According to a former colleague, the published accounts of a private investigator and an evaluation of paper archives, the editor and receiving editor of The Washington Post allegedly used fraudulently obtained cellphone and business records to write in newspaper articles as journalists in London.
Will Lewis, The Post’s publication, assigned one of the content in 2004 as firm director of The Sunday Times. Another was written by Robert Winnett, whom Mr. Lewis just announced as The Post’s following executive director.
A long-running American newspapers scandal centers on deception, hacking, and fraud, which toppled a big tabloid in 2010 and sparked years of lawsuits from celebrities who claimed reporters hacked into their personal records and voicemail messages without permission.
Mr. Lewis, who works for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has claimed that his only role in the discussion was preventing dangerous conduct after the truth.
However, a former Sunday Times columnist claimed on Friday that Mr. Lewis had privately assigned him to write an article in 2004 using mobile information that the writer believed had been obtained through phishing.
A British businessman who was the area of the article officially claimed after that story broke that his information had been stolen. The writer, Peter Koenig, described Mr. Lewis as a talented writer — one of the best he had worked with. But as time went on, he said Mr. Lewis changed.
” His motivation outran his morals”, Mr. Koenig said.
The Sunday Times ‘ private investigator who worked for The Sunday Times afterwards admitted using deception to obtain the materials in a subsequent article in 2002 that featured Mr. Winnett’s headline.
Both articles were written during a time when the paper acknowledged paying the private investigator blatantly to receive information. That would go against the ethics standards set by The Post and the majority of British media outlets. The Sunday Times has frequently stated that it has never paid for illegal behavior.
A New York Times assessment of Mr. Lewis’s job even raised new questions about his determination in 2009, as editor of The Daily Telegraph in Britain, to give more than 100, 000 weight for information from a source. In the majority of American newspapers, paying for information is forbidden.
In a conference with Post reporters in November, Mr. Lewis defended the payment, claiming that the funds had been put into an escrow account to safeguard a cause. However, the broker who brokered the bargain claimed in a new interview that resources had personally given the money and that there had not been an escrow account.
According to a Washington Post spokesperson, Mr. Lewis declined to respond to a list of questions. William is very clear about the lines that should not be crossed, according to a statement made in the papers, and his record history attests this. This month, Mr. Lewis spoke with Post journalists about his commitment to creating a climate that will foster excellent news and that he will never interfere with his role as publisher.
Mr. Winnett did not respond to inquiries sent via WhatsApp or email or answer phone calls. The Post referred inquiries to his representative, who did not respond.
Mr. Lewis praised Mr. Winnett this month in a meeting with Post editors. ” He’s a brilliant investigative journalist”, Mr. Lewis said. And he will give our organization an even greater degree of analytical rigor.
One of the most significant news organizations in the country, which has a long history of imposing checks on institutions and holding the powerful accountable, may be led by Mr. Lewis and Mr. Winnett up. Editors inside and outside The Post have questioned whether the new officials share their moral principles in the run-up to an election.
Mr. Lewis was editor of The Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2020. The report won Pulitzer Prizes, including for exposing Donald J. Trump’s hush-money payments before the 2016 election, and he maintained its reputation for great journalistic standards during his career.
Tumult at The Post, nevertheless, has brought new attention to Mr. Lewis’s earlier career, especially at The Sunday Times.
Up until the early 2000s, it is well documented that reporters at that respectable press newspaper relied on allegedly obtained materials for articles.
But the controversy that followed that time generally centered on news reporters, so Mr. Lewis and Mr. Winnett remained on the edge of the disagreement.
The Sunday Times uses obscene language.
In 2002, Mr. Winnett landed a scoop.
Mercedes was re-releasing the Maybach, a 1930s-style German luxury vehicle that The Sunday Times called” the Nazis ‘ favorite limousine.” Several famous British figures were lining up to place orders. A member of the House of Lords, a significant political donor, and a leader of the insurance sector were all on Mr. Winnett’s list.
The article stated that the people in question were “understood to have placed orders,” rather than how Mr. Winnett had obtained the names.
A private investigator named John Ford made a long career with The Sunday Times a public figure many years later. He claimed to have scoured through people’s garbage and had secretly obtained access to the bank, phone, and company records of British politicians and other figures of the public.
In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Mr. Ford spoke regretfully about his work for a June 2002 article revealing the Maybach buyers. Mr. Winnett’s article is the only one that fits that description. However, he has not been publicly linked because the original article is not readily available online.
The New York Times reviewed the June 9, 2002, article in Factiva, a subscription news database.
Mr. Ford claimed in the Guardian interview that he had called the Mercedes dealer and that he was a manufacturer of German key fobs who needed to see a list of customers to check the spelling of their names. After the article ran, the man on the other end of the line, he claimed, was fired.
Mr. Ford, who has stopped giving news interviews, declined to comment.
Mr. Lewis became business editor in 2002, a few months after the Maybach article ran, and became Mr. Winnett’s boss.
In 2004, Mr. Lewis pulled another business reporter aside after the regular Tuesday editorial meeting and gave him an assignment, according to the reporter, Mr. Koenig.
