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Revealed: The Emails Behind the Royal ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Affair
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This article was first published in the November 2023 print edition of Byline Times
A series of anonymous emails blowing the whistle on payments by The Sun to the partner of a senior royal aide were written by three former colleagues of the controversial journalist Dan Wootton, a Byline Times investigation can reveal
This newspaper has received credible intelligence to suggest the three worked together to inform on the Murdoch tabloid’s former executive editor as they feared a cover-up by publisher News UK if they did not.
To protect themselves from exposure, the colleagues went to extraordinary lengths to cover their tracks, after reaching out to Scotland Yard, Buckingham Palace lawyers, and retired Guardian journalist Nick Davies.
Byline Times will not be identifying them as a matter of journalistic source protection. However, it can reveal how they presented themselves as being a temporary worker and a friend of a junior News UK administrator with access to The Sun’s editorial payment systems.
They acted following the publication of two stories about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their son Archie in June and July 2019, and the subsequent discovery of payments totalling £4,000 to a publicist whose partner is Prince William’s former press officer Christian Jones.
For the first time, this newspaper is reproducing some of the emails’ content. Part of them reads: “If a journalist is using someone’s [partner] to pay Prince William’s PR for information about his own brother and sister-in-law that shouldn’t happen.”
They add: “Someone in editorial started questioning why stories that weren’t on the front page were getting thousands of pounds in fees. My friend says someone saw a string of payments within a few weeks to [the publicist, Jones’ partner] about royals and then asked who this person was. They couldn’t understand why a showbiz PR would have that kind of knowledge.”
The insider information was later handed to Neil Basu, the former Met Police Assistant Commissioner overseeing counter-terrorism at the time, and led to two internal inquiries at Buckingham Palace.
News UK denies making any unlawful payments to third parties, and Jones and his partner say they did not provide private information about the Sussexes to The Sun.
Byline Times has sourced its own copies of the emails, which were first addressed to Nick Davies in spring 2020.
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Davies – whose investigations for the Guardian exposed the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, leading to that newspaper’s closure in 2011 and a major Old Bailey trial – confirmed his role in passing on the anonymous communications to relevant third-parties.
“I am retired, but I still get approached with stories two or three times a week and have to say no to them,” he said. “But this email was clearly important. There was a clear public interest if there had been misfeasance by a public official. It was important and there was clearly a chance that what was being said was true. So I boosted it into the hands of people with power.”
First, Davies reached out to lawyers for the Duke of Sussex, who also passed the information on to Neil Basu.
“I was in the middle, and I admitted I had no idea if what the email said was true,” Davies added. “It was detailed information, but the truth was not clear. The police needed some kind of evidence to put before a judge to get a warrant to go to Buckingham Palace and search Christian Jones’ records and those at The Sun. They needed to meet the source to get a sworn statement or some other form of sworn evidence. I urged them [the anonymous whistleblower] to meet the police, who were willing to do so off-the-record, but the source would not come forward.”
The information in the emails was so detailed and credible, however, that it prompted the Duke of Sussex to explore a civil lawsuit with a formal ‘letter before action’ to The Sun. The information they contained centred on the appropriateness of payments going to the partner of someone acting in an official capacity for the Royal Family.
The Sun front page 09.01.20 The Emails
Byline Times can reproduce parts of the emails which went on to have such wide-reaching ramifications.
Posing as The Sun worker’s friend, the authors wrote to Davies: “I understand you are now retired from journalism. Perhaps if this is not of interest to you directly, you might wish to pass it on to someone capable if you think it worthwhile. I have no wish to be involved because I would fear for the safety and wellbeing of my loved ones. You played a pivotal role in exposing wrongdoing at News International. The company, now News UK, claims to be the cleanest media company in the world. It is not. I will give you one example. See where it leads.”
The emails claimed to be from a News UK worker who, during a brief period of employment there, had access to payment systems used by editorial teams and had knowledge of internal legal compliance protocols. The worker, it was claimed, had maintained a friendship with a second whistleblower at the tabloid.
One email went on: “Everyone there now has to undergo strict training to avoid corrupt payments, but at The Sun they are circumventing this. I know this because there is one case involving one of the top editors, Dan Wootton, that has been hushed up.”
The email continued: “The impression my friend gave is that only a few people within The Sun know about it. They’ve told me before that when the connection was made between [Christian Jones’ partner, the publicist] and Jones there was a real sense of panic because Wootton is so powerful within that office.
“He deals directly with [chief executive] Rebekah Brooks on stories sometimes, he has his own radio show, and he’s forced out a lot of people as he’s moved up through the organisation. He’s tried and succeeded to get people sacked. He’s that powerful.”
EXCLUSIVE
The Truth About Megxit: How Dan Wootton and a Cash-For-Leaks Scandal Split the Royal Family
As Scotland Yard probes the journalist Dan Wootton over allegations of blackmail and serial sexual catfishing after a three-year special investigation by Byline Times, this newspaper can now reveal
how his payments to the partner
of a top royal aide forced the
Duke and Duchess of Sussex to run
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Dan Evans and Tom Latchem
Explaining the situation, the emails continue: “[Dan Wootton] is a showbiz journalist, but in the last year or so, if you check you will see he has written a number of stories about the Royal Family. There were concerns raised internally last year over a number of payments he had made, totalling thousands of pounds, to a freelance PR.
“If you look on Google, [the publicist] worked for a number of showbiz PR firms, so perhaps not a big deal. The reason concerns were flagged was because Wootton suddenly began paying [the publicist] thousands of pounds … for royal stories, starting on or around 15 July last year (2019).”
It went on: “These began with large payments of £3,000 upwards for single stories about the Duchess of Sussex that only someone very close to them could know about. The information was very detailed and questions were asked very discreetly internally about why the amounts paid were suddenly so high about stories possibly involving public officials (which is a big red flag at News UK now).
“The answer, it was quickly established, was that [the publicist] is the partner of William and Kate’s press secretary, Christian Jones.”
The email went on: “By the company’s own updated rules, any suspicion of a payment to a public official should be flagged up immediately to lawyers. The reason I’m contacting you is that this didn’t happen. I have no reason why although given the seniority of the journalist and the panic it would cause internally, perhaps that is sufficient explanation.
“Only a handful of people had direct knowledge of it and I’m not sure Dan Wootton was even confronted about it. I don’t know the journalists personally but it really angers me that good people, secretaries even, lost jobs on the News of the World and here we are again possibly and it has not even been looked into.”
The emails go on: “After I left I heard someone involved was so angry they had emailed a Mr Basu at Scotland Yard last December about it and possibly even a royal servant called Tyrrell [Gerrard Tyrrell, the Royal Family’s lawyer] to tip them off.
“All I know is [the publicist] is on The Sun’s payment system under a ZC (contributor) number paid lots of money by Dan Wootton, I know that much. The paper trail is there if someone wants to find it. It seems rotten to me. I hope this is of interest.”
