The tradition that Washington Post CEO Will Lewis and approaching leading director Robert Winnett have inherited from London’s Fleet Street has been that the biggest newspapers have been residing there for years. Carl Court/Getty Images
Carl Court/Getty Images
Will Lewis, the new publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, has assembled at least five past close associates in the paper’s top ranks in just five short months. The most recent is Robert Winnett, who worked with Lewis at two documents in the U. K. and is to begin as the best writer over the Post‘s main office after the November elections.
Winnett serves as the British newspaper’s assistant director for the Telegraph Media Group.
Where Lewis and Winnett made their mark and what is accepted in the British media advertising, there is a huge gap between what is acceptable in the fiercely competitive walls of European news. In some cases, their alleged do did raise red flags at key U. S. stores, including The Washington Post.
Among the shows: a six-figure sum for a big shovel, hiring a junior reporter for a federal job to eavesdrop on classified documents, and relying on a private investigator who allegedly abused subterfuge to eavesdrop on sensitive information from their servers and telephones. Eventually, the investigator was detained.
On Saturday night, The New York Times disclosed a particular instance in which a former writer implicated both Lewis and Winnett in reporting that he believed relied on records that were fraudulently obtained by a private investigator.
Lewis did not respond to NPR’s extensive and frequent requests for comment on this post. Additionally, Winnett did not respond to particular inquiries that were made through the Telegraph Media Group straight to him.
The stakes are high. Post journalists are pressed to what ideals Lewis and Winnett may bring to the report, which is renowned for its protection of the Watergate scandals from the Nixon age and for holding the most powerful people in American history accountable for generations to come.
Former internet producer and director of digital information for the British daily The Guardian, Emily Bell, says that” U.K. media frequently operates at a faster pace and plays more loosely around the corners.”
A new publisher’s ire
For the new Post publisher, Lewis ‘ claims in court that he sought to cover up a large-scale phone hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers are turning out to be a turning point have gained momentum.
Lewis attempted to fend off unwelcome scrutiny from Post journalists and NPR on at least four occasions since taking the position of postman last fall.
In December, before he started the job, Lewis intensely pressured me not to report on the accusations, which arose in British suits against Murdoch’s newspapers in the U. K. He also repeatedly offered me an exclusive interview on his business plans for the Post if I dropped the story. I did n’t. The initial NPR article provided the first comprehensive reports on fresh allegations involving Prince Harry and others.
Immediately after that article ran, Lewis told then- Executive Editor Sally Buzbee it was not newsworthy and that her teams should not follow it, according to a person with contemporaneous knowledge. That intervention is the first to be reported here. The Post did not publish a report.
Lewis has denied the hacking coverup claims and is not a defendant in the lawsuits. He is not even facing a criminal charge. Lewis has stated that he made sure Murdoch’s papers’ hackers received compensation.
As previously reported, on separate occasions in March and May, Lewis angrily pressured Buzbee to ignore the story as further developments unfolded in court.
For instance, in May, a British judge granted plaintiffs the opportunity to thoroughly investigate Lewis ‘ role in their lawsuits against the Murdoch newspapers. Lewis informed her that it constituted a mistake in judgment, allowing Post reporters to pursue it. Her abrupt departure was announced a few weeks after the Post published an extensive piece on the allegations involving Lewis.
Some of her former coworkers say they believe her decision to report on the allegations against him was influenced by her rejection of a diminished role as a result of a restructuring by Lewis, though Buzbee’s ouster largely stemmed from her rejection of a diminished role.
Although he did not dispute what he said to me, Lewis denied pressuring Buzbee. Instead, he told Post reporters that I am” an activist, not a journalist”.
Every Post employee is expected to uphold the highest ethical standards set forth in a statement from a Post spokesperson.
Based on interviews with 10 current and former Post journalists, five former British journalists, and a review of court documents and other public records and accounts, this article is based.
They asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the moment.
