and Wallis to the news desk and the features department and then onwards to the journalists beneath them, and with it came a certain style of management, simply and repeatedly described by those who experienced it as ‘bullying’. This was a tough place to work.
* * *
Hanging on the wall above the news desk, there was a digital clock which counted down the minutes to the next edition of the paper. In the human-resources department, they logged the bylines of all the reporters, who were often reminded that those who slipped down the league table could expect to be hauled in for a bollocking or even to find themselves on the receiving end in the next round of redundancies.
Reporters who worked there speak of a deeply unpleasant ‘ideas’ meeting on Tuesday mornings when they would all sit in a corner office while Edmondson or Weatherup or one of their deputies told them that their ideas for stories were all useless, a judgement which was often reinforced by an email later in the morning telling them that those were the worst story proposals the news desk had ever heard and demanding three more ideas from each of them. Edmondson, the reporters say, was particularly aggressive. They tell, for example, of him trying to put an electronic tracker on one reporter’s phone to check on his movements; of a senior reporter being reduced to tears at his desk because his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and Edmondson refused to let him have any time off work to look after her; of another who was sacked because he became a single parent and would not accept Edmondson’s ruling that ‘you belong to the News of the World ’. When they were out on the road, they say, he liked to keep up the pressure by sending them texts – ‘tick tock’ or simply ‘??’.
Since Rupert Murdoch broke the print unions and threw out the National Union of Journalists in 1986, the reporters had had no kind of protection. Some cracked. One is said to have tried to kill herself at a Christmas party. Mostly, however, they passed the bullying along to the people they dealt with. Several of them have described how they were encouraged to rip off the sources who sold them stories.
Some sources were naive. They would tell their story before getting a signed contract and would simply never be paid. One reporter was sent to interview a prostitute who had had sex with a public figure, with instructions not to pay more than £250,000 for her story. The woman opened up by saying she wouldn’t talk for a penny under £10,000. Another agreed to talk on the promise that the News of the World would pay for her to have a good holiday. When she tried to claim her reward, Ian Edmondson declared that she was from up north, so she could stay in a caravan, for £150. Some got contracts and fell for an easy trick. The contract promised them big money if the story went on the front page. The reporter knew very well it would go inside the paper but kept that quiet. When the story came out and the source begged for something, anything, the reporter would offer them a tiny fee and, as one put it, ‘you wear them down and, in the end, they’ll take buttons’. A few – including a woman who had been raped by a footballer – fell foul of a clause which said that to the best of the source’s knowledge, the story must be true: the News of the World printed the story, claimed the source had been knowingly wrong about some part of it and refused to pay up. The subjects of stories also were shown no pity. They were dragged out and exposed in front of millions of readers, for being gay, for liking sex, for having a new partner, for accidentally showing their knickers when they stepped out of a car, for having broken the law when they were an adolescent. If the truth was not good enough to make a story, they could twist it.
Some reporters say they had pangs of conscience, not least because of the eye-watering hypocrisy which was involved. While castigating anybody
* * *
Hanging on the wall above the news desk, there was a digital clock which counted down the minutes to the next edition of the paper. In the human-resources department, they logged the bylines of all the reporters, who were often reminded that those who slipped down the league table could expect to be hauled in for a bollocking or even to find themselves on the receiving end in the next round of redundancies.
Reporters who worked there speak of a deeply unpleasant ‘ideas’ meeting on Tuesday mornings when they would all sit in a corner office while Edmondson or Weatherup or one of their deputies told them that their ideas for stories were all useless, a judgement which was often reinforced by an email later in the morning telling them that those were the worst story proposals the news desk had ever heard and demanding three more ideas from each of them. Edmondson, the reporters say, was particularly aggressive. They tell, for example, of him trying to put an electronic tracker on one reporter’s phone to check on his movements; of a senior reporter being reduced to tears at his desk because his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and Edmondson refused to let him have any time off work to look after her; of another who was sacked because he became a single parent and would not accept Edmondson’s ruling that ‘you belong to the News of the World ’. When they were out on the road, they say, he liked to keep up the pressure by sending them texts – ‘tick tock’ or simply ‘??’.
Since Rupert Murdoch broke the print unions and threw out the National Union of Journalists in 1986, the reporters had had no kind of protection. Some cracked. One is said to have tried to kill herself at a Christmas party. Mostly, however, they passed the bullying along to the people they dealt with. Several of them have described how they were encouraged to rip off the sources who sold them stories.
Some sources were naive. They would tell their story before getting a signed contract and would simply never be paid. One reporter was sent to interview a prostitute who had had sex with a public figure, with instructions not to pay more than £250,000 for her story. The woman opened up by saying she wouldn’t talk for a penny under £10,000. Another agreed to talk on the promise that the News of the World would pay for her to have a good holiday. When she tried to claim her reward, Ian Edmondson declared that she was from up north, so she could stay in a caravan, for £150. Some got contracts and fell for an easy trick. The contract promised them big money if the story went on the front page. The reporter knew very well it would go inside the paper but kept that quiet. When the story came out and the source begged for something, anything, the reporter would offer them a tiny fee and, as one put it, ‘you wear them down and, in the end, they’ll take buttons’. A few – including a woman who had been raped by a footballer – fell foul of a clause which said that to the best of the source’s knowledge, the story must be true: the News of the World printed the story, claimed the source had been knowingly wrong about some part of it and refused to pay up. The subjects of stories also were shown no pity. They were dragged out and exposed in front of millions of readers, for being gay, for liking sex, for having a new partner, for accidentally showing their knickers when they stepped out of a car, for having broken the law when they were an adolescent. If the truth was not good enough to make a story, they could twist it.
Some reporters say they had pangs of conscience, not least because of the eye-watering hypocrisy which was involved. While castigating anybody
Similar Books