In a subsequent email, the whistleblowers confirmed the detail of [the publicist’s] contributor code: “I think [the publicist’s] ZC number is ZC634*** [Byline Times’ redaction]. My friend thinks there was a payment for £3,000 made around the 15 July last year for a story about the Duchess of Sussex and her nannies which was published on 28 June. There was also a payment of £1,000 made for a story about godparents to Meghan’s son. I don’t have any more details and I don’t know if I can get any more without arousing suspicion for my friend.”
EXCLUSIVE
In Plain Sight: The Picture the Palace Probe Missed
In 2020, Simon Case was tasked to investigate payments from Dan Wootton and The Sun to the partner of a royal press officer, allegedly for information about Prince Harry and Meghan. He found there was no evidence of wrongdoing. But Byline Times can shed further light
Tom Latchem and Dan Evans
The informants went on to talk about internal compliance policies intended to protect News UK from Operation Elveden-type scandals and bribery allegations.
Since Elveden, which closed down in 2016, News UK has upgraded its internal compliance systems to flag suspicious payments to serving public officials with a self-certifying system based around e-learning modules.
The email added: “This is used for every new contributor the company pays like a source. It’s a single sheet and has a box on it which asks the journalist to tick yes/no whether the person is a public official.”
Byline Times understands that the New York HQ of parent company News Corporation could be alerted to red flags. It followed the creation in 2011 of a management standards committee, one of whose first jobs was to assist UK police and act as ‘assisting suspects’ in the Elveden probe, and hand over evidence against employees in order to avoid corporate charges, which could have infringed the US Federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with the potential to impact directly on owner Rupert Murdoch.
The email went on: “People internally on editorial … started getting suspicious about the scale of the payments made by Wootton, looked at it, someone did some research and found the connection between Jones and [his partner], presented it to the same senior execs, who then recoiled in horror at what had been found and stuck their heads in the sand without taking it further.”
It added: “Basically [they] said, yep, anyway, let’s move on, it’s a great story by Dan. I don’t think there’s any desire to push for it to be investigated. I think the view internally is to let sleeping dogs lie and hope no one ever makes the connection independently.”
Byline Times put a series of detailed questions to a lawyer for the Royal Family, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Dan Wootton, Christian Jones, Jones’ partner, and Simon Case.
The allegations about payments were put to News UK in 2020, when Byline Investigates, the sister website of Byline Times, first revealed payments were made. News UK threatened to sue in order to stifle publication. The identities of the senior executives said to have known about the connection between Christian Jones and his partner are not known and the extent that News UK management know that this happened, if at all, is unclear.
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem are former colleagues of Dan Wootton’s from the News of the World between 2007 and 2011. None of the sources or analysts cited either in this story or wider investigation were paid
In Plain Sight: The Picture the Palace Probe Missed
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This article was first published in the November 2023 print edition of Byline Times
It’s the friendship Prince William’s former right-hand-man Simon Case concluded simply didn’t exist. And yet here are one-time royal press secretary Christian Jones and his publicist partner huddling together for an intimate celebratory photograph with ‘cash-for-leaks’ journalist Dan Wootton.
The occasion was Wootton’s 35th birthday party in March 2018. The location was the private terrace of a £1,675-a-night suite at London’s exclusive hotel The Ned. The guests were 20 “incredible friends” (in Wootton’s own words) – hand-picked to enjoy his extensive largesse. The issue is that it was a ‘friendship’ that – when legal documents later named Christian Jones – he flatly denied.
None of which could have seemed possible as Jones and his partner toasted the birthday boy – just a few days from winning a third British Press Award for ‘Showbiz Reporter of the Year’, and five years before he was unmasked as a serial catfish targeting young celebrities and colleagues for sexual images – with Veuve Clicquot among the potted peonies and Carrara marble tables on the 35m sq entertaining terrace of a hotel suite complete with a mahogany four-poster bed and roll-top bathtub.
One of the party’s attendees told Byline Times that “there was no expense spared” and “everyone invited was part of Dan’s special group of mates”.
“Dan hired a private dining room and laid on a set menu with three options for each course,” they said. “It was champagne and cocktails and whatever you wanted from the menu. Just 20 ate and then a few more turned up to celebrate with Dan upstairs on his terrace before heading on to a club in Shoreditch. It was lavish. There was no expense spared. Everyone invited was part of Dan’s special group of mates. Dan paid for everything.
This apparent closeness, as illustrated by the photo Wootton uploaded to Instagram and captioned with three red hearts on 11 March 2018, presented a problem, however, for Jones and his long-term publicist partner.
For, after Jones took the job of deputy communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in December 2018, Wootton paid the publicist for stories which, according to a whistleblower account, led to a secretive internal investigation at The Sun newspaper, which feared being sucked into a leaks scandal just a few years after some of its journalists were prosecuted over payments to public officials.
Christian Jones (right) and Dan Wootton at The Ned ‘Just A Fluke’
The Sun has never confirmed anything on the record, but Byline Investigates – the sister website to this newspaper – revealed in June 2020 how lawyers for the Duke of Sussex, armed with credible but anonymously supplied information apparently originating from inside The Sun’s publisher News UK, were threatening to sue the tabloid over the publication of stories written by Wootton – and negatively spun against the Sussexes – headlined ‘Nanny McThree’ and ‘Tot Secret’.
They were published in June and July 2019 and centred on nannying and god-parenting arrangements for the Sussexes’ son Archie. Payments of £4,000 had been made to the publicist in August 2019 and were identified by way of an internal News UK accounting code. The matter had been referred to both Buckingham Palace and Britain’s then top anti-terrorism police officer, Scotland Yard’s Neil Basu, for investigation.
Basu’s job was to try to establish whether there was any case for a criminal prosecution for misconduct in public office – the crime for which nine police officers were convicted, based on evidence handed over by the Murdoch media empire to Scotland Yard’s 2016 Operation Elveden, for accepting money from journalists for information.
After the Metropolitan Police failed to obtain the full identity of the whistleblowing Sun insiders – which it required to obtain a warrant to search royal property – Simon Case, the then private secretary to Prince William, was tasked to investigate from within Kensington Palace, where Jones was employed.
Byline Times, through a number of sources close to the matter, has been able to establish some details of the investigation and the processes that ultimately cleared Christian Jones of wrongdoing. Both he and his partner insist the allegations that Wootton paid for private information about the Sussexes are incorrect.
But this newspaper can reveal that, although when formally questioned by Case – who is today the head of the British Civil Service and facing tough questions at the Covid Inquiry over the quality of decision-making during the pandemic – Jones admitted to knowing Wootton and dealing with him on a professional basis, he strongly denied that either he, or his partner, were close friends with the journalist.
“Quite a long and involved process resulted from Prince Harry’s lawyers sending a letter before action to The Sun,” one source said. “Of course, Christian had to be questioned by his bosses about it. He said that, yes, he had known Dan for a while, but that he did not know him very well, and that Prince William’s courtiers who appointed him didn’t have a problem with it.
“Christian also told them that his partner had indeed been paid by The Sun at the time stated in the whistleblower emails, and for the amounts described, but that the money related to stories about clients his partner represented in their work as a publicist, and was nothing to do with Prince Harry and Meghan.
“One of his partner’s clients supposedly had the same name as the Duchess of Sussex. There was the suggestion that this was the reason for some of the money paid and that the timing was just a fluke.
“On that basis, Christian faced no further action. He retained the confidence of Kensington Palace and later on had a couple of big promotions.”
Byline Times has learned that Jones’ position was that the allegations against him ought not to have been made at all on the basis of anonymous accusations, albeit they contained many correct details, including the internal News UK code, which warranted a legitimate case for further investigation.
Kensington Palace is understood to have sought to draw a line under the matter unless compelling new evidence emerged.
Alongside Wootton’s birthday Instagram photo, this newspaper has spoken to multiple other witnesses who say that Wootton tried to cultivate a friendship between the three.
EXCLUSIVE
The Truth About Megxit: How Dan Wootton and a Cash-For-Leaks Scandal Split the Royal Family
As Scotland Yard probes the journalist Dan Wootton over allegations of blackmail and serial sexual catfishing after a three-year special investigation by Byline Times, this newspaper can now reveal
how his payments to the partner
of a top royal aide forced the
Duke and Duchess of Sussex to run
from the UK
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem
‘It Wasn’t Like It Was A Secret’
“It is true that Dan knew [Jones’ partner] pretty well,” one source said. “At the time, they were quite a young publicist who had worked for a couple of the London agencies and were keen to get on in their career. Dan knew this and made a point of including [the publicist] in his group, beyond just seeing them at the usual premieres and television events where publicists and journalists tend to rub shoulders.
“For [the publicist], knowing Dan was undeniably useful professionally. Dan had a hell of a lot of power with the Murdoch press and [the publicist] sometimes had clients who either wanted to be in those papers or to be kept out of them.
“They enjoyed the benefits of knowing Dan. Sometimes they got to use The Sun’s box at the 02 for gigs. They were often around each other socially in the West End. You’d see them at the usual media haunts like Soho House and Shoreditch House.
“Sometimes Christian was there too. He got to know Dan through his partner. They used to go out together quite regularly for a while, sometimes in a small group, sometimes in larger ones, for food and drinks. It wasn’t like it was a secret. Lots of people in their social set saw them and knew about it and, justifiably, assumed they were pretty close.”
Wootton was at the zenith of his personal power at The Sun and on a senior rota to periodically assume overall editing duties when Jones took up his post at Kensington Palace around Christmas 2018.
Jones’ principal job was to handle media matters for the Cambridges – his actual employers – with a dual role to look after the Sussexes. But a few weeks into his new appointment, Jones himself became the story.
On 23 January, The Sun published photos of Jones out in London’s Notting Hill with the Duchess of Sussex under the headline: ‘“WHAT A HOTTIE” Meghan Markle’s hunky new press secretary sets pulses racing as female fans urge Harry to “be careful”’.
Alongside paparazzi pictures snatched after a low-key work lunch with Meghan, who at the time was pregnant with Archie, the paper wrote: “Royal fans have been left hot under the collar after Meghan Markle stepped out with her hunky new press secretary.”
The article went on to quote social media comments praising Jones’ physical appearance and cited his LinkedIn CV, crediting the Cardiff University graduate as being a former Brexit speechwriter and Treasury press officer.
“In his new role,” the piece added, “he will liaise with British and international media as well support the royals’ charitable work and engagements.”
A media management source said the article “raised eyebrows” at the palace at the time, considering Jones’ “main job was to be a trusted point-man to guide and protect his employers from invasive media” coverage. Yet, this was the “equivalent of clattering straight into the first hurdle”.
Byline Times understands that any social connection between Wootton, Jones, and his partner ended following the investigations into the payments.
The first source said that “the friendships pretty much died” after this because for Jones or his partner to be seen publicly with Wootton “would have been a very bad look”.
Despite the inauspicious start to working life at the royal household, Jones went on to enjoy a successful three years there during which he stepped into the shoes of Simon Case, when Boris Johnson brought him into his Government during the pandemic, to be the private secretary to the Cambridges.
He left Prince William and Kate in January 2021 to become a partner and head of corporate affairs for Bridgepoint, a £31.56 billion private asset investment fund in the City.
EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: The Emails Behind the Royal ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Affair
Detailed but anonymous testimony from insiders at The Sun sat at the heart of cash-for-leaks allegations involving a royal official and the newspaper’s former top editor Dan Wootton. Now, Byline Times can publish the details for the first time
Dan Evans
Again, The Sun covered the career change, noting that Jones had enjoyed an “incredibly close relationship with Prince William”. The paper wrote: “Whereas Simon was credited with making the Duke a statesman – Christian has really helped them to steer them through their public-facing role during the pandemic. He’s helped them to grow in confidence by gently pushing them out of their comfort zone.”
Today, Jones’ partner continues to work as a publicist with some high-profile clients.
Wootton did not comment on the record at the time of the 2020 Byline Investigates story. But his lawyers at Mishcon de Reya, one of Britain’s most costly law firms, denied that any payments were made unlawfully to a public official or a proxy and claimed their client was the victim of a smear campaign by unknown bad actors.
Byline Times put a series of detailed questions to a lawyer for the Royal Family, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Dan Wootton, Christian Jones, Jones’ partner, and Simon Case.
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem are former colleagues of Dan Wootton’s from the News of the World between 2007 and 2011. None of the sources or analysts cited either in this story or wider investigation were paid
The Truth About Megxit: How Dan Wootton and a ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Scandal Split the Royal Family
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This article was first published in the November 2023 print edition of Byline Times
King Charles withdrew his £700,000 funding deal for son Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s transition to a life in Canada in retaliation for the naming of a top royal aide in legal papers alleging a cash-for-leaks arrangement with the journalist Dan Wootton, Byline Times can reveal.
The financial sanction came after the Duke of Sussex defied the demands of the then Prince of Wales and palace staff by declining to remove the name of former Kensington Palace press secretary Christian Jones from a ‘letter before action’ to Wootton’s former employer The Sun in May 2020.
Jones denies any suggestion of wrongdoing or leaking confidential information about the royal household.
The matters alleged in the letter before action about him appear to have been dropped, but the sudden defunding of the Sussexes in late June 2020 led to the collapse of the ‘Sandringham Agreement’ governing a 12-month trial period as the couple sought to split their time between the UK and Canada and remove themselves from the ‘royal rota’ – the press pool given exclusive inside access to cover the royals.
It came just three months into the trial period and led directly to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex having to enter into private commercial arrangements to pay the estimated £3 million-a-year cost of 24-hour security for their family.
One well-placed source with knowledge of the matter told Byline Times: “They threatened the removal of the funding to try and protect the royal household from a potential courtroom scandal with Jones and Wootton very publicly at the centre. The actual removal of the funding weeks later was about control, and designed to force Harry and Meghan to come back to the senior royal family in the UK where their security would be assured.”
