Who to Believe?
The day before a former editor of the newspaper - Piers Morgan - said that he had no knowledge of such practice - and that at any one time he only knew of about 5% of what was going on.
I find Piers Morgan's evidence hard to swallow for two important reasons.
The first is that the editor of any national newspaper is - in my experience - is normally a very talented, hard working - if unlikeable- person.
Which is why they get top the top in the first place - whatever people think of Kelvin McKenzie (former Sun editor) and Piers Morgan - they are not idiots.
Because they know all the tricks of the trade and perform much better than most of their peers - hence the reason they are selected by owners to sit in the hot seat - the editor's chair.
The second reason is that journalists move around newspapers - like bees visit flowers looking for honey - they are on the move all the time just as Piers Morgan did himself when he moved to The Mirror.
Most well known journalists - again in my experience - have worked for several titles and take with them the practices they've acquired and employed elsewhere.
So I don't believe for a minute that phone hacking was the sole responsibility of the News of the World - or the News International stable.
Instead I think it was pretty commonplace until people started getting caught - in which case they were 'on their own'.
I can't imagine an editor like Piers Morgan publishing all these great 'scoop' stories - without asking the obvious question from time to time.
'How are we getting this information - how do we know that it's accurate?'
And if a newspaper editor wasn't asking that basic question - then they clearly didn't deserve to be in the job - but in any event they can't have it both ways.
