Readers Don’t Trust Dirty Tricks
In March of 2002, Milly Dowler, age 13, left her home in Walton-on-Thames for the last time. After she disappeared, her parents called the police. A search began. Blanket news coverage followed. In those days, probably a dozen British tabloids and half a dozen higher-brow broadsheets all chased the same stories. In an effort to beat his newspaper’s rivals, an investigator employed by News of the World, one of those tabloids, hacked into Dowler’s cellphone. He was looking for messages that offered clues; he may or may not have deleted some messages, thereby giving her family false hope that she might be alive.
A few months later, Dowler’s body was found. Several years after that, British police uncovered evidence of the phone hack, along with evidence that the phones of many other people—actors, athletes, Prince Harry—had been hacked by journalists in pursuit of other stories. The nation recoiled in horror: What kind of monster would hack the phone of a missing child? The Dowlers, and its parent company, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch shut down the paper and, over many years, paid out millions of pounds in damages. is still in the courts.
