Yeah, About that New Publisher

Jeff Bezos chose Will Lewis to be the new publisher of the Washington Post.

To say that Mr. Lewis has a "colorful" career would be a profound understatement, as he was hip deep into what was known as the, "Phone Hacking Scandal," where they broke into the voice mails of various prominent individuals as well as the phone of 13 year old girl's voice mail.

It appears that he was involved in the original actions as well as the coverup.

Some new developments seemed to confirm that, and when the managing editor of the Washington Post, Sally Buzbee, looked into this, he pressured her to drop the story, and then forced her out when she refused.

The most basic rule for editors and publishers is that you don't tell the newsroom what to do if you have a personal conflict of interest.

And this guy is who Jeff Bezos picked to save the paper:

Washington Post publisher Will Lewis pressured former top editor Sally Buzbee not to run a story about his involvement in a decade-old British phone-hacking scandal, and forced her out after she defied him.

Doing what he did violates a core doctrine of American journalism: that editors and publishers are not supposed to interfere with their own newsrooms’ coverage of issues in which they have a personal conflict of interest.

It’s really about as basic as it gets.

And having crossed that line, Lewis should hand in his resignation. Or Post owner Jeff Bezos should fire him.

Lewis reportedly said Buzbee’s decision to run the story over his objections was a “lapse in judgement.” But the lapse was all his. 

And it’s a lapse that casts into doubt the credibility of the entire news operation. What other coverage will Lewis interfere with next: News about Amazon, and its owner Jeff Bezos – who gave Lewis his job? News about his former boss, right-wing media titan  Rupert Murdoch?

Once the line has been crossed, all bets are off.

The lapse also reflects terribly on the two (white male fellow former Murdoch henchmen) friends Lewis hired to replace Buzbee.

Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal executive, is serving as interim editor of the newsroom through the November election, when he takes the helm of a new as-yet-undefined “second” newsroom. Robert Winnett, who currently edits a conservative British broadsheet, the Telegraph, will take over the main newsroom after the election.

He also leaned on NPR reporter David Folkenflik to spike his work on the same story.

This story has hit the New York Times as well: 

In 2011, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, News Corporation, faced a grave threat in Britain. Reporters at one of his tabloid newspapers were exposed for hacking the phones of celebrities, private citizens and, in one case, a murdered child for information.

Other misdeeds soon emerged, including the revelation that for years, tabloid reporters had paid for information from police officers and government officials.

Desperate to stop the scandal and appease prosecutors in Britain and abroad, News Corp chose Will Lewis, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, to clean up the mess.

He did just that. In his telling, he cooperated with the authorities, revealed wrongdoing and helped set the operation on a new course. Some former colleagues and hacking victims, though, long believed that he helped News Corp cover up the extent of the wrongdoing.

………

Last month, while Mr. Lewis prepared to restructure the Post newsroom, a judge in London ruled that victims of phone hacking could press ahead with more allegations in their wide-ranging lawsuit. Though Mr. Lewis is not a defendant, the lawsuit asserts that his cleanup was in part a cover-up to protect News Corp leaders. 

 This week, Mr. Lewis was caught off guard when The Post’s executive editor quit ahead of his reorganization. Then, The New York Times reported that Mr. Lewis had told her that covering the legal developments in the hacking case represented a lapse in judgment.

………

In court documents, phone-hacking victims say that Mr. Lewis allowed the deletion of huge volumes of emails that could have implicated senior News Corp figures in the scandal. The lawsuit claims that, on his watch, eight filing cabinets full of potential evidence disappeared.


The plaintiffs say that, rather than turning over everything to the authorities, he ignored information that could have implicated senior executives. They assert that he was part of a scheme to fabricate a security threat to justify deleting emails.

………

The phone-hacking scandal might have been old news had it not been for a shake-up at The Post.

The newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, appointed Mr. Lewis to be publisher late last year, and he began laying plans to split the paper into three sections: core news, which would include business and politics coverage; opinion; and a new, reader-friendly section focused on service journalism.

The Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, urged him not to make such a drastic change before the election in November. Mr. Lewis went ahead with it and offered Ms. Buzbee a job running the paper’s new section, an apparent demotion.

She abruptly quit last Sunday.

As a result, people, and in particular the Gray Lady, have looked more deeply into this affair and Mr. Lewis role in it, and it appears that he authorized stories that he knew that he were derived from the phone hacking.

Oh, snap:

The publisher and incoming editor of The Washington Post used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles as journalists in London, according to a former colleague, the published account of a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives.

Will Lewis, The Post’s publisher, assigned one of the articles in 2004 as business editor of The Sunday Times. Another was written by Robert Winnett, whom Mr. Lewis recently announced as The Post’s next executive editor.

Yeah, remember Robert Winnett from earlier?

The use of deception, hacking and fraud is at the heart of a long-running British newspaper scandal, one that toppled a major tabloid in 2010 and led to years of lawsuits by celebrities who said that reporters improperly obtained their personal documents and voice mail messages.

Mr. Lewis has maintained that his only involvement in the controversy was helping to root out problematic behavior after the fact, while working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.


But a former Sunday Times reporter said on Friday that Mr. Lewis had personally assigned him to write an article in 2004 using phone records that the reporter understood to have been obtained through hacking.

A second article in 2002 carried Mr. Winnett’s byline, and a private investigator who worked for The Sunday Times later publicly acknowledged using deception to land the materials.

Both articles were produced during a period when the newspaper has acknowledged paying the private detective explicitly to obtain material surreptitiously. That would violate the ethics codes of The Post and most American news organizations. The Sunday Times has said repeatedly that it has never paid anyone to act illegally.

After that story broke, a British businessman who was the subject of the article said publicly that his records had been stolen. The reporter, Peter Koenig, described Mr. Lewis as a talented editor — one of the best he had worked with. But as time went on, he said Mr. Lewis changed.

“His ambition outran his ethics,” Mr. Koenig said.

A second article in 2002 carried Mr. Winnett’s byline, and a private investigator who worked for The Sunday Times later publicly acknowledged using deception to land the materials.

………

In a meeting with Post journalists in November, Mr. Lewis defended the payments, saying that the money had been put into an escrow account to protect a source. But the consultant who brokered the deal said in a recent interview that there had been no escrow account and that he had doled out the money to sources himself.

I'm beginning to figure that Bezos hired this guy because of his lack of ethics and a his record of intervening to protect his superiors, and not in spite of this.