EXCLUSIVE
In Plain Sight: The Picture the Palace Probe Missed
In 2020, Simon Case was tasked to investigate payments from Dan Wootton and The Sun to the partner of a royal press officer, allegedly for information about Prince Harry and Meghan. He found there was no evidence of wrongdoing. But Byline Times can shed further light
Tom Latchem and Dan Evans
The source added: “The greater truth is that Harry and Meghan make better headlines than the King and Camilla or William and Kate. The idea of them still being in public service but abroad and out of the control of the institution and dominating the media narrative just couldn’t happen.
“Senior members of the family wanted them back after the transition period and were ready to continue playing dirty to make this happen. They never thought the trial period would work and tried everything to make it fail, starting with the removal of security and then signing off on a 12-month assault by the UK press on Harry and Meghan and everyone in their orbit.
“As far as the institution of the monarchy went, the Sussexes had either to be safely in the tent in Britain or cast away and castigated as comprehensively as possible in order to reduce the threat of them eclipsing the rest of the family.
“It’s no surprise they have endured such a degrading time from such a willing British media, when the same just isn’t true elsewhere in the world.”
‘The Telling Detail’
As part of a three-year special investigation into the professional and personal conduct of Dan Wootton, Byline Times has spoken to several sources with connections to the royal households about how the partner of Christian Jones, a publicist, came to be paid £4,000 by Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun in August 2019 – allegedly for articles relating to the Sussexes.
It is understood that the professional publicist admits to receiving the payments, but has claimed they were for other stories about a reality television star with a similar name to the Duchess of Sussex.
Jones has always denied being the source of any unauthorised information about the Sussexes getting into the press, including details of a written summary that Prince Harry had given Prince Charles in December 2019 of plans to move his family to North America, which Wootton reported initially on the front page of The Sun on 7 January 2020, before running day after day of negative coverage.
In his bestselling book Spare, the Duke of Sussex said Wootton’s information included a “telling detail” about an offer to relinquish their titles. “There was only one document on Earth in which that detail was mentioned – my private and confidential letter to my father,” he writes. “To which a shockingly, damningly small number of people had access. We hadn’t mentioned it to even our closest friends.”
Byline Times can reveal how the story, so-called Megxit, was published on the same day the Sussexes were planning their own announcement. It prompted a constitutional crisis and wrongly claimed that Prince Harry had blindsided his then 93-year-old grandmother – provoking a widespread public backlash – when, in fact, according to Spare, the Queen had been aware of it since 3 January.
In the book – in which Wootton is referred to as a “sad little man” – Prince Harry revealed how a further meeting set up with the Queen was blocked by palace staff and how she had already signed-off on a previous plan for her grandson and Meghan to move in part to South Africa.
Two well-placed sources have confirmed to this newspaper that Prince Charles’ private secretary Sir Clive Alderton and the then Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel, a close friend of Prince Charles, strongly urged Prince Harry to have Jones’ name stripped from the record.
It followed an internal inquiry conducted by Simon Case, then the private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge, and a close colleague of Jones, who concluded that – having heard him deny the allegations that he leaked confidential information – there was no case to answer.
However, Byline Times has learned that Jones and his partner had already been named specifically in anonymous but highly detailed whistleblower testimony – which included an internal News UK ‘ZC’ contributor accounting code – purportedly from an administrator within The Sun, which was deemed credible enough to warrant referral to the Metropolitan Police, and which was integral to the legal letter.
EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: The Emails Behind the Royal ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Affair
Detailed but anonymous testimony from insiders at The Sun sat at the heart of cash-for-leaks allegations involving a royal official and the newspaper’s former top editor Dan Wootton. Now, Byline Times can publish the details for the first time
Dan Evans
‘No One Wanted that Stuff to End Up in a Courtroom’
Part of the testimony, which was initially supplied to the respected retired investigative journalist Nick Davies, reads: “I think the publicist’s ZC number is ZC634***. My friend thinks there was a payment for £3,000 made around the 15th of July last year [2019] for a story about the Duchess of Sussex and her nannies which was published on 28 June. There was also a payment of £1,000 made for a story about godparents to Meghan’s son.”
A second source with links to the royal households told Byline Times that the “Christian Jones problem promised to drag the hidden dealings between the palaces and the press into the public domain”.
“That was deemed highly undesirable by the offices of Prince Charles and Prince William because there was always lots of horse-trading going on with the editors and their correspondents to ensure favourable coverage and protection when scandals broke,” the source continued. “No one wanted that stuff to end up in a courtroom. Harry and Meghan were expendable, but the heirs and their wives were not.
“It sent a chill through Clarence House [for the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall] and Kensington Palace [for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge]. But the Sussexes – particularly Harry – were very keen to get to the bottom of it all.
“He wanted to know how their private information kept being spun into negative headlines in the biggest newspapers. He and Meghan had been stung very badly by the timing and manner of Wootton’s reporting on their plans to live part of the year abroad, which wasn’t even a new idea as the Queen had previously given her blessing for a move to South Africa, which hadn’t worked out.
“And then detailed intelligence had come up to suggest Wootton was paying the partner of a Kensington Palace official, who had a lot of access, for stories about his family. Harry seemed pretty determined to get to the bottom of it.
“A view was quickly taken within the royal households that everything needed to be brought under control. The removal of the transition funding, which Prince Charles knew was his son’s only lifeline to keeping safe, was considered a very effective way of trying to bring Harry and Meghan to heel in the UK. But it didn’t work.”
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Another source explained the mechanics of the royal institution’s competing media strategies.
They told Byline Times: “You need to understand the competition that is constantly in play between the offices of the senior members of the Royal Family. Each has their own staff and their own agendas. The primary objective is to protect the institution of the monarchy. Charles and Camilla are obviously at the top of the tree, and were even when the Queen was alive; William and Kate next. Anything that threatens the hierarchy, or the public perception of it, is a problem to be dealt with.
“Quite often these problems are tackled through the tactical use of the press. The offices of each family member have their own relationships with the very top people at the newspapers. If there are specific messages they wish to express, then it will usually be through the Mail, Mail on Sunday, and The Sun, or less frequently through The Times and Sunday Times. These papers continually report briefings spoon-fed from the palace without questioning them.
“This is why it was such a problem when Christian Jones was named in those legal letters. Whether it was true or not true that information Jones collected in the course of his work was ending up in The Sun, was not really the point.
“The point is that the Royal Family is doing deals and trades with the press all the time for favourable coverage and protection and to maintain public relevance. The naming of Christian Jones threatened to shine a light on the entire unethical relationship between the institution and the press barons and that could not be tolerated and had to be punished.”
And so it appears that the monarchy chose to side with a press secretary over Prince Harry.
Shifting Allegiances
Despite not holding a formal remit from The Sun to cover royal matters, Wootton – who was the newspaper’s executive editor for show-business and television coverage until he departed in 2021 to become the star presenter for GB News – started taking an increasing interest in royal stories in 2018.
