That Colin Myler phone hacking interview – with added dry cleaner
COLIN Myler is in the news. The last editor of the News of the World is now woking in New York as the editor of the New Daily News. ITN caught up with him in the Big Apple. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s found that the Myler misled MPs during their investigation into phone hacking. He was not alone. The MPs say Les Hinton, the former News International chairman, and Tom Crone, the paper’s former legal manager, also misled them.
The MPs said the buck should stop with Rebekah Brooks for the “grotesque” behaviour in hacking into missing teenager Milly Dowler’s phone. The MPs on the Culture Committee also ruled – and get this – that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run a major international company. That would be his own multi-billion dollar company, the one Rupert Murdoch created and grew. So say the MPs who have never run anything.
There are clearly a few worthy news people to interview. But it’s far easier to get to Myler, given that he remains a news man in the world’s most bustling city – and Brooks is behind a big wall and surrogate’s bump in Oxfordshire.
Myler did issue a statement:
“While I respect the work that the Select Committee has carried out, I stand by the evidence that I gave the committee. I have always sought to be accurate and consistent in what I have said to the committee. The conclusions of the committee have, perhaps inevitably, been affected by the fragmented picture which has emerged from the various witnesses over successive appearances and by the constraints within which the committee had to conduct its procedure. These issues remain the subject of a police investigation and the Leveson judicial inquiry and I have every confidence that they will establish the truth in the fullness of time.”
Sure. But ITN thought Myler needed door steeping . Enough of the legal niceties and carefully constructed statements. Let’s hear a few words from the horse’s mouth. Surely the man who as editor of the Sunday Mirror published covert photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, exercising in a Kensington gym understands that the punters demand newsworthy moments from people in the news.
There can be no secrets. When working as the News of the World – Myler also worked for the Mirror and the Mail; two newspapers that have used doorstepping techniques to get stories – Colin Myler sanctioned the decision to “encourage private investigator Derek Webb to become a member of the National Union of Journalists”. As we reported:
Derek Webb, a former police detective, says he was paid to follow high-profile people and their families, like Prince William, former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe’s parents, Boris Johnson, Angelina Jolie, Simon Cowell, Sir Paul McCartney, Charles Kennedy, David Miliband, Elle MacPherson, Heather Mills and Gary Lineker.
No.
Posted: 1st, May 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
