Hacking justified,says UK tabloid ex-editor

Media: Says hacking encouraged by NOTWS Brooks,Coulson,calls them scum of journalism for abandoning colleagues

SARAH LYALL

He admitted that he and his colleagues hacked into peoples phones and paid police officers for tips. He confessed to lurking in unmarked vans outside peoples houses,stealing confidential documents and rifling through celebrity garbage cans.

After Paul McMullan,a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdochs now-defunct News of the World tabloid,had finished his jaw-droppingly brazen remarks at a judicial inquiry Tuesday,it was hard to think of any dubious news-gathering technique he had not confessed to,short of pistol-whipping sources for information.

Nor were the practices he described limited to a few,McMullan said in testimony before the Leveson Inquiry,which is probing the hacking scandal. On Wednesday,the police arrested a 17th suspect Bethany Usher,31,a former journalist and senior Journalism lecturer at Teesside University.

In fact,McMullan said,The News of the Worlds underlings were encouraged by their bosses to use any means necessary to get material. We did all these things for our editors,for Rebekah Brooks and for Andy Coulson, McMullan said,referring to News of the World editors who,he said,should have had the strength of conviction to say,Yes,sometimes you have to stray into black or gray illegal areas. He added: They should have been the heroes of journalism,but they arent. They are the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it.

Coulson and Brooks have both been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking. Brooks,whom McMullan called the archcriminal, is also suspected of making illegal payments to the police. Nothing that McMullan said was particularly surprising. What was startling was that McMullan,who left his job in 2001,eagerly confessed to so much and on such a scale no one else has done it quite this way and that he maintained that none of it was wrong.

Underhanded reporting techniques are not shocking, he said. Hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool,given the sacrifices we make,if all were trying get to the truth, he said,asking if we really want to live in a world where only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6. No,he said,we do not.

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As examples of the dangers of his job,he described having cocaine-laced marijuana forced on him by knife-wielding drug dealers in a sting operation; being attacked by a crowd of murderous asylum seekers; and,in his Brad the teenage rent boy guise,sprinting through a convent dressed only in underpants to escape the paedophile priest he had successfully entrapped.

Journalists here have traditionally justified shady practices by arguing they are in public interest. Asked by an inquiry lawyer how he would define that,McMullan said the public interest is what the public is interested in.