On 13 March 2019, Wootton published an article in The Sun about an alleged falling out between Prince William and Kate and the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley, David Rocksavage and Rose Hanbury, whom the paper dubbed Kate’s “rural rival”. For reasons that are not clear, the article was subsequently removed from The Sun’s website, but remained widely reported elsewhere.
A former friend of Wootton’s told Byline Times that the journalist’s allegiance appeared to quickly shift from one prince to another.
“Dan hated Prince William until around May 2019,” they said. “Behind closed doors, he didn’t have a good word for him. He was always talking about his attitude. But Dan never criticised Harry, really. He never seemed to have much interest at all. Then, suddenly in the summer of 2019, he switched. Basically, he was hating on Harry and Meghan. He had previously been obsessed with Prince William. And then he switched to the Sussexes.”
Byline Times put a series of detailed questions to a lawyer for the Royal Family, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Dan Wootton, Christian Jones, Jones’ partner, and Simon Case.
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem are former colleagues of Dan Wootton’s from the News of the World between 2007 and 2011. None of the sources or analysts cited either in this story or wider investigation were paid
‘Reckless to the Point of Madness’: How the Murdoch Empire Hacked British Politics
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This week, News Group Newspapers – the publisher of The Sun and the now defunct News of the World – agreed a six-figure settlement with former Liberal Democrat minister Chris Huhne over a phone-hacking and intrusion claim. It also settled 11 other cases, including those of singer Melanie Chisholm, and actors Keith Allen and Catherine Tate.
Rupert Murdoch's company News Corp has now paid out a total of £1.2 billion in settlement of claims of unlawful privacy intrusion.
In the latest edition of Prospect magazine’s Media Confidential podcast, its Editor Alan Rusbridger – under whose editorship the Guardian newspaper exposed the phone-hacking scandal in 2011 – interviews former Guardian journalist Nick Davies, whose reporting revealed how claims of 'one rogue reporter’ masked the widespread use of hacking at the News of the World.
In this extract from the podcast, Davies explores the significance of the Huhne settlement.
'A Weapon' to Attack those 'Causing a Political Obstruction’
There were two big headlines. First, the Murdoch people carried on hacking voicemails for many years longer than we have previously understood, and did so in a way which was so reckless.
The second big headline is that, whereas all of the hacking we knew about already was about trying to get stories about people's personal lives, this, or at least a significant part of it, appears to have been devoted to advancing Rupert Murdoch's commercial interests, specifically his attempt to take over all of BSkyB.
The implication of that is that there were senior people organising it. It wouldn't be the familiar names from the News of the World newsroom. It would be somebody high up in the hierarchy. And somewhere up there, there's not only Rupert Murdoch but more immediately on the scene his son James.
I would describe it as a strong case of circumstantial evidence, which falls short of anything like a smoking gun. There isn't an email from A to B saying 'guess what, I just hacked Chris Huhne's email and discovered the following info'. So, as circumstantial cases go, it's strong, but I think it's not without doubt.
When we talk about the circumstantial evidence here, some of it is familiar stuff. People saying 'oh yeah, I remember my mobile phone would go, and when I picked it up, there was nobody there'. (If you're going to hack someone's voicemail, you have to get through when they're not answering the phone). 'I would show up for some meeting and there would be a photographer there. How the hell did they know I was going to be there? How on earth did they get this information?' So, there's that kind of foundation layer of circumstantial evidence.
The media company has now paid to settle a claim that alleges the involvement in, or at least the knowledge of, illegal activities by senior executives
Brian Cathcart
There are two other types of evidence extracted from the Murdoch company on the orders of the judge hearing the Huhne case.
First, records of payments to private investigators. And the second – which is the most important – is the records of phone calls made from Murdoch HQ in Wapping to the three senior Lib Dem MPs we're talking about here: Chris Huhne, Vince Cable and Norman Lamb.
What you see over a period of time is nearly 900 calls coming from the Wapping Murdoch building to these three MPs. The three MPs say 'but we weren't getting calls from The Sun or the News of the World', which are the people involved here. 'What are these calls for?' And some of them are suspiciously short. A reporter calls a politician, it's going to be a complicated conversation, at least 10 minutes, maybe longer. This is a minute or two, over and over again.
The private investigator invoices, and the calls from Wapping, happen in clusters. If we apply that circumstantial evidence to a timeline, you see a very interesting picture developing.
First of all, in late 2005, and early 2006, Charles Kennedy was the Leader of the Liberals. There's a problem with alcohol. He loses the leadership. There's an election with four candidates. And there is tremendous activity by the News of the World and The Sun hiring private investigators. We can see the payments going through, and the overwhelming majority of these short, nearly 900, mysterious calls are coming through the main switchboard cluster around the Charles Kennedy story and the election bid.
Two of the targets of that hacking, Simon Hughes and Mark Oaten, have separately settled, and it's been accepted that they were being hacked. Later that year, everything goes wrong when the police bust the News of the World's royal correspondent Clive Goodman in August 2006, seven months after the election hacking. Come the spring of 2009, as far as the official version of events is concerned, all of the phone-hacking has stopped.
Suddenly, the News of the World and The Sun pick up on Chris Huhne as a target. He's seeing somebody he's not married to. Suddenly, you've got this cluster of PI (private investigator) activity and mysterious, short phone calls from the Wapping hub number. That suggests to me that the Murdoch company really does think it's above the law and it can do what the hell it likes.
They carry on doing that with clusters after the Guardian starts publishing these stories that cause them such trouble. Within days of the Milly Dowler story in July 2011, the are clusters of PI activity and mysterious hub calls going into Vince Cable. There’s a phase in December 2011 when Lord Justice Leveson is sitting, hearing evidence based on the material that's come out. They're still hacking phones while that's going on. This is reckless to the point of madness.
There's a really interesting phase around Murdoch's attempt to take over BSkyB.
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We have the election in May 2010; the Coalition is now in Government. On 10 June, the Murdochs’ very smooth French lobbyist, Fred Michel, goes in to see Norman Lamb, a senior Lib Dem MP who is, at this point, parliamentary private secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. And guess what? There are six short hub calls to Lamb's phone on and around that day, 10 June, and six others to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, who's going to decide whether to issue an 'intervention notice' and start investigating the competition implications of the BSkyB bid.
That cluster of phone calls at that moment looks very much like somebody on the commercial side not looking for blackmail stuff and kompromat, but just trying to find out which way the ball is bouncing so that Fred can do better than perhaps he might be able to at the meeting with Norman Lamb.
At the beginning of September 2009, The New York Times (thanks to Alan Rusbridger’s initiative) publish a big story on phone-hacking. CEO Rebekah Brooks writes to Fred Michel an email saying 'what can we do?' Michel writes back in terms, this is slightly chilling: "The key will be for prominent Lib Dems, like Clegg and Huhne, to stay silent on it, and I think they will.”
A few weeks later, Vince Cable says 'I'm issuing an intervention notice. We're going to investigate this bid'. Two things happen.
One, we get lots of hub calls coming in – there's lots and lots of apparent evidence of espionage on Cable, the Business Secretary handling this huge deal, and on Norman Lamb, Nick Clegg's right-hand.
