Paper Monitor
11:08 UK time, Tuesday, 19 July 2011
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It is high noon - or, more accurately, high 1430 BST- for the biggest news story of the year.
The introductory paragraph to the offers both a neat summary of events to date and an encapsulation of the fevered mood among those covering them:
The phone hacking scandal that has claimed the jobs of Britain's two most high-profile police officers, caused the closure of one of the country's most famous newspapers, prompted 10 arrests so far and led to calls for the resignation of the Prime Minister reaches a critical juncture today with a moment of high drama to rival anything that the British media has produced before, either in real life or fiction.
The impending appearance of Rupert and James Murdoch before a committee of MPs investigating the affair has Fleet Street barely able to contain its anticipation.
According to the media tycoon "faces the modern equivalent of being flogged through the streets of London... This is Rupert Murdoch's Tyburn."
"Westminster is a seething cocktail of charges and conspiracies, with a lynch mob mentality ruling the Commons' corridors."
Even the Murdoch-owned Times predicts millions will tune in to watch the confrontation live, quoting a source who predicts the spectacle will be
Dissenting voices are, however, to be found in the Daily Mail. Its whether "all sense of proportion been lost in this furore". Likewise, says he finds himself "out of sympathy with people -- mostly politicians and journalists -- who are reacting much as might be expected if an enormous meteorite had landed on Hemel Hempstead".
Whatever your view of the affair, Paper Monitor directs your attention to - the reporter responsible for pursuing the scandal to its current point - profiling Sean Hoare, the first ex-News of the World journalist to claim that his former editor Andy Coulson knew about phone-hacking.
Hoare was, of course, found dead yesterday, and his posthumous profile is one of the most powerful pieces of writing Paper Monitor has read for some time.
Davies portrays Hoare as a man of contradictions - a working-class "'clause IV' socialist who still believed in public ownership of the means of production" and yet "found himself up to his elbows in drugs and delirium" while working the showbusiness beat.
Hoare was, Davies says, a "born reporter... a warm, kind man, who could light up a lamp-post with his talk" and yet, unlike many of his less scrupulous colleagues, "did not play the bully with his sources".
But the lifestyle took its toll. As he threw himself into covering the celebrity world, he would start each day with "a rock star's breakfast" - a line of cocaine and a shot of Jack Daniels.
As his health deteriorated, he was sacked by Coulson, prompting him to speak out. Poignantly, Davies describes a troubled soul who nonetheless sought redemption:
He liked to say that he had stopped drinking, but he would treat himself to some red wine. He liked to say he didn't smoke any more, but he would stop for a cigarette on his way home. For better and worse, he was a Fleet Street man.
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