Operation Motorman and Hugh Grant put British press on trial

London - It was only a matter of time before British newspapers beyond Rupert Murdoch’s empire were dragged into the inquiry into media ethics, and actor Hugh Grant, who has led a personal crusade against the tabloids, was the first, but won’t be the last, to broaden allegations far beyond the News of the World. The headlines paid attention to Grant's allegation that the _Mail on Sunday_ could only have got details of a story connected to his relationship with Jemima Khan by hacking his phone. However, his testimony went much further implicating not just another newspaper but by highlighting Operation Motorman, a investigation into the trafficking of illegally obtained information. A 2005 report based on the investigation was a stinging indictment into practices not just at a range of tabloids but also the quality broadsheets and British magazines as well as banks, local councils and creditors. Grant said that it was a myth that “egregious abuses of privacy happened only at The News of the World”. He pointed to an Information Commissioner’s Office report in 2006 based on the Operation Motorman investigation that found that 32 newspapers and magazines used information obtained by private investigator “Steve Whittamore and his illegal dark arts”. He added: [caption id=“attachment_137558” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“Hugh Grant appears for the Leveson inquiry Into Culture, Practices And Ethics Of The Press. Getty Images”]  [/caption] “Dark arts that included blagging and bribing, among others, phone companies and the (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency).” Grant’s entire testimony is available on the Leveson Inquiry site. ‘Operation Motorman’ implicated other newspapers Operation Motorman began after British authorities uncovered in 2003 a vast network of police and public officials selling illegally obtained private information to private investigators. The information was then sold mostly to newspapers and magazines but also to insurance companies, local councils and other groups that had a financial interest in such information. The revelations led to two separate investigations: Operation Motorman, conducted by the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Merseyside Police, and Operation Glade, conducted by the Metropolitan Police. The case was explosive but seemed to fizzle. In 2004, private detectives Whittamore and John Boyall, the heart of the network, as well as two others plead guilty and were given conditional discharges. The Guardian’s Nick Davies said that Whittamore “is only one of a dozen or more private investigators who have been involved in breaking the law for Fleet Street”. The initial release of the report led to little reform, although the self-regulatory body for the newspaper industry, the Press Complaints Commission, said that it strengthened its professional standards. To support stronger action and its call for two-year jail terms for those who traffic in illegally obtained personal information, the Information Commissioner’s Office issued a follow up report, What price privacy now? in 2006 detailing the number of instances that individual newspapers and magazines and journalists at those publications dealt in illegally obtained private information. The ICO published a league table of transactions and the number of journalists or clients at those publications. The Daily Mail tops the table by a large margin, with 58 journalists engaging in 952 transactions. The Sunday People comes second 802 transactions by 50 journalists. The now defunct News of the World, at the centre of the furore over phone hacking, comes in a distant fifth on the table 228 transactions by 23 journalists. The Daily Mail says that data requests uncovered in Operation Motorman were legal. The tabloids were not the only newspapers listed in the league table. The Guardian’s Sunday stablemate the Observer conducted 103 transactions, and Rupert Murdoch owned the Sunday Times came much further down the list, with 4 transactions. The Observer took great pains to distance itself from hacking allegations, saying that Operation Motorman focused on violations of the Data Protection Act and not phone hacking. The News of the World might have been far down on the list , but Operation Motorman wasn’t an investigation of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World allegations. Thousands of names have been found in Mulcaire’s notebooks. In September, the Independent on Sunday reported that the lead investigator for Operation Motorman said that “his team was forbidden from interviewing journalists who were paying for criminal records checks, vehicle registration searches, and other illegal practices”. In a signed witness statement provided to the Independent, the original lead investigator for Operation Motorman said that investigators were allowed to question journalists to ask them what they were doing with all of the phone numbers and other information given to them. Why not? “It was fear – they were frightened,” he told the Independent. After reviewing the files, the Independent lists a number of newspapers and newpaper groups implicated in paying for illegally obtained information including the Sunday Express, Rupert Murdoch’s News International and also Trinity Mirror. The focus of the coverage has been on phone hacking, to the exclusion of other serious allegations of wrong doing at British newspapers. The coverage following Hugh Grant’s testimony focused almost entirely on his allegations against the Mail on Sunday. It has long been clear that the unethical and illegal practices were wider spread than a rogue reporter or even a rogue newspaper. It remains to be seen whether the Leveson inquiry will successfully move to a broader review of press practices, as is its remit. The British press will be keen to keep a tight focus and a tight lid on scope of shady practices that authorities have known about for years.