Guardian editor praises journalist who "brought it all into the open"
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in a wide-ranging to-the-camera video on the newspaper's website, confesses to bafflement as to why Murdoch decided to kill off the News of the World.
Mr Rusbridger says of Britain's top politicians, "We have seen both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition making the kind of statements that a week ago would have been considered suicidal for politicians, essentially conceding that they had turned a blind eye to the abuse of press power because they needed to keep in with Rupert Murdoch."
And he praises the determined reporting of Davies, the Guardian journalist who brought the scandal into the open. "If it hadn't been for him, none of us would have known anything about this." "No-one fully understands why the News of the World had to be sacrificed," says Mr Rusbridger. "No-one was calling for that. And it's not clear that the damage that had been done to the title - undoubtedly the brand was a very tarnished brand - was yet terminally toxic "That suggests to me that, either News International know there is further dirt coming down the slipway and they are acting in advance of that knowledge - or there may be commercial reasons why they just think it may be a more efficient operation. If so, that's a very brutal reason for killing off a title. " Or it may be - and some cynics have suggested this - that the paper had be sacrificed to save the skins of people who are still in the upper echelons of the company." Mr Rusbridger, who also said the PCC was "dead in the water" said that, at the end of a week in which the press has had a "bit of a hammering," and the reputation of journalists has been so tarnished, "we should remember that it was a journalist who brought this all out into the open. " If it hadn't been for Nick Davies and the fact that he kept at this absolutely remarkably over the last two-and-a-half years, none of us would have known anything about this. "It wasn't Parliament, it wasn't the police, it wasn't the regulator that got this story out. It wasn't lawyers. It was Nick Davies. It is a remarkable tribute to what journalism can be and what the best of journalism is in a week in which we have also seen a lot of the worst of journalism ." Mr Davies has admirers well beyond his own newspaper. Peter Oborne, Chief Political Commentator of the Telegraph, writes today, "Rupert Murdoch’s web is unravelling. . . brought down almost single-handedly by the brilliant Guardian campaigning journalist Nick Davies ." Drum note: Mr Davies in a 2009 interview on the Browser website, gave as his first choice in the Five books feature , All the President’s Men - and said that was his inspiration in going into investigative journalism.