It’s sort of exciting to watch the American media reckon with the influx of British journalists, British editors and British corporate culture within American newsrooms. This culture-clash is happening in multiple newsrooms, but the most high-profile case is the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos owns WaPo, and several months ago, he appointed Will Lewis as the Post’s new CEO. Lewis is British and he cut his teeth in Rupert Murdoch’s British media arm during the heyday of pre-Leveson hacking and blagging. Lewis was recently cited in Prince Harry’s ongoing lawsuits against News UK, a fact which Lewis has been desperately trying to minimize, bury and kill. Lewis is clearly still operating like he’s part of a Murdoch operation in Britain, and that’s caused significant clashes within WaPo’s editorial board and beyond. Lewis is also bringing in more British editors and journalists, to the point where WaPo is probably going to resemble The Sun or the (now defunct) News of the World any day now. What’s also amazing is that the New York Times is taking the opportunity to do some very critical reporting of what’s going on at WaPo. Speaking of:
The publisher and the incoming editor of The Washington Post, when they worked as journalists in London two decades ago, used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles, according to a former colleague, a published account of a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives.
Will Lewis, The Post’s publisher, assigned one of the articles in 2004 as business editor of The Sunday Times. Another was written by Robert Winnett, whom Mr. Lewis recently announced as The Post’s next executive editor.
The use of deception, hacking and fraud is at the heart of a long-running British newspaper scandal, one that toppled a major tabloid in 2010 and led to years of lawsuits by celebrities who said that reporters improperly obtained their personal documents and voice mail messages.
Mr. Lewis has maintained that his only involvement in the controversy was helping to root out problematic behavior after the fact, while working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. But a former Sunday Times reporter said on Friday that Mr. Lewis had personally assigned him to write an article in 2004 using phone records that the reporter understood to have been obtained through hacking.
After that story broke, a British businessman who was the subject of the article said publicly that his records had been stolen. The reporter, Peter Koenig, described Mr. Lewis as a talented editor — one of the best he had worked with. But as time went on, he said Mr. Lewis changed.
“His ambition outran his ethics,” Mr. Koenig said.
A second article in 2002 carried Mr. Winnett’s byline, and a private investigator who worked for The Sunday Times later publicly acknowledged using deception to land the materials.
The NY Times is also reviewing all the times where Lewis paid thousands of dollars for information, which is a widespread tactic in the British press, they all pay for leads or information. Only the tabloids do that here in America, like the National Enquirer, In Touch Weekly or maybe Us Weekly. Never a newspaper. I think Lewis probably could have gotten away with paying-for-information as a mere “cultural difference” in newsrooms across the pond. But the fact that he is still lying about everything else is going to ruin his American career long-term. Hiring private investigators to create a third-party buffer to criminal activity, using information from hacking and other crimes, all of that happened for years across the board in UK newsrooms and Lewis was absolutely a part of it. That’s why Prince Harry is suing, and that’s why Lewis is so desperate to bury all of those stories.
Photos courtesy of Getty.