A journalistic spy in the most powerful positions
Will Lewis and Rob Winnett co-founded The Sunday Times, a publication owned by the Murdoch empire, 20 years ago. Lewis was the business editor and Winnett wrote on business and politics.
The New York Times made two disclosures on Saturday evening, one of which involved a former reporter for The Sunday Times claiming Lewis commissioned articles based on records that were allegedly obtained defraudulently. In one of those stories, Winnett was the author’s byline. ( News UK, Murdoch’s British publishing arm, declined to comment to NPR. )
According to the book Flat Earth News by the renowned British investigative reporter Nick Davies, Winnett handled a junior reporter working under unusual circumstances for The Sunday Times a year later.
The reporter, Claire Newell, was hired by the U.K. government Cabinet Office, which is in direct service to the prime minister. She then moved to a temporary secretarial service.
The Sunday Times subsequently broke a series of often staggering stories based on the confidential documents Newell provided. Then, Tony Blair, the prime minister, demanded an investigation. Newell was questioned and detained by Scotland Yard.
As Davies noted,” She was feeding back a succession of officially secret documents, any one of which could have landed her in jail if the government had chosen to prosecute Murdoch’s paper”.
No one involved in the investigation was prosecuted by the authorities. ( Newell, who is now The Telegraph‘s investigative editor under Winnett, did not respond to requests for comment. )
An arrest of a newspaper’s private eye
Lewis was appointed to lead The Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper that was closely associated with the Tory party there, in 2006. Winnett, who the rival Independent called “rat boy” for his scoop-sniffing cunning, was hired as the youngest editor in its history and was hired by him.
Winnett brought Lewis an exclusive detailing the lavish expenses charged to taxpayers by British members of Parliament from all three major parties. The front-page stories led to changes and resignations. Both men received awards.
Winnett’s exclusive came with a price tag: Lewis had to approve a 110, 000- pound payment to acquire a stolen government database yielding the evidence, another editor revealed.
Leading U.S. news organizations like The New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post itself would have to follow ethics codes for that.
Prior to the publication of Blair’s memoir, Newell hired a private investigator named John Ford to obtain a copy of the book. Ford was the same investigator named in the New York Times piece.
In order to pursue the story, police detained and interrogated Ford over his actions involving obtaining people’s personal information and obtaining their personal information. Later, Ford wrote and claimed that he had been engaging in illegal behavior on behalf of The Sunday Times since the middle of the 1990s, including “phone interceptions and bank interceptions.” The newspaper has previously said it did not hack into any phones but that misrepresentation to acquire documents is not always illegal in the U. K.
A” clean-up campaigner” is accused of being a swindler.
As News International General Manager Will Lewis and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch ( R ) leave their London headquarters on July 15, 2011, in a carriage, they ride together. Lewis is now the publisher of The Washington Post. / Getty Images/Peter Macdiarmid
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
By 2010, Lewis had returned to Murdoch’s fold. Under Rebekah Brooks, a former tabloid newspaper turned chief executive, he became general manager of the British newspaper arm.
Murdoch and his son James joined a small corporate task force to assist the parent company in handling the mess as allegations of illegality at their tabloids grew.
The allegations included hacking into voicemails and emails, and the illegal procurement of financial and medical records as the tabloids pursued stories about members of the royal family, sports stars, Hollywood actors, singers, politicians and other celebrities. Following Davies ‘ revelation that war dead and crime victims included the targets, including a murdered 13-year-old girl, were outraged.
For using similar tactics, other newspapers received criticism. But the scale at the Murdoch press was vast and unrivaled. According to estimates, it has paid the victims of these illegal actions$ 1.5 billion.
Lewis was frequently referred to as the “point person” working to a strict code of conduct. The Guardian went so far as to call him Murdoch’s” clean- up campaigner”.
Lewis is now accused in court of aiding in the creation of a cover-up that led to the destruction of tens of millions of emails, the creation of Rebekah Brooks ‘ computers, and the creation of the claim that former prime minister Gordon Brown was attempting to eavesdrop on information from her devices. Brown is now calling for a formal investigation from the police.
