Yes, let’s talk, why not, I remember saying to him, and we agreed to meet at that old, journo-friendly waterhole, the Phoenicia’s Pegasus. We got on well immediately and it certainly was fun explaining to Colin there were actually no Cubans stalking the village streets, Kalashnikovs in hand, ready to pounce at the stroke of midnight when, for the second time in our recent history, the Union Jack was to ingloriously slip down the ceremonial pole to be replaced by the Maltese national flag.
They were rowdy nights, for Colin Myler was not the only Fleet Street journalist in search of a good story. Most of them were convinced that if the Cubans were having second thoughts about us, then the Libyans must have been planning a take-over. The fact that the Colonel himself was to attend the festivities had whetted their appetite.
With hindsight, it all appears so amusing and even infantile. A group of desperate journalists trying to latch on to pieces of inaccurate and completely misleading information, making sure they believed their own editors’ lies and innuendoes. The two or three Maltese journalists among them, of differing ideological leanings, fought gamely to convince them that while there was, at that moment in time, a certain division among the Maltese as to what the event could lead them to, there certainly were no fears of Malta ever becoming a communist hotspot in the Mediterranean. They preferred to believe the contents of the diplomatic pouches reaching Whitehall from the High Commission in Floriana.
Like the rest of them, Colin Myler had an agenda to work on and he stuck to it as I arranged meetings for him with the main characters on the national stage at the time. It was the beginning of a professional relationship that verged on a kind of friendship that had us meeting and even working together on Malta-related stories for papers we represented, he as an increasingly influential top-desk reporter, me as an eager stringer.
Since the announcement of the NOTW death sentence, many have been at pains trying to explain the whole issue and Myler’s part in it. According to one long-serving industry executive, Colin Myler is “pretty ruthless, pretty hard – a traditional, old-fashioned newspaper guy, and to be fair to him, he wouldn’t do the sort of stuff that was going on at his paper. He wasn’t from the Andy Coulson (ex-NOTW editor and ex-media chief to Prime Minister David Cameron) chance-taking school of journalism.” It is a description I would easily accept as it is in line with my own view of Colin Myler as I watched him grow and advance in print journalism since those heady days of the 70s and 80s.
Myler in fact made his name as a reporter in his native Liverpool and quickly rose to become an executive, first in local papers and then at national titles. A Catholic, he argued the NOTW could be a force for good, despite what has since emerged about the tactics used by some of its reporters in the years before his arrival.
Like most weathered journalists, however, it cannot be said he has remained untainted. It was Myler who told the Commons’ culture, media and sport select committee in 2009 that he had taken charge of an internal investigation that had trawled through emails and found hacking was restricted to one “rogue reporter”. We now know there were actually several rogues.
It was also Myler who, along with the NOTW legal manager, persuaded James Murdoch in 2008 to authorise a hefty payment to Gordon Taylor, a victim of hacking. But in true capitalist style, Murdoch now claims he did not know exactly what that payment was for as it became increasingly clear Myler was being lined up as a possible fall guy by the company, someone it could blame for concealing its true purpose.
I was happy when Colin took over the editorship of the Sunday Mirror, only to watch him resign in April 2001 when an interview the paper ran with the father of a man allegedly beaten up by Leeds United footballers Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate caused their trial to collapse and the paper subsequently fined. He then went to New York as editor of Murdoch’s Post where he fought, and won, a circulation battle with the city’s Daily News.
In addition to working under the long shadow cast by phone-hacking allegations, Myler’s NOTW tenure included the 2008 privacy case brought by Max Mosley who won substantial damages after the paper falsely accused him of taking part in a “sick Nazi orgy”.
Watching him walk solemnly out of the building at the head of a large group of newly-sacked journalists last week, caused a disturbance in my memory. Here was this man with a reputation, an old friend just about to reach pensionable age, making a dignified exit, at least for the time being. I would not be surprised if he pops up somewhere else once again.
Sadly, though, his 168-year-old paper won’t.