Will Lewis, senior executive in the Murdoch company, persuaded his old pals at the Daily Telegraph to send two young freelance journalists to Vince Cable's constituency meeting, where they secretly recorded him saying, essentially, 'I'm going to stop Murdoch doing this'. That recording meant that Vince Cable lost his job. Vince Cable didn't go quiet, so he lost his job. All of this is surrounded by these hub calls and PI invoices.
Granted, there's an element of doubt. But I think we are entitled to say that the Murdoch company used the News of the World as a weapon to try to attack the people who were causing a political obstruction and to appear to have engaged in illegal criminal activity to gather evidence which would assist them in doing that.
When people criticise Rupert Murdoch, they often think it's all about him intervening in the editorial line of his papers. That's actually the secondary issue. The primary one is Murdoch undermines, and occasionally overthrows, democratically elected governments. And never before, in all the research that I was doing, have we been able to see it happening in such fine detail.
Listen to the full interview in Prospect magazine’s Media Confidential podcast
Video: Amnesty shows Israel killed journalist, maimed another, in Lebanon
Warning: distressing footage – forensic examination of footage from 13 October attack, on Lebanese territory, on clearly marked journalists, shows Israeli tank fired once, then again less than a minute later; Amnesty calls for war crime investigation
Detailed analysis by Amnesty International of footage surrounding a 13 October attack on a group of clearly marked journalists shows Israeli tank crew knowingly fired two shells, less than a minute apart, at the group as they filmed in southern Lebanon. One journalist was killed and the other lost her leg in the needless and deliberate assault.
Amnesty has now published its findings under the title “Deadly Israeli Attack on Journalists In Lebanon Must be Investigated as a War Crime”:
Israel has relentlessly bombed schools, hospitals, news offices and homes in Gaza, killing thousands of civilians, mostly women and children – and at least sixty-eight journalists, more than were killed in any other conflict since 1990. Now it has been shown to have committed another wanton Lebanon attack on journalists doing their job, taking another life and wrecking more. The far-right Israeli regime is out of control and flouting international law, while lying wildly and incompetently to try to salvage its public image.
The same story has been seen time and again, including the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, targeted last year as she covered an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in West Bank.
Despite this, western politicians continue to cover for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals – and UK journalists appear to be ignoring the murder of their colleagues.
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Video: Israel’s ‘minister for Hamas rape propaganda is ‘proud to be a racist’
May Golan was withdrawn by Israel in May as proposed new New York consul after outrage over racist rally – now she’s pushing wild claims about Hamas atrocities
Israel’s ‘Minister for the advancement of women’, May Golan, has been at the forefront of the apartheid regime’s latest attempt to dig itself out of the pit of its PR and propaganda disaster over the 7 October Hamas raid.
Among a long list of failed propaganda attempts, the Israeli regime has been caught out trying to fake a ‘Hamas ambush’, faking a ‘recording’ of Hamas operatives, faking ‘evidence’ that Israel did not bomb a hospital and kill five hundred or more refugees – and seeing the news that Israel forces killed many of the Israelis who died during the raid, including the child it used for its atrocity-propaganda push, spread rapidly despite the silence of so-called ‘mainstream media.
So the regime’s latest tactic is to push claims that Hamas committed ‘widespread’ rapes during the raid – and, as so often, its ‘evidence’ is a single ‘eyewitness’. Israel has even been caught using an old image of a killed Kurdish woman soldier that it claimed was an Israeli rape victim. The ‘commissioner’ appointed to ‘investigate’ the rapes is an Israeli lawyer who has previously written a position to justify Israel circumventing the human rights of Palestinian captives and who runs an agency closely linked to Israel’s far-right government – and the commission did not even take any testimony from witnesses.
And one of the main faces of the latest propaganda push is May Golan – a woman who has told a far-right Israeli rally that she is ‘proud to be a racist’ and that ‘it’s our right to be racist’:
So great was outrage at her racism earlier this year that Israel withdrew its proposal to make her its consul in New York – yet despite this very recent history, her claims have been transmitted without scrutiny by the BBC and other UK and international ‘mainstream’ media, and with no mention of her record. Some media have even claimed ‘witnesses upon witnesses’ have testified to the commission about sexual assault by Hamas, even though it heard none.
Israel’s propaganda disaster continues – but so-called ‘mainstream’ media and commentators are slavishly, even enthusiastically, pushing the latest unevidenced narrative.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
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‘News Corp Was Out to Get Me’: Chris Huhne Condemns Murdoch Empire after Settlement for Phone-Hacking and Intrusion
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The former Liberal Democrat Cabinet minister Chris Huhne today accepted a six-figure sum from the publisher of The Sun and News of the World in settlement of a phone-hacking and intrusion claim – and promptly demanded a new police investigation into the Murdoch company.
In a statement outside court, Huhne accused named executives, including current News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks, of targeting him with the aim of destroying a vocal critic of the media multinational owned by Rupert Murdoch.
"News Corp was out to get me," he said. "My case is unprecedented because the unlawful information-gathering was directed not by journalists but by News Corp executives. The Metropolitan Police should reopen its investigation."
He had wanted the case to go to trial but late in the day the Murdoch company offered a settlement sufficiently large that he could not refuse it without assuming unacceptable financial risks.
Although the company had earlier drafted a defence challenging some of his allegations, Huhne asked today: "Why would they now pay up if they could prove I was wrong?"
His case is significant in several respects besides the questions it raises about the role of managers.
It is the first of three brought by senior Lib Dem politicians (Sir Vince Cable and Sir Norman Lamb will follow) alleging hacking and other illegal information gathering that was driven by political rather than journalistic motives.
Three Sensible, Non-Radical Things Labour Could Do to Reform our News Media
Nothing drastic is required if a new government is to tackle the obvious crisis in the way we get our news, while the benefits of change could be enormous
Brian Cathcart
It takes this intrusive activity into the highest reaches of government. Huhne presented evidence (some of it challenged in the News defence) of an intensive campaign against him that continued when he was a Cabinet minister in the Cameron Coalition Government, and sitting on ministerial committees such as the National Security Committee.
He presented evidence that these activities continued at least until 2011 – five years after the company publicly claimed it had been halted.
It is the latest case to include extensive allegations of illegal activities by The Sun newspaper. Hacking by the now defunct News of the World has long been beyond any possibility of denial, but the Murdoch organisation has yet to admit the involvement of The Sun – despite having already paid large sums to settle a number of claims against it.
As Huhne said in his statement, News has now paid to settle a claim that alleges the involvement in, or at least the knowledge of, illegal activities by senior executives.
"The key News corporation executives were... a director in charge of political and external affairs, and long-standing Murdoch lieutenant Rebekah Brooks. Both were overseen by family member James Murdoch," he said.
A new police investigation should focus on directors and managers, he added.
Brooks was among Murdoch executives tried in 2014 for offences related to illegal news gathering and a subsequent cover-up. She was acquitted, while Andy Coulson – former Sun editor and director of communications for Prime Minister Cameron – was jailed.