Lewis has denied impropriety but will not address specifics.
Even though Winnett was already employed by the rival Telegraph at the time, Ford later claimed that Winnett had assisted Lewis in defending Lewis from legal repercussions from his actions for The Sunday Times in 2010. Ford claimed that he believed that they were using him as a buffer to protect editors.
” Robert Winnett… was intimately involved with the arrangement of my legal defence”, Ford wrote years later in Byline Investigates. Ford claimed that Winnett informed him that there had been “high-level negotiations” with the police to get him off:” Despite having been poached by The Telegraph while I was on bail, he remained in close contact with his friend Will Lewis.”
Ford claimed that he only received a formal caution from the police. Through an associate, Ford affirmed this account to NPR but did not comment further. He claimed to have targeted Prime Ministers Blair and Brown for The Sunday Times and that he had targeted 15 to 20 Labour Cabinet ministers.  ,
Subterfuge to sideline a critic
Former Business Minister Vince Cable is one of the people currently suing News UK. The Murdochs ‘$ 15 billion bid to acquire the British satellite company Sky, which they already controlled, was being reviewed by Cable in 2010.
Conservative PM David Cameron, who had been backed by the Murdochs, led the government, Cable belonged to the minority partner Liberal Democrats.
In a private meeting, Cable claimed to be “declaring war” on Murdoch and that two young women he thought were his constituents.
The two women had taped the encounter because they were working as undercover reporters for The Telegraph. While it mined the video for other embarrassing headlines, the paper left out any mention of the Murdochs or the Sky takeover deal, which the Telegraph’s owners opposed.
Instead, the BBC made the video public, causing a furore that hurt Cable. A second minister, who was James Murdoch’s friend, was given the task of rewriting the agreement.
The BBC reporter who broke the story, Rob Peston, is a friend of Lewis. Winnert was the anchor reporter for the Telegraph‘s coverage of Cable. And Lewis immediately began employing two Telegraph IT staffers from News UK.
An investigative report by Kroll International in 2011, disclosed by Reuters, concluded that Lewis had likely been central to “orchestrating” the leak to the BBC, along with one of the tech staffers. The company claimed it was unable to be completely certain.
Lewis was the lead counsel for a formal judicial inquiry into press abuses in 2012 when he inquired whether he had contributed to the leak of Cable’s video. Lewis declined to answer, citing journalists ‘ obligation to protect their sources, though Lewis would have been the source, not the reporter. ( Peston has not made any comments. )
Lewis joined News Corp. as an executive in 2012. He was named in 2014 to be publisher of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and chief executive of Dow Jones, which he led until 2020.
relying on old friends to make future plans
Since 2020, The Post lost about half of its digital audience and$ 77 million in the previous year. Lewis helped put Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal on a course to strong digital subscriptions. Jeff Bezos, owner, named Lewis last year to rekindle the paper’s momentum.
Lewis has remained close to his former coworkers from Murdoch days on both sides of the Atlantic since taking over.
At the Journal, Lewis elevated veteran editor Matt Murray to become editor in chief. Lewis tapped him once more at the Post. Till November, Murray will lead the main newsroom of the Post, which will then be tasked with creating fresh content and revenue streams.
The chief growth officer, Karl Wells, worked for Lewis at the Journal and at Murdoch’s British tabloid, The Sun. Elsa Makouezi, the Post CEO’s director of communications, and Eleanor Breen, his chief of staff, collaborated with him at the Journal and his startup. Both of them are based in London.
Emily Bell says Lewis may be finding it hard to adapt to American values, despite his time at The Wall Street Journal— noting his patron there, Murdoch, was born in Australia and trained in Britain.
According to Bell, newspapers are largely national in scope and compete fiercely for readers, advertisers, and influence in the United Kingdom. One of Murdoch’s most combative traits is.
” In Britain, there are much more incestuous relationships, with much greater alignment of power rather than a genuine interest in actually holding power to account”, Bell says. And I believe that The Washington Post will see a lot of damage from that.
