The publisher and incoming editor of The Washington Post used fraudulently obtained phone calls and telephone numbers in newspaper articles while working as reporters in London, according to public reports by a former colleague, a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives. Company records.
Will Lewis, publisher of The Washington Post, assigned one of his articles to The Sunday Times in 2004 as business editor. The other was written by Robert Winnett, whom Mr. Lewis recently announced as the next executive editor of The Washington Post.
The use of deception, hacking and fraud is at the heart of a long-running scandal in British newspapers that toppled a major tabloid in 2010 and led to years of lawsuits from celebrities who say journalists improperly gained access to their personal files and voicemails information.
Lewis insists his sole purpose in getting involved in the controversy while working at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was to help root out problematic behavior after the fact.
But a former Sunday Times reporter said on Friday that Lewis personally assigned him to write an article in 2004 using phone records, which the reporter understood to have been obtained through hacking.
After the incident came to light, a British businessman who was the subject of the article publicly stated that his records had been stolen. Journalist Peter Koenig described Mr. Lewis as a talented editor and one of the best he had ever worked with. But over time, he said Mr Lewis changed.
“His ambitions exceeded his moral standards,” Mr. Koenig said.
A second article in 2002 bore the byline of Mr Winnett, a private investigator working for the Sunday Times who later publicly admitted to using deception to obtain the material.
Both articles were written during a period when the newspaper acknowledged explicitly paying private investigators to secretly obtain material. This would violate the ethics of The Washington Post and most American news organizations. The Sunday Times has repeatedly said it has never paid anyone to engage in illegal activity.
The New York Times review of Mr Lewis’s career also raises new questions about his decision to pay more than £100,000 to obtain information from sources in 2009 as editor of the Daily Telegraph. Most U.S. newsrooms prohibit payment for information.
In a November meeting with a Washington Post reporter, Lewis defended the payment, saying the money had been placed in an escrow account to protect the source. But the adviser who brokered the deal said in a recent interview that there was no escrow account and that he gave the money to sources himself.
A spokesman for the Washington Post said Lewis declined to answer a series of questions. The newspaper has previously said that “William knows very well the lines that should not be crossed, and his record proves it.” In a series of discussions with Post reporters this week, Mr. Lewis said that as a publisher, His job was to create an environment in which great journalism could flourish, and he would never interfere.
Wynette did not answer calls or respond to questions sent via WhatsApp and email. The Post referred questions to his spokesman, who did not respond.
Mr. Lewis praised Mr. Winnett during a meeting with a Washington Post reporter this month. “He was a brilliant investigative reporter,” Mr. Lewis said. “He will reinstate more rigorous investigations into our organization.”
Together, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Winnett will lead one of the nation’s most important news organizations, which has a long history of conducting independent checks on government and holding those in power accountable. Amid upheaval in newsrooms in the run-up to the election, reporters inside and outside The Washington Post are asking whether the new leaders share their moral foundations.
Mr. Lewis served as publisher of The Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2020. Hush money paid by Trump before the 2016 election.
But the turmoil at the Post brought new scrutiny to Lewis’s early career, particularly at The Sunday Times.
There is ample evidence that reporters at the famous broadsheet relied on fraudulently obtained information to write articles in the early 2000s.
But the ensuing scandal focused largely on tabloid journalists, so Lewis and Wynette remained on the fringes of controversy.
The Sunday Times trick
In 2002, Mr. Winnett got the scoop.
Mercedes has relaunched the Maybach, a German luxury car that was popular in the 1930s and was dubbed “the Nazis’ favorite limousine” by The Sunday Times. Celebrities across the UK queued up to place orders. Mr Winnett has a list that includes a member of the House of Lords, a major political donor and an insurance industry leader.
The article did not say how Winnett obtained the names, saying only that the men “are understood to have placed the orders.”
Many years later, a private investigator named John Ford publicly revealed his long career working for The Sunday Times. He said he went through people’s trash and secretly obtained bank, phone and company records of British politicians and other public figures.
In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Mr Ford ruefully spoke of his role in a June 2002 article exposing Maybach buyers. Mr. Winnett’s article is the only one that fits that description. However, since the original article is not easily found online, it has not been publicly linked to him.
The New York Times commented on the June 9, 2002 article in Factiva, a subscription news repository.
In an interview with the Guardian, Ford said he had called a Mercedes dealer and used a fake accent to claim he was a German key ring manufacturer and that he needed to see a list of buyers to confirm the spelling of their names. He said the person on the other end of the phone was fired after the article was published.
Mr. Ford has stopped speaking to the press and declined to comment.
In 2002, a few months after the Maybach article, Mr. Lewis became business editor and became Mr. Winnett’s boss.
In 2004, Lewis pulled another business reporter aside after a regular Tuesday editorial meeting and gave him an assignment, according to journalist Koenig.
