Peter Hoskin

More fuel for the media bonfire

I read the news today, oh boy — and it seems that Paul McCartney has waded into the phone hacking row. After claims by his ex-wife, Heather Mills, that her voicemails were accessed by the Daily Mirror, the former Beatle is now set to share his own concerns with the police. Although we cannot yet be sure of the specifics of Sir Paul’s case, the whole episode is likely to increase the pressure on Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Mirror when the alleged hacking of Mrs Mills’ phone went down. Indeed, John Whittingdale, the chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, has said of Morgan that, “I hope he will return to the UK and I imagine that there will be some questions which will be put to him, possibly by the police, on the basis of the evidence that has emerged”.

In view of all that, I hope CoffeeHousers don’t mind me repeating a pair of graphs that we recently put together for the magazine. I explained them fully here, but, to summarise, they compare those newspaper groups that were implicated in buying information from a single private eye in the early 2000s with how much coverage those newspaper groups had given to the phone hacking scandal at the start of last month. As you’ll see, the Trinity Mirror Group doesn’t coming out of it too well:

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