And Here You Thought Rupert Murdoch Was a Nice Guy at Heart: Hack Attack (Nick Davies)

Hack Attack: The Inside Story of how the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch - Nick Davies

About half a decade ago a reporter for one of the leading British Newspapers, The Guardian, thought he detected a discrepancy in the coverage of a minor crime. A London PI and a journalist for a London tabloid had been convicted for hacking the voicemails of the Royal family. Most Brits nodded sagely and then went on about the business of devouring football results and slobbering over page 3 girls (not unlike we Yanks after all, are they?) Not Nick Davies, though: Davies, the aforementioned Guardian reporter, smelled a rat. Thus began the five-year odyssey in which a handful of journalists and legal eagles took on the empire of one of the world’s most powerful men and fought it to a standstill.

For a few days.

Rupert Murdoch [source: David
Shankbone/wikimedia commons]

Davies lays out the history, often in excruciating detail, in his 2014 memoir Hack Attack: The Inside Story of how the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch. Davies and his editor, Alan Rusbridger, began the laborious process of uncovering the seamy underbelly of Murdoch’s print empire in Britain with a single story in 2009. By the end, they had stripped the covers off not just the invasion of the privacy of just about anyone with any celebrity but also bribery of law enforcement. All this criminality was based on a single desire: for Murdoch’s journalism empire to become so powerful that they could dictate policy to the British government. They damned near succeeded.

Through 400-plus pages, Davies logs the small details of the crimes at News of the World, Murdoch’s flagship tabloid, and the involvement of officials of the company from James Murdoch to Rebekah Brooks. Over a period of three years, Davies and The Guardian worried at every piece of evidence, each inconsistency, every slip of the tongue by a participant. Names are named, including officials of the London Metropolitan Police and at Scotland Yard; likewise a series of residents of 10 Downing Street.

Davies draws his information from sources named and unnamed, from court records, and from the published reports of the Levenson Commission, which ultimately investigated the whole sordid affair. He also lays out a history of the Murdoch empire in Great Britain, complete with their early support of Margaret Thatcher and hints of payback from her government.

Davies’ descriptions of the antics of News of the World and another Murdoch paper, The Sun, reveal that the world of British newspaper journalism is vastly different from that in the States. The large newspapers in Britain have nationwide circulation, which gives them a powerful voice in the political arena. History reveals that newspaper publishers have never been shy about shading the truth (or telling outright lies) when it comes to British politics; not unlike the practices of Murdoch’s flagship property in the USA, Fox News. Davies is not afraid to describe the tactics of the tabloids, including what he calls ”monstering” – a process of character assassination employed to get rid of people the publisher finds inconvenient. Politicians who incurred the wrath of the wrong publisher frequently found their private lives (real or imagined) splashed across the front pages.

As a Yank, I sometimes wished that the publisher had included a British-American dictionary. Davies does include a list of people named (or nicknamed) within the text, a sort of dramatis personae, and (for some reason) an appendix of private investigators involved in the chicanery. US readers – who should be interested if only to get a feeling for the kind of person the owner of Fox News actually is – may be confused at some of the slang. Hundreds of times, beginning on page 6, Davies uses the terms “blag” and “blagging” where we on this side of the pond might use “con.” That minor quibble certainly shouldn’t stand in the way of reading the novel, but keep an internet connection handy… Overall, Hack Attack contains a wealth of information and insight into a thoroughly nasty business. Unfortunately, I find it ill-organized and often repetitive – I think the story could have been told more cleanly; which surprises me given Davies’ background as a print journalist.

Nonetheless, one reads Davies’ book with a sense of hope, hope that the public revelations of wrongdoing and the ensuing legal proceedings could somehow remove the taint from the fourth estate. One will, sadly, realize that no such cleansing occurred. We on this shore should also be well aware that the Murdoch agenda remains unchanged, even if their methodology was briefly challenged.