Phone hacking: the police vs the press

·40 min·2 clips

"A void of information leads to speculation and speculation helps no one," says Basu on why press officers retreat into silence.

1. The Crime Agents episode "Phone hacking: the police vs the press" follows the scandal from the 2005 royal-aide leak concerns and the 2007 jailing of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire to the Leveson Inquiry launched under David Cameron. 2. Hosts are ex-cop Neil Basu, who oversaw Operations Weeting, Tuleta and Elveden from April 2013 to 2015, and crime journalist Andy Hughes, joined by Sky News crime correspondent Martin Brunt. 3. The core question is whether the post-Leveson rule that officers stop speaking to journalists directly went too far, a divide Hughes says "hasn't fully healed to this day." 4. Basu says the inquiries convicted many people but closed in 2015 without a corporate charge against News International, because investigators could not prove senior figures up to Rupert Murdoch were a "controlling mind" of phone hacking. 5. Basu rejects the line that victims were "d-list celebrities," citing over 4,500 victims, some "pushed to the verge of suicide," and arguing that hacking politicians' phones affects "how a country is governed." 6. Hughes recalls phoning detectives directly as a local reporter and sharing a pint with them, then finding contacts far harder to make as Brunt's producer at Sky News after Leveson, when press offices controlled all messaging. 7. Hughes says the Met under Cressida Dick gave journalists "the least amount of information as possible," and that he has seen clearer communication since Mark Rowley became commissioner and brought in his own communications team. 8. Brunt says Bernard Hogan-Howe told senior officers to record any contact with a journalist, while Basu blames the News of the World editorial team and officers with "wrong relationships" rather than Leveson, calling the Met's early response "complacency with a very large C." 9. Brunt says the Nicola Bulley case in Lancashire showed that briefing the Crime Reporters Association on her alcohol problems would have curbed speculation, and that forces "tended after Leveson to treat journalists as a threat" rather than "an asset." 10. Suits listeners interested in policing, journalism ethics, and media-police relations.

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