In 2011, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire News Corporation faced a serious threat in the UK. Reporters for one of his tabloids were exposed for tapping the phones of celebrities, ordinary citizens, including a murdered child, for information.
Other misconduct soon surfaced, including years of tabloid journalists paying to obtain information from police and government officials.
In an effort to head off the scandal and appease prosecutors in the UK and overseas, News Corp hired former Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis to clean up the mess.
That’s what he did. In his account, he cooperated with authorities, exposed wrongdoing and helped put the operation on a new path. However, some former colleagues and hacking victims have long believed that he helped News Corp cover up the extent of the wrongdoing.
The allegations, nearly 15 years old and unsubstantiated, suddenly became fresh and complicated Mr. Lewis’s new job as publisher of The Washington Post.
Last month, as Lewis prepared to reorganize the Washington Post newsroom, a London judge ruled that victims of phone hacking could bring additional charges in a wide-ranging lawsuit. Although Lewis is not a defendant, the lawsuit alleges that his cleanup was partly a cover-up to protect News Corp. leaders.
Lewis was caught off guard this week when the Washington Post’s executive editor resigned ahead of a shakeup. Later, The New York Times reported that Mr. Lewis told her that reporting on legal developments in the hacking case represented a mistake in judgment.
An NPR reporter later revealed that Lewis offered him a scoop in exchange for not continuing to write about the phone-hacking scandal.
Now, his newsroom overhaul appears to be far more complicated, with reporters questioning Lewis’s vision, his decision to hire two former subordinates as senior editors at The Washington Post and whether he shares their ethics.
The Washington Post said in a statement that he did so: “As a veteran publisher, former editor and editor-in-chief, William knows all too well the lines that should not be crossed, and his track record proves it.
Mr. Lewis joins The Washington Post after serving as publisher of The Wall Street Journal. But he rose to prominence in Britain, a country where journalists pay for scoops, hack into phones and secretly record politicians. The Telegraph’s biggest scoop under Lewis was that his reporters were paid more than $150,000 for confidential information that politicians were reimbursed for.
This tactic is considered unethical in most American newsrooms, including The Washington Post, which changed the course of national journalism with its coverage of Watergate, CIA black sites and other major stories.
Now, reporters there are wondering whether he will bring a new journalistic sensibility and ethics to Washington.
“It seems so,” said Paul Farhi, who covered media for The Washington Post until late last year. “His cronies were hired to basically protect his own back by telling stories that made him look bad. These were unknown things to The Washington Post.
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The phone hacking scandal began with revelations that British tabloid reporters hacked into the phones of celebrities, sports stars and politicians alike to get scoops.
The fallout was dramatic, with a year-long public investigation and charges in criminal and civil courts. News of the World, a tabloid owned by News Corp., collapsed. Damages related to the incident have now exceeded $1 billion, including losses to hundreds of victims.
Prior to 2010, Mr. Lewis had nothing to do with these issues. He is the editor of the Daily Telegraph, a major newspaper outside the Murdoch empire. His tenure was marked by scandals involving politicians using government spending accounts to fund lavish personal expenses. Mr Lewis later admitted that the newspaper paid about £150,000 (equivalent to $190,000 today) for the documents.
He joined News Corp in 2010 and took charge of the phone hacking incident a year later.
“He was actually a good choice,” said Farhi, who covered the scandal at the time. He said Mr Lewis was well respected in the British media. “His morals are not in question.”
Mr Lewis joined a small team called the Governance and Standards Committee, which sought to assign blame for the problems, identify other wrongdoing and demonstrate News Corp. was committed to cleaning up its conduct.
As part of that work, the commission provided police with details about journalists who hacked phones or paid public officials. Some journalists complained that they were being blamed for accepted practices.
Dan Evans, the former News of the World reporter who was indicted, said that “for decades he oversaw the abandonment of journalists who followed standard procedure.” Press reform. “That’s just the way it works.”
Mr. Lewis rarely discusses this period of his career, but when he does, he describes himself as cleaning up the mess.
“My role is to put things right,” he once told the BBC. “That’s what I do.”
“I do everything I can to maintain journalistic integrity,” he recently told The Washington Post.
Allegations of cover-up
In court documents, phone hacking victims said Lewis allowed the deletion of numerous emails that could have implicated senior News Corp. figures in the scandal. Under his leadership, eight filing cabinets filled with potential evidence disappeared, the lawsuit says.
The plaintiff alleges that instead of turning everything over to authorities, he ignored information that might have implicated senior executives. They claimed he was involved in a scheme to fabricate security threats to justify deleting emails.
He denies wrongdoing. The lawsuit is one of many over the years surrounding the hacking incident. Many plaintiffs, including celebrities such as Elton John, have reached settlements. Others, like Prince Harry, continue to stand by their views.
In 2020, Lewis was removed from his role as BBC director-general, arguably the most prestigious media position in the UK, shortly after some of the allegations surfaced.
Mr. Lewis’s work on the governance and standards committee brought him into Mr. Murdoch’s inner circle, and he was promoted in 2014 to leader of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Wall Street Journal.
But his work on the committee angered many staff at News Corp’s British newspapers. Some believe the low-level reporter was sacrificed, as Mr Evans described it, “to keep his boss out of the orange jumpsuit”.
Although Lewis is based in London as CEO of Dow Jones, he is rarely seen at the company’s headquarters, which shares office space with the tabloid The Sun, and where some News of the World staff continued to go after the paper closed. work. Former employees recalled working in a building a few miles away.
The future of postal services
If not for a shakeup at The Washington Post, the phone-hacking scandal might have become old news.
The newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, appointed Lewis as publisher late last year, and he began developing plans to split the paper into three sections: core news, including business and political coverage; opinion; and a new, reader-friendly section focused on It’s service news.
Sally Buzbee, executive editor of The Washington Post, urged him not to make such drastic changes before the November election. Mr. Lewis continued to do so and offered Ms. Buzby a job running a new division of the paper, an apparent demotion.
She resigned suddenly last Sunday.
Soon after, The Times revealed that Mr Lewis had rebuked Ms Buzby over the newspaper’s coverage of the hacking lawsuit. He disagreed with plans to write about the judge’s ruling (which The Washington Post eventually reported) that cleared the way for accusers to bring charges against him.
Later, NPR’s senior media correspondent David Folkenflik revealed that Lewis offered a deal in exchange for retraction of an article.
“In several conversations, Lewis repeatedly and enthusiastically offered to grant me an exclusive interview about the future of The Washington Post if I would drop reporting on the allegations,” Falconflick wrote. He didn’t accept the deal.
Lewis told The Washington Post on Thursday that his conversations with Falconflick were not on the record and took place before he joined the Post. He called Folkenflick “an activist, not a journalist.”
Some politicians and press officials are indeed willing to trade access for favorable coverage. But accepting such a deal would violate most newsroom norms. So an offer like this from the new publisher of The Washington Post was unusual and surprised reporters inside and outside the newsroom.
“He used his position to protect his public image,” Mr. Falhi said. “Reporters smell that and they think someone is hiding something.”