Koenig recalled in an interview with The New York Times that Lewis asked him to investigate a conversation between two businessmen involved in a possible sale of the retail chain. Koenig said he received copies of the phone records — which he believes were provided by Lewis himself.
“My understanding at the time was that they had been hacked,” Mr. Koenig said.
Armed with the records, Mr Koenig said he persuaded one of the businessmen, Stuart Rose – then chief executive of retailer Marks & Spencer and now a member of the House of Lords – to be interviewed and explain reason.
Mr. Koenig’s June 2004 article contains detailed details of Mr. Rose’s phone call. The article did not reveal the source of the information.
Mr. Koenig said he was almost certain Mr. Lewis personally edited the article. He said it would be highly unusual for any other senior editor to review a business article.
Mr Lewis himself wrote a first-person article on the same day about Mr Ross and his role in a possible M&S deal. In it, Mr. Lewis described personally receiving tips to investigate the deal and mentioned phone calls. “I heard that Ross started calling his public relations consultant on Friday, May 7,” Mr. Lewis wrote.
In another article published by Mr Lewis that day, he recorded the exact time of another phone call.
Days later M&S announced Mr Ross’s phone records had been hacked.
“Dark Arts”
The identity of the culprit who obtained M&S phone records has never been revealed. It was widely reported at the time that someone impersonating Mr. Ross contacted the phone company and requested his records.
This type of deception, known as “bragging” in the UK, would become central to the scandal that engulfed Murdoch’s British media empire years later and revealed the ways Murdoch and other Fleet Street tabloid reporters used it to infringe on the stories they reported. privacy policy.
The word “hacking” is often used as shorthand for a variety of tactics, including bragging, which has been called the “dark art” of British journalism. These methods are generally illegal, but UK law makes exceptions where information is obtained in the public interest.
In 2010, the Guardian and The New York Times revealed such practices at the News of the World, sparking controversy that forced Murdoch to close the paper.
Lawsuits ensued, but they focused almost entirely on the tabloid’s conduct. Broadsheets such as The Sunday Times remain largely outside the debate. It would be several years before the details came into public view.
“All senior editors and most reporters at The Sunday Times knew that I was obtaining illegal phone bill data and bank account transactions for stories on an almost weekly basis,” Ford told British news website Byline Investigates in a 2018 interview.
Mr. Ford said in the interview that his annual salary was as high as 40,000 pounds, which was about $72,000 at the time. John Witherow, the paper’s top editor at the time and Mr. Lewis’s boss, acknowledged that the paper hired Mr. Ford as a bombastic blowhard on multiple investigations.
“He was hired for his impersonation skills. Is that correct?” Mr Witherow was asked during a 2012 government investigation.
“That’s what it sounds like,” the editor replied.
In a later article, Mr. Ford himself wrote that he considered Mr. Winnett a close friend. The Sunday Times paid Mr Ford’s legal fees after he was arrested in 2010 on fraud charges related to the bragging. Mr. Winnett “was closely involved in the arrangements for my legal defense,” Mr. Ford wrote.
Ford was eventually given a formal warning in the case but was not convicted.
Pay for information
For years, Mr. Lewis said little about the phone-hacking scandal. When he discussed the issue, he presented himself as someone who cooperated with authorities and helped News Corp. root out wrongdoing.
“My job was to put things right and that’s what I did,” he told the BBC in 2020.
Recently, as Mr. Lewis worked to restructure the Post newsroom, the hacking scandal reengaged his life. His executive editor, Sally Buzbee, dropped out of the program. Days later, The New York Times revealed that Lewis had scolded her for reporting on developments in the British phone-hacking lawsuit that bears his name. Mr. Lewis denied pressuring Ms. Buzby.
Later, an NPR reporter revealed that Mr. Lewis said he would give an exclusive interview if he promised not to write about the phone hacking case.
Mr. Lewis also faced questions about another scoop he and Mr. Winnett delivered in a manner that most American newsrooms would consider unethical.
In 2009, when Lewis was editor of the Daily Telegraph, Winnett revealed politicians were using government spending accounts to spend lavishly. The article sparked a major political scandal.
This article is based on records purchased by The Daily Telegraph from security consultants for more than $120,000.
In a meeting with Post reporters in November, Mr. Lewis defended his article. He told staff the Telegraph spent the money to help protect sources. “I agreed to hold the funds in escrow for legal protection,” Lewis said, according to the Washington Post.
In an interview with The New York Times last week, the security consultant described a less formal arrangement.
“This is not an escrow account,” said consultant John Wick. He said he collected the money himself on behalf of the source. “I hold it and then release it however I think I need to.”
Mr Wick said he had reached an agreement with Mr Winnett: to pay £10,000 for the chance to view the information and then a further £100,000 for exclusive rights to the information.
Mr Wick said he did not tell Mr Winnett or Mr Lewis what he did with the money.
Kitty Bennett and Julie Tate Contributed research.
