WSJ on Milly : 'Big financial hit for episode that produced little for NotW'
The act of hacking Milly Dowler's phone literally brought the whole house crashing down on News International. Today the Wall Street Journal comments on how little of the actual story made it into the News of the World.
The WSJ says, "The payments related to the Dowler case would represent a big financial hit for an episode that produced very little for News of the World in terms of the kind of salacious scoops the paper coveted."
On April 14, 2002, says the WSJ, the News of the World printed a short article, which ran inside the newspaper, containing discussions of Milly Dowler's voice mails.
Early versions of that day's article contained detailed quotes from voice mails, the Journal recently disclosed. But in the final edition, the article contained only one passing reference to a voice mail.
The final version of the story focused on the possibility that a hoaxer had been posing as Ms. Dowler, and had hampered the police probe of her disappearance.
Phone-hacking and other allegations of wrongdoing are the subject of a criminal investigation , said the WSJ , noting that a string of the paper's former editors and other staff have been arrested in recent months. None of the people arrested this year have been charged.
Police have also been notifying more and more people that they may have been a victim of phone hacking.