Why I'm boycotting the News of the World (for last decade)
There can be little doubt that the News of the World has behaved in a truly reprehensible way by hacking into the missing Milly Dowler’s mobile phone and worst still, giving her parents hope and misdirecting the police by deleting messages, when as we know she was already murdered.
This has resonated so much more than celebrities or politicians having their mobile telephones hacked and it now looks as if the parents of murdered Soham toddlers Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman may also have been targeted by private detectives hired by the newspaper. As I write it has also emerged the paper may have targeted survivors of the 7/7 bombings - just hours before the anniversary.
Advertisers are quite rightly abandoning the paper and those who dither are finding great fury is being heaped upon them through social media. Brands are already suffering for being associated with the News of the World.
Then there is the BBC reporting that emails have been handed to the police showing that payments were authorised to police officers for information, itself a criminal offence. There can be little doubt the lack of judgement shown by successive editors amid widespread hacking has the potential to lead to regulation of the press which will see genuine investigative reporting suffer.
However, this is nothing new by the ‘News of the Screws’ as Private Eye dubs the Sunday paper. It was reckless reporting over a decade ago that led to me boycotting a paper I had read for a decade before that. Indeed, I have never bought a copy since.
Rebekah Brooks was the editor when Milly Dowler’s telephone was hacked and apparently knew nothing about it, making her position as chief executive of the paper’s parent company defensible, if still clearly precarious.
However it was he campaign to name and shame paedophiles that prompted me to boycott the News of the World. Clearly designed to drive up readership it was a success, but its claims to be in the interest of children were laughable.
I was with Thames Valley Police as a press officer at the time and saw firsthand how it actually put children at risk. Sex offenders who were being managed and supported in the community were driven underground and often disappeared with the very real risk they would reoffend without the support structure that the paper had deftly destroyed for ratings.
Ignoring the evidence that most sex offences are committed by people known to their young victims rather than the predators the paper like to portray, it was never about helping.
Make no mistake, as a parent I do not want a sex offender living next door to me, but I recognise that they do need to be supported and managed to give the police and health professionals the chance to prevent them reoffending, or indeed offending in the first place.
So when you pick up a different paper this Sunday, and I hope you will, know why you are doing it and commit to boycotting for more than a week and do check out this guide in the Guardian on what you can do if you feel strongly about how the paper has behaved.
And finally... if you want a chuckle check out how sister paper The Sun jumped to the 'Screws' defence after the paper had lied to the Press Complaints Commission back in 2009 about how the hacking was nothing more than an single reporter!