Professionally Speaking » Book Review: Hack Attack, by Nick Davies

Hack Attack, Nick Davies’s exhaustively researched exposé – subtitled “How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch” – details how the press baron and key members of his staff pulled the levers of power in British politics and business during the six years from 2008 to 2014. While denying and lying, they slipped in and out the side-door of Number 10 for drinks with the prime minister, rubbing shoulders with the power elite who lived in fear of the ability of mass circulation newspapers to influence elections and destroy lives.

A sprawling cast of characters fill the pages of Hack Attack: the bullying editors and hapless reporters of the Fleet Street tabloid newspapers; members of the Queen’s household in Buckingham Palace; prime ministers and members of the government in Whitehall and Downing Street; petty criminals and senior policemen; wide boys and blagging operatives; movers and shakers, celebrities and philanderers; and behind it all the spectral presence of one of the world’s most powerful men – media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Davies is the reporter on the left-of-center Guardian newspaper who ran the first stories about the practice of phone hacking. His well-written report reads like a thriller. It is a compulsive page-turner. His bravery in pursuit of the truth is quite startling. One suspects that in any other country than Britain he would have been “disappeared” for dishing the dirt as he has. The scope of the cover-up he exposes makes Woodward and Bernstein, in an earlier era, seem bush league. They had Deep Throat. He has anonymous sources he code-names “Sapphire”, “Ovid” and “Jingle”. They had a cover-up about one crime, the Watergate break-in. He has a decade of systematic illegal activity by reporters and editors who illegally “hacked” the mobile phone voicemails of anyone and everyone who could provide source material for their stories. They hacked the Royal Family, they hacked members of the British Cabinet, sports stars and everyday citizens. Most notoriously, they hacked the cell phone of a murdered teenage schoolgirl. The private messages they listened to were material for news reports, most often in the now defunct News of The World, a Murdoch paper closed as a direct result of Davies’s investigative journalism. Davies uncovers the secrets and lies and reveals how the police in Scotland Yard kept a lid on it for years.

Hack Attack is a must-read for anyone who lives in the UK and wants to hear how they were lied to by the establishment, or, as in my own case, resides in the USA and wonders about the corporate morality of Murdoch’s henchmen on the Wall Street Journal and those who deliver “fair and balanced” reporting on Fox News.

Book Review: Hack Attack, by Nick Davies

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