Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre 'never approved hacking'

[dipsydoodle]

Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre has told a parliamentary committee he had never "countenanced" phone hacking or blagging at his newspaper.

He told the committee both acts were clearly "criminal".

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In 2006 the Information Commissioner named the Daily Mail among newspapers which had dealt with a firm of private investigators involved in the illegal trade of personal information.

The report, What Price Privacy Now?, said the Mail had used the firm the most - with 952 transactions by 58 journalists.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14192673

Might help explain why The Mail is so boring. I trust the The Mirror won't make the same claim - instances are quoted against them in a Guardian article concerning the guy who was acquitted in the axe murder case : both examples involved the Royal Family.

[fedsron2us]

1. It would be interesting to know which PIs the Mail used

and if any had criminal records. I think there might be one or two Lib Dem members of the coalition who would like to know how Dacre & Co have sourced some of their hostile attacks on them. Any public enquiry into the whole hacking scandal certainly needs to be framed beyond just NI.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. "the biggest payers – you’d have thought it would be the NoW, but actually it was the Daily Mail"

So who are the other culprits when it comes to illegal activity – could the Daily Mail be next?

The taped conversations between Paul McMullan and Hugh Grant that lifted the News of the World scandal also contained a throwaway comment on phone hacking and illegal data gathering.

In his McMullan’s own words: “When I went freelance in 2004 the biggest payers – you’d have thought it would be the NoW, but actually it was the Daily Mail…”

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/07/19/shouldnt-the-police-also-investigate-the-daily-mail-over-hackgate/

Maybe I was wrong to say earlier that the Mail has covered things up better.

[LeftishBrit]

3. Oh, if only the Daily Hate-Mail goes down too!

Of course, the RW press and its owners have done a lot to mess up the country already. If not for them, Thatcher *might* have got elected in 1979, but would probably have lost after one term. The unions would not have been crushed to the same extent. Blair would never have been able to take his party so far to the right with so little opposition. We might not have gone into Iraq. Privatization would not have reached the point it did, even before this government. And this government would probably not be in office.

Etc.

Ugh.

[dipsydoodle]

5. I think they were all using the same private eyes

.

[fedsron2us]

6. I think the issue that has not fully come out yet

is that the mobile phone hacking by journalists and private investigators may only be the tip of a very big iceberg. Far more corrosive appears to have been the trade in private data extracted by corrupt police officers and others from government and corporate IT systems. In particular it appears that sensitive personal data which the public have been forced to supply the state has simply been for sale to the highest bidder.

[dipsydoodle]

7. The overall tragedy here

is that the outcome of all this is likely to be less freedom of the press and equally bad - less newspapers sold. Regardless of what , if anything , now happens with other News International papers there's no saying that what replaces them won't be worse.

Yes - the hacking by journalists and private investigators may well only be the tip of a very big iceberg.

[fedsron2us]

4. Dacre is hardly likely to be 'countenancing' hacking by his papers

as that would be tantamount to admitting a breach of Section 79 of RIPA. The rich irony of this horrid piece of legislation being used on people like Murdoch and Dacre is one of the more exquisite features of this scandal.

[dipsydoodle]

8. More widening / wider still ?

According to BBC Radio 4's The Report, the files from Operation Motorman, which was run by the Information Commissioner's Office in 2003, were requested three months ago.

They contain 4,000 requests from 300 journalists and 31 publications for confidential information from a private investigator, which in many cases had been obtained illegally.

The investigation found the Daily Mail had made the most requests, followed by the Sunday People and the Daily Mirror.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14222771