It will be four years to the day tomorrow that the Guardian published the front page expose of the Hacking of Milly Dowler by Nick Davies and Amelia Hill which led to the setting up of the Leveson inquiry and kicked off this seemingly endless saga of the investigation of press intrusion.
But phone hacking was just the tip of a much darker iceberg at both News of the World and other tabloid titles, as the Daniel Morgan Independent panel will show next year. I will continue to write about the ‘Criminal Media Nexus’ and the connections between corrupt police, private detectives and the press on Byline.
I am crowd funding this project on Byline. Contributions can be made by clicking on this link.
Over recent months Byline managed to live tweet and independently support James Doleman’s coverage of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson’s perjury trial in Edinburgh, and Martin Hickman doing the same stellar job on the trial of Coulson’s former deputy, Neil Wallis, at the Old Bailey.
Meanwhile the well respected investigative journalist Paddy French has been digging down into the connections between the Mirror Group and phone hacking. He has already discovered that the Mirror was openly hacking Irish Politicians in 1998, and his Byline articles will expose a lot more.
And to complement this, Paddy French is pitching an unauthorised biography of the legendary tabloid editor and TV show host, Piers Morgan, for crowdfunding through Byline.
Morgan, close friends with both Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, is the key figure in the growth of celebrity journalism. And this biography will be a no-holds barred account of his rise.
So do support more independent journalism and publishing by pre-buying his book here.
Byline has existed for just three months, and in ‘beta’ version only. Despite this, we have already been able to sign up writers as diverse as radical feminists Julie Bindel and Beatrix Campbell, crowdfunding pioneer and media critic Peter Jukes, Greek crisis blogger Alex Andreou, World Press Freedom Award winner Daoud Kuttab, sex columnist Rowan Pelling, controversial Israel-Palestine commentator Norman Finkelstein, US political cartoonist Eric Lewis, former San Francisco Bay Guardian editor-in-chief Steven T. Jones, investigative reporter Graham Johnson, and QI creator John Mitchinson. Abby Tomlinson of ‘Milifandom’ fame is also joining soon.
Full disclosure, I am an advisor to this innovative new site, along with Sir Harry Evans and Bill Emmott.
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