While America’s flagship newspaper, the Washington Post (WP), suffered internal strife, including a loss of about $70 million last year and the sudden resignation of its female editor-in-chief for unclear reasons, an ‘illegal reporting’ scandal surrounding the publisher and editor-in-chief-designate emerged. According to the New York Times (NYT) on the 15th, Peter Koenig, a former colleague of WP publisher and CEO William Lewis, revealed that publisher Lewis had previously used fraudulently obtained phone records to write articles.
Before coming to the Washington Post, Lewis worked as a business editor at the Sunday Times, the Sunday edition of the British daily The Times, in 2004. At that time, he was given hacked phone records and instructed him to write an article. At the time, the article covered the possible sale of British retailer Marks & Spencer, which announced that its phone records had been hacked after reports containing details of the CEO’s phone calls were published. He criticized Lewis, saying that although he was a capable editor, he changed over time and that “his ambition outstripped his ethics.”
Koenig claimed that Robert Winnett, deputy editor-in-chief of the British daily Telegraph, who was appointed as the next editor-in-chief of WP, also obtained information illegally when he broke a scoop in the Sunday Times in 2002. Winnet revealed a list of prominent British figures who ordered the Maybach, a luxury sedan from German Mercedes-Benz that was called the ‘Nazi’s favorite limousine’ but did not disclose how the list was obtained in the article. But John Ford, a private investigator with a long history with the Sunday Times, said in a 2018 interview that he regretted his work on the article. He confessed that he impersonated an employee of a German electronic key manufacturer and called a Mercedes-Benz employee to obtain a list of buyers.
The NYT also pointed out that publisher Lewis’ decision to pay 120,000 pounds (about 210 million won) to buy information from a reporter in 2009 when he was editor-in-chief of the British daily Telegraph was also problematic. In the United States, most news organizations have adopted a code of ethics that prohibits paying for information. The NYT pointed out that journalists inside and outside the WP have questioned whether the new leader shares this ethical foundation. The reporting company used deception, hacking, fraud, wiretapping, etc. to uncover scoops, and it was a widespread tactic led by British tabloids. However, this practice was abandoned in 2010 when the News of the World, a tabloid Sunday newspaper owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, was found to have been writing articles by illegally eavesdropping on the phone calls of celebrities.
However, the NYT reported that as criticism of the media at the time was mainly focused on tabloids, the controversy surrounding Lewis and Winnet, who were affiliated with the Sunday Times, which was classified as a political paper, did not receive attention. Publisher Lewis did not comment on the phone hacking scandal for several years, but when the issue was brought up again during the recent reorganization of the WP organization, he told fellow reporters that he had spent money to protect reporters, saying, “I don’t have money in escrow.” “I agreed to it,” he said. However, the person who dealt with the Telegraph at the time said that there was no escrow account and that he received the money from the media company and distributed it to informants.
The NYT reported that the Winnet editor-in-chief did not respond to press inquiries. The NYT previously reported that, in relation to the sudden resignation of Sally Buzbee, the first female editor-in-chief of WP, earlier this month, publisher Lewis had reprimanded Buzbee for having her cover the progress of a phone hacking lawsuit in the UK related to her.