Mr. Lewis told him to look into conversations between two businessmen involved in the potential sale of a chain of stores, Mr. Koenig said in an interview with The New York Times. Mr. Koenig said he was given copies of phone records — he believes by Mr. Lewis himself.
” My understanding at the time was that they had been hacked”, Mr. Koenig said.
According to Mr. Koenig, he persuaded one of the businessmen, Stuart Rose, who was then the retailer’s chief executive and is now a member of the House of Lords, to give him an interview to explain the calls.
The June 2004 article by Mr. Koenig contains down- to- the minute details of Mr. Rose’s phone calls. The source of the information was not disclosed in the article.
Mr. Koenig said he was almost certain that Mr. Lewis edited the article himself. He claimed that any other senior editor who had been reviewing business articles would have been very unusual.
The following day, Mr. Lewis himself wrote a first-person article about Mr. Rose and his possible involvement with Marks & Spencer. Mr. Lewis makes reference to the phone calls in the article and describes personally receiving the tip to investigate the deal. ” I am told Rose started Friday, May 7, with a call to his public relations adviser”, Mr. Lewis wrote.
And he mentions the precise timing of another phone call in a separate article, which Mr. Lewis also wrote and published that day.
Days later, Marks &, Spencer announced that Mr. Rose’s phone records had been hacked.
The’ Dark Arts ‘
The person responsible for the Marks & Spencer case’s phone records has never been made known to the public. Someone allegedly contacted the phone company, posed as Mr. Rose, and sought his records at the time, according to what was widely reported.
Years later, that kind of deception, known as blagging, would become a scandal that engulfed Mr. Murdoch’s British media empire and exposed the tactics reporters at his and other Fleet Street tabloids used to invade the privacy of people they wrote about.
The word “hacking” is often used as a shorthand for a variety of tactics, including blagging, that became known as British journalism’s “dark arts”. Although the methods are generally prohibited, British law makes an exception for blagging when the information is obtained for the public good.
The Guardian and then The New York Times were forced to close the paper after the controversy forced Mr. Murdoch to do so in 2010.
Lawsuits followed, but they focused almost exclusively on the actions of tabloid newspapers. Broadsheets like The Sunday Times remained largely unmoved. Details have since been made public only a few years later.
” All senior editors and most reporters at The Sunday Times knew that I obtained illegal phone billing data and bank account transactions, almost every week, for stories”, Mr. Ford said in a 2018 interview with the British news site Byline Investigates.
In the interview, Mr. Ford said he was paid up to £40, 000 a year, about$ 72, 000 at the time. John Witherow, then the newspaper’s top editor, who was Mr. Lewis’s boss, acknowledged that the paper had hired Mr. Ford as a blagger for various investigations.
” He was employed because of his skills for impersonation. Is that right”? Mr. Witherow was asked during a 2012 government inquiry.
” Sounds like it”, the editor replied.
In a later article, Mr. Ford himself wrote that he had considered Mr. Winnett a close friend. After Mr. Ford was arrested in 2010 on a blagging- related fraud charge, he said in the article, The Sunday Times paid his legal fees. Mr. Winnett “was intimately involved with the arrangement of my legal defense”, Mr. Ford wrote.
Mr. Ford ultimately received a formal warning, but not a conviction, in the case.
Paying for Information
Over the years, Mr. Lewis has said little about the phone hacking scandal. When he has spoken about it, he has come across as someone who worked with the authorities and assisted News Corporation in identifying wrongdoing.
” My role was to put things right, and that is what I did”, he told the BBC in 2020.
As Mr. Lewis continues to work on reorganizing the Post newsroom, the hacking scandal has recently roared back into his life. His executive editor, Sally Buzbee, quit over that plan. Days later, The New York Times learned that Mr. Lewis had reprimanded her for covering up events in a lawsuit naming him in a British phone hacking case. Mr. Lewis has denied pressuring Ms. Buzbee.
Then, an NPR reporter learned that Mr. Lewis had agreed not to write about the phone hacking case and had been offered an exclusive interview.
Additionally, Mr. Lewis has been questioned about another scoop that he and Mr. Winnett delivered in ways that are n’t typically seen in American newsrooms.
In 2009, while Mr. Lewis was editor of The Daily Telegraph, Mr. Winnett revealed that politicians had used government expense accounts to spend lavishly. The article sparked a significant political controversy.
The Telegraph purchased more than$ 20,000 in security consulting records, which the article used to support the article.
In his meeting with Post journalists in November, Mr. Lewis defended his article. He informed the staff that The Telegraph had used the funds to help with source protection. ” I agreed to put money in escrow for legal protections”, Mr. Lewis said, according to The Post.
The security consultant described a much less formal arrangement in an interview with The New York Times this week.
” It was not an escrow account”, said the consultant, John Wick. He said that he had collected the money himself, on behalf of the source. When and how I thought it was needed,” I held it and I released it.”
Mr. Wick said that he had arranged the deal with Mr. Winnett: £10, 000 for a chance to review the information, then another £100, 000 for the exclusive right to it.
Mr. Wick said he did not tell Mr. Winnett or Mr. Lewis what he did with the money.
The first article appeared in the New York Times about the Washington Post’s Publisher and Incoming Editor Are Said to Have Used Stolen Records in Britain.