Huhne’s own political career ended in 2013 when he was jailed for perverting the course of justice in relation to a motoring offence.
According to the campaigning group Hacked Off, today’s settlement brings the total spent by the Murdoch organisation on settling hacking-related claims and associated legal costs to £1.2 billion over about a dozen years. All of Huhne’s legal costs are being met by The Sun’s holding company, News Group Newspapers.
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His claim against the papers was built largely on information that the company had been legally obliged to disclose, and it painted a picture of multi-faceted surveillance and intrusion by Murdoch employees on a nightmarish scale.
Among the allegations were that:
In two periods of a few days, each in 2009 and 2010, private investigators were paid a total of more than £10,000 to follow him.
Between 2006 and 2011, 222 calls were made from the Murdoch headquarters at Wapping to Huhne’s mobile phone which bore the hallmarks of voicemail interception.
Some 20 private investigators and investigation companies were commissioned for tasks including the illegal accessing of Huhne’s medical records, credit standing, utility bills, bank details and telephone records including his list of ‘friends and family’ numbers.
Messages allegedly accessed included both highly private matters – Huhne’s marriage was breaking up and he was forming a new relationship – and highly sensitive political communications with political figures not only in the Lib Dems but with others such as Labour Home Secretaries Charles Clarke and Alan Johnson.
Huhne said today that the "issues in this case are much wider than previous phone-hacking cases".
Former BBC reporter and producer Patrick Howse explores the damage done to the broadcaster in its attempts to appease enemies that want it destroyed
Patrick Howse
"News Corporation ordered unlawful information gathering in the UK that demonstrated exactly the same contempt for the democratic process shown by Fox when it knowingly lied about Trump winning the presidential election," he added.
"Searching for political kompromat, spying on government ministers for political gain and knowingly telling repeated lies to maintain sales and ratings should all be utterly unacceptable in any responsible media company, yet are the stock in trade of the two Murdoch companies [News and Fox].
"The US, UK and Australian political systems have allowed the Murdochs to become far too powerful. I confidently predict there will be little or no reporting of this settlement in The Times, Sunday Times, Sun, Sun on Sunday, TalkTV, Times Radio, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Marketwatch, Australian, Sky News Australia, News.com.au, Fox News or Fox TV stations because they are all owned by the Murdochs."
A News UK spokeswoman told The Times that Huhne's allegations were denied.
She said: "It is strongly denied that there was any corporate motive or direction to obtain information unlawfully. Huhne was a senior politician and stories published were legitimate and in the public interest."
‘The BBC’s Evisceration of Newsnight is a Craven Admission of Defeat’
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It’s fair to say that if any BBC programme deserves the title ‘flagship’, it’s Newsnight.
It feels like it’s always been there and has always been excellent. So, it’s no surprise that the BBC’s announcement of deep cuts and a radical restructuring that will change the scope and very nature of the programme has been greeted with dismay by many people who have worked on it, and many more who appreciate its storytelling and extremely high journalistic standards.
A highlight of recent years was Emily Maitlis’ interview with Prince Andrew, with the former Newsnight presenter taking to X (formerly Twitter) to lament the decision to reduce the editorial team by more than half and turn the programme into a talk show.
“Could the Prince Andrew interview have happened in this iteration of BBC Newsnight?” she asked. “Of course not. Aside from the painstaking prep and lengthy research that demanded from the team, [Prince Andrew] came to a flagship brand the BBC was proud of. It doesn’t feel that way tonight.
"Of course, there will still be interviews and debates and the theme music will carry on. But once the bosses send out a signal they don’t really *care* about a flagship investigative news programme – the guests and the audience start to wonder why they should."
The decision to eviscerate Newsnight has to be seen in the context of the relentless campaign against the very idea of public service broadcasting that has been waged by the Conservatives from the minute they came to office in 2010.
The biggest weapon has been funding and the BBC has been strangled by round after round of inadequate licence fee rises or freezes in an age of broadcast inflation.
This has been accompanied by viscous and constant political pressure. Faced with a Government that hates the BBC, wants it dead, and until it is dead wants it to be compliant, the corporation's leaders have chosen a policy of appeasement.
Former BBC reporter and producer Patrick Howse explores the damage done to the broadcaster in its attempts to appease enemies that want it destroyed
Patrick Howse
The disasters of Brexit and the institutional dishonesty and incompetence of the Conservative Governments went unchallenged by most of the BBC’s output – because its leaders were scared stiff of those governments.
Furthermore, increasingly and importantly, many of them – such as Sir Robbie Gibb, Richard Sharp, and Tim Davie – were Conservatives themselves.
Newsnight was one of the few programmes to buck this trend and actually try to hold the Government to account and call out lies.
Maitlis did so with Dominic Cummings over his Barnard Castle ‘eye test’; and Lewis Goodall, the programme’s policy editor, did some excellent analysis. Both left the programme, with many people seeing the grey influence of Gibb behind that outcome.
I think Newsnight’s fearlessness and willingness to call out lies created some powerful enemies in the BBC’s hierarchy – and they have finally succeeded in effectively killing it.
The programme is to be shortened and is to become solely a format for live discussion. It will lose its team of dedicated reporters and the producers who work with them on the films that have always been such a vital part of the programme.
Meirion Jones, a former Newsnight journalist who was instrumental in breaking the Jimmy Savile abuse story – the row over which led to his departure from the BBC – believes what he calls “the sausage factory” of neutered and homogenised BBC output has won.
“Everything coming out of the BBC will be one amorphous blob,” he told me. “We need programmes like Newsnight which have a little independence and a shorter editorial chain. We need expert reporters and producers who can take advantage of that freedom to make interesting, revelatory, surprising TV and really hold power to account whether that's exposing a multinational or putting a prince on the spot. Unfortunately, that seems to be the last thing BBC bosses want.”
Filmed reports – or packages to use the jargon – are a foundational part of Newsnight’s journalism. News reports in the BBC’s TV news bulletins would normally be under two minutes long, stretching to perhaps five minutes for a lead on the 10 o’clock news. Newsnight’s films might be 10 minutes long or even more. The programme’s pool of dedicated reporters – who all really know what they are doing – are complimented by talented and creative producers and video journalists who make engaging and informative television.
But more importantly, these packages get at the truth. They are examinations of complex issues by impartial, intelligent and well-informed journalists – not just a formulaic bad-tempered run through polarised arguments. In other words: they inform, educate and entertain Newsnight’s audience. It’s no wonder the BBC’s timid and servile leadership has decided to get rid of them.
What we will get instead is more of the same old 'he says this, but she says that' discourse that has done so much damage, not only to the BBC’s reputation, but also to Britain’s democracy.
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Instead of any attempt to get at the truth, we will have more Tufton Street think tankers spouting the views of their shadowy financial sponsors ‘balanced’ with honest people who know what they are talking about.
