News Corp and the hackers: a scandal in two parts

In Inside Story, Rodney Tiffen looks at what the phone-hacking scandal has revealed so far about media, politics and the police – and what’s likely to happen next • ON 4 JULY this year the Guardian reported that a private investigator working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had hacked into the phone of missing teenager Milly Dowler in 2002. After her message bank had filled up, he had deleted some messages to make more room, giving her parents and friends and the police false hope that she was still alive. The Guardian had published other exposés based on information about the Murdoch paper’s phone hacking over the previous two years, but the reporter who had been following the story, Nick Davies, told the editor that this was the strongest article so far. Yet no one anticipated that it would provoke such a dramatic reaction…Read the full article Photo: Jedd Goble/ Flick