Hack Attack
The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
The definitive book on how the News of the World phone-hacking scandal reached the highest echelons of power in the government, security, and media in the UK, from the journalist who broke the story.
At first, it seemed like a small story. The royal editor of the News of the World was caught listening to the voicemail messages of staff at Buckingham Palace. He and a private investigator were jailed, and the case was closed. But Nick Davies, special correspondent for The Guardian, knew that it didn't add up. He began to investigate, and ended up exposing a world of crime and cover-up, of fear and favor—the long shadow of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
Hack Attack is the mesmerizing story of how Davies and a small group of lawyers and politicians took on one of the most powerful men in the world—and beat him. It exposes the inner workings of the ruthless machine that was the News of the World, and of the private investigators who hacked phones, listened to live calls, sent Trojan horse emails, bribed the police, and committed burglaries to dig up tabloid scoops. Above all, it is a study of the private lives of the power elite. It paints an intimate portrait of the social network that gave Murdoch privileged access to government, and allowed him and his lieutenants to intimidate anyone who stood up to them.
Spanning the course of the investigation from Davies's contact with his first source in early 2008 to the resolution of the criminal trial in June 2014, this is the definitive record of one of the major scandals of our time, written by the journalist who was there every step of the way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The reporter who broke Britain's phone-hacking scandal probes the media industry's corrupt nexus of power and propaganda in this searing expos . Guardian journalist Davies (Flat Earth News) recounts his investigation of the Rupert Murdoch tabloid News of the World and the illegal "dark arts" including hacking into the voice mail of celebrities, politicians, and ordinary crime victims and bribing police officers for information that it used to unearth salacious scandal stories. His narrative, studded with new revelations about Fleet Street's spying techniques, flows like a breathless thriller. Helped by secret sources with codenames like "Lola" and "Jingle," he struggles to tease out information, and is obstructed by the stonewalling News, by Scotland Yard officials with chummy relationships with the News who withheld explosive evidence of its misconduct, and by other media organizations that dismissed and attacked his reporting. Daviese paints a lurid, gossipy picture of Fleet Street, especially Murdoch's newspapers, whose rabid pursuit of sex and dirt, he argues, serves not just to sell papers but also to smear opponents and sway politics in favor of Murdoch's business interests. Davies's vision of an Orwellian media tyranny goes over the top he likens the Murdoch regime to Animal Farm's pigs-turned-oppressors but this is investigative journalism at its most riveting and provocative. Photos.
