Kelvin McKenzie V Nick Davies: Sun’s Hillsborough Hypocrite Slams Guardian’s Milly Dowler Error
FORMER Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie is upset that The Guardian’s Nick Davies might not have been right when he stated that the News Of The World had deleted messages from Milly Dowler’s phone – the one it hacked.
MacKenzie write in The Spectator:
Welcome to the world of journalism, Nick Davies. So the cops in Surrey told you the story was true — or so you claim. The cops at the Yard told you it was true — or so you claim. Every aching bone in your reporter’s anti-Murdoch body told you it was true. But there was a problem — as we all now know today. The Milly Dowler story that led The Guardian on that fateful day back in July was untrue: there is no evidence to show that the News of the World deleted Milly’s voicemails.
Biased reporting! Is that what McKenzie is accusing Davies of?
This is the same Kelvin MacKenzie who when editor of the Sun – the NoTW’s sister organ – told us that Liverpool fans had robbed and urinated on the dead at Hillsborough. His source for that lie was the lying police.
MacKenzie wants Davies busted:
So what price has Nick Davies paid since he tried to slip his deliberately unintelligible apology into Page 10 of The Guardian on Saturday? None at all. Not suspended. Not sacked. What price has Alan Rusbridger, the paper’s ho-hum £500,000-a-year Editor paid? None at all. Not suspended. Not sacked. Not a peep out of the management. You might think they’d call an emergency Board meeting, and sling him out for a mistake of this magnitude.
Rusbridger stands by his writer. Just as Murdoch stood by McKenzie, who was not dismissed. The Hillsborough disaster occurred on 15 April 1989. McKenzie stayed on as the Sun’s editor until 1994. Although McKenzie has expressed some regret over the story but he blames journalists in Liverpool for feeding it to the Sun. As he told the BBC:
“If I could revisit Hillsborough, certainly I’d do it in a different way. I’d do it in the way that the other newspapers did. They basically ran the story and said big fury over… And I wish I’d done that.”
McKenzie goes on:
There are other victims of this reporting scandal. Rupert Murdoch is one of them. Will the Guardian give ‘due prominence’ — one of their favourite phrases when attacking tabloid mistakes — to an apology to Rupert Murdoch? Perhaps they might clear Page One. After all, Rupert was forced to make a personal apology to the Dowlers — both in private and in front of the TV cameras — for an offence which, it now transpires, his paper did not commit.
I happen to know that Rupert was a reduced man because of Dowler. At 81 he still has remarkable energy but the whole affair had exhausted him, and continues to exhaust.
Overlooking the fact that the NoTW did hack Dowler’s phone, just as the paper hacked the phones of 7/7 bomb victims, might the empathetic McKenzie feel a pang of outrage for the “reduced” families of the 96 people who died at a football match and then had the dead loved one’s names besmirched with blatant police-fed lies reported as fact in the Sun?
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This picture may only be used within the context of the Hillsborough court case. An undated file showing the tunnel at the Leppings Lane end of Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough ground, shown to the jury at Leeds Crown Court. * ...at a private prosecution brought by the Hillsborough Family Support Group. Match commander Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield and Superintendent Bernard Murray deny the manslaughter of two of the victims of the disaster at the FA Cup Semi-Final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Sheffield Wednesday's ground on April 15, 1989.
Posted: 15th, December 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