It is just the latest – and perhaps terminal – stage of the BBC’s adoption of a philosophy based on the idea that ‘the truth must lie somewhere in between’ two opposing views. This philosophy is quick, easy and, above all else, cheap to implement. It also avoids the need to take any courageous editorial decisions (a big plus for BBC managers), because all it needs is guests to represent ‘both sides of the argument’.
Stand by for flat-earthers up against professors of astrophysics, or influencers arguing with immunologists about virus spread, or newspaper columnists telling peer-reviewed research scientists there’s no such thing as climate change.
However robust and challenging these discussions might be, there will be no well-made, intelligent films crafted by impartial producers, video journalists and reporters to actually examine the issues and get to the truth.
There will just be noise, clipped up and shared on social media, where it will wash around for months, reinforcing increasingly polarised positions and allowing people with delusional and sometimes sinister views to feel validated.
The whole philosophy of this false balance, of ‘hearing both sides of the argument’, is built on sand. Sometimes there aren’t two sides – sometimes there’s just honest, well-informed people who are expected to argue their case against dishonest scoundrels who lie for a living. The truth does not lie ‘somewhere in between’ these two positions: the truth is not the midpoint between facts and lies.
So, the Newsnight decision makes perfect sense – if you want to save money, you want to keep the Government sweet, and you don’t care much about the BBC’s reputation for telling its audiences the truth. Viewed from every other angle, it can only be seen as a craven capitulation and an admission of defeat.
White House Fears Pause In Fighting Will Let Journalists See What’s Been Happening In Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/2f59faa78e8aa5aa64f67387188f3ccc/href
Israel and Hamas have reportedly agreed to a four-day ceasefire which will entail the release of 50 hostages held by Hamas in exchange for 150 hostages held by Israeli forces.
In an article titled “Biden admin officials see proof their strategy is working in hostage deal,” Politico describes the deal as “the administration’s biggest diplomatic victory of the conflict” and reports that White House officials are calling it a “vindication” of Biden’s decision making. Which is an entirely inappropriate level of verbal fellatio for an achievement as minimal as not murdering children for a few days.
Tucked away many paragraphs into this report is a sentence which is getting a lot of attention on social media today saying that according to Politico’s sources there has been some resistance to the pause in fighting within the administration due to fears that it will allow journalists into Gaza to report on the devastation Israel has inflicted upon the enclave.
“And there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel,” Politico reports.
Rania Khalek on Twitter: "The Biden administration worries that the pause in Gaza will allow journalists to show us the extent of destruction from Israel's genocide. These people are vile. https://t.co/AsOBfVcJ3I pic.twitter.com/D3NxUsEPXY / Twitter"
The Biden administration worries that the pause in Gaza will allow journalists to show us the extent of destruction from Israel's genocide. These people are vile. https://t.co/AsOBfVcJ3I pic.twitter.com/D3NxUsEPXY
In other words, the White House is worried that a brief pause in the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza will allow journalists to report the truth about the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza, because it will hurt the information interests of the US and Israel. They are worried that the public will become more aware of facts and truth.
Needless to say, if you’re standing on the right side of history you’re not typically worried about journalists reporting true facts about current events and thereby damaging public support for your agendas. But that is the side that the US and Israel have always stood on, which is why the US empire is currently imprisoning Julian Assange for doing good journalism on US war crimes and why Israel has a decades-long history of threatening and targeting journalists.
During Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza in 2021 the IDF reportedly targeted more than 20 Palestinian press institutions in the enclave, as well as the tower hosting the international outlets AP and Al Jazeera. During this current onslaught Israel has been killing dozens of Palestinian journalists, sometimes by actively bombing their homes where they live with their families. The IDF’s campaign to wipe out inconvenient news reporters has resulted in the Committee to Protect Journalists calling this the deadliest conflict on record for journalists anywhere, ever.
wsbgnl on Twitter: ""The spiralling death toll over a six-week period compares with the 42 journalists killed worldwide in the whole of 2022, including 15 who died covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine, widely considered a highly dangerous conflict for news media."https://t.co/u7JIA6VChZ pic.twitter.com/wg7DwLiFpj / Twitter"
"The spiralling death toll over a six-week period compares with the 42 journalists killed worldwide in the whole of 2022, including 15 who died covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine, widely considered a highly dangerous conflict for news media."https://t.co/u7JIA6VChZ pic.twitter.com/wg7DwLiFpj
Both the US and Israel have been attacking the press in this way because their governments understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world. They understand that while power is controlling what happens, ultimate power is controlling what people think about what happens. Human consciousness is dominated by mental narratives, so if you can control society’s dominant narratives, you can control the humans.
This is why the powerful have been able to remain in power in our civilization — because they understand this, while we the public generally do not. That’s why they bombard us with nonstop mass media propaganda, that’s why they work to censor the internet, that’s why Julian Assange languishes in prison, that’s why Israel routinely murders journalists, and that’s why the White House is afraid of what will happen if worldwide news reporters are able to get their cameras into Gaza.
____________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Video: Israel’s latest ‘evidence’ of Al Shifa Hamas base is embarrassingly feeble
CCTV footage – in a hospital the Israelis claimed had taped up all its cameras – showing wounded men being taken into a hospital is supposed to be proof Al Shifa hospital is a Hamas base
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari claiming a ‘hostage’ shows no signs of being hurt
The Israeli military’s attempts to justify its incessant bombing of Gaza’s hospitals and schools by claiming that Al Shifa – Gaza’s largest hospital – was a Hamas base started feebly and have become an international embarrassment.
‘Evidence’ so far put forward has been full of holes, including claiming an IDF laptop on a desk was a Hamas computer – and a claim so transparently false that even the BBC felt obliged to point out the obvious problems and changes in a supposed weapons stash between the IDF publishing a video of it and them allowing the BBC in to film.
And now, IDF propaganda-pusher Daniel Hagari is telling us to believe that Israel has ‘concrete evidence’ of Hamas’s use of the base, because of CCTV footage showing them bringing in two men – when at least one of them is clearly badly wounded and the other is staggering like he might well be and appears to have blood on his shirt.
It’s impossible to tell from the footage – if it’s genuine at all – whether the wounded men are Palestinian or Israeli – or, as Hagari claims, from the Far East – but we’re supposed to think that bringing two wounded men into a hospital is ‘conclusive proof’ of anything except that, well duh, you take wounded people to a hospital if you’re a humane human being.
Hagari also claims ‘Hamas’ bringing military trucks into a hospital is illegal, yet then goes on in his own presentation to show they are bringing wounded people into the hospital for treatment – the war crime would be to not bring them to the hospital:
And even if the men in Hagari’s video are hostages, Hamas is unlikely to have shot them and then try to save their lives – and evidence is now piling high that the deaths and woundings at the Beeri kibbutz were caused by Israeli troops ordered to destroy houses and vehicles even though they knew they might be killing Israelis – including an inadvertent admission by a senior Netanyahu spokesman – though this is unsurprisingly being ignored by the UK’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media.
When in a hole, you should stop digging – but Israel is so desperate to justify its war crimes that it is embarrassing itself more with each attempt. It would be funny if they weren’t trying to cover genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
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