Guido Fawkes says 'Morgan was at heart of the whole culture of hacking'
An MP has apologised to Piers Morgan over a blundering misquote from his book - but blogger tells American magazine that he would run it again.
Fawkes - real name Paul Staines- had been leading the charge against Morgan "as questions mount over the CNN host's involvement in the U.K. hacking scandal, " said the magazine.
In answer to one question, Staines said that he believed that Morgan , who has flatly denied any involvement in phone hacking, " was at the heart of that whole culture of hacking." Staines said in the interview he took "full responsibility" for the post that led to MP Louise Mensch thinking Morgan had admitted phone hacking in his book The Insider. She has since apologised to Piers Morgan for what she said at the Murdoch Parliamentary hearing. In the book, Morgan, conscious of calls he had received about his DTI shares case, feared he might have been a victim of the "little trick" of phone hacking. He wondered at the same time if public figures and celebrities knew about "the little trick." The Guido Fawkes blog quoted that remark and added in the same paragraph : " In March 2002, just one year later, this "little trick" was used by the Daily Mirror against Sven and Ulrika to produce a story that won the “Scoop of the Year” at the British Press Awards the following year." In fact the paragraph in the book did not mention the Sven and Ulrika story and the Mirror denies they hacked any phones to get that tale . p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 14.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; line-height: 16.0px; font: 14.0px 'Trebuchet MS'; color: #333233}span.s1 {color: #334377}span.s2 {text-decoration: underline ; color: #334377} Adweek asked Staines , " That post made it seem like he (Morgan) was writing something that he wasn’t. Right? Staines did not offer a correction. " I’ll reread it," he said. Asked what gets him excited, journalistically, he said, "Scalps. If we don’t get a scalp a year, we kind of feel we haven’t really done it. And we generally get a scalp a year. Obviously scandals like this bring us loads of traffic and that makes the advertisers happy. " Staines claimed other editors were "equally guilty" in the scandal. And he said he would run the controversial excerpt on Morgan again . "Absolutely. My job is to move the story along. And when we know that the basic story is correct and we don’t have nine-tenths of the building blocks and we’ve only got six-tenths of the building blocks we’ll go with it."
Updated:
Guido Fawkes has contacted The Drum to state that Morgan has admitted to 'nothing beyond theory' in his books.