YOU WOULDNT READ ABOUT IT Eric Campbell* muses on Londons phone hacking scandal.

Ive always been grateful for a tabloid upbringing. As a cadet on the now defunct Sydney Sun, I learned how to write stories for tired commuters holding a paper in one hand and a train pole in the other. Good yarns were attention-grabbing, entertaining and easily digestible. Sex and celebrities usually won out over foreign news. In those days, the early 80s