CNN, which has given the scandal plenty of play, is starting to face questions about its treatment of allegations implicating its own Larry King replacement.
Seems Morgan was once an editor of the News of the World, the British tabloid that started all of this -- though his alleged improprieties were during his tenure as editor of a different tabloid: the Daily Mirror.
On Monday, a British politics blog titled Guido Fawkes claimed Morgan condoned hacking during his editorship.
"James 'Scottie' Scott, the Daily Mirror's showbiz reporter at the time, was listening into (English TV star) Ulrika Jonsson's voicemails when he was flummoxed by messages in her native Swedish," Fawkes wrote.
"Morgan decided to let '3AM Girl' Jessica Callan break the illegally obtained story under her byline in order to try and rid the column of its banal reputation."
The blog never supplied much evidence, but one of his sources might be Morgan's book, "The Insider," in which Morgan talks about a "little trick" that sounds a whole lot like hacking.
While different news outlets have begun to pick the story up, CNN has remained silent. Adweek pointed this out to CNN, which defended its silence by saying that Morgan has not been summoned to testify.
But while he has not been formally summoned like the Murdochs, MPs have said Morgan should face questioning.
Morgan himself addressed the speculation on Monday, telling the CBS daytime show "The Talk" that he had not broken any laws. However, neither CNN nor Morgan have responded to the allegations since then.Piers Morgan, the British journalist and talk show host who took over for CNN’s venerable Larry King earlier this year, is a former editor of the now-defunct News of the World, the tabloid at the center of the hacking scandal. Moreover, Morgan has been implicated in a separate celebrity phone hacking scandal while he was editor of the U.K’s Daily Mirror.
But so far, CNN has failed to report any of this. A ThinkProgress search covering the last 30 days of several media monitoring services and CNN’s own website, show the network has not so much as mentioned Morgan’s connection to the failed News Corp. tabloid, nor the separate Mirror allegation.
A CNN spokesperson confirmed the lack of coverage to Ad Week last week, “saying that the network hasn’t covered the matter because Morgan has not been officially called to testify in England.”
Morgan himself did address the issue on Monday, telling a CBS talk show that neither he nor his former publication have broken any laws.
The allegations are especially troubling given this passage from Morgan’s 2005 book, The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade:
Apparently if you don’t change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don’t answer, tap in the standard four digit code to hear all your messages. I’ll change mine just in case, but it makes me wonder how many public figures and celebrities are aware of this little trick.
As Ad Week notes, “Morgan has been sounding a fairly sympathetic note about Murdoch.” In the CBS interview, he said, “I’m not going to join the Murdoch bashing. I’ve always been a big admirer of his. He gave me my first break in journalism. He made me editor of [News of the World] when I was 28 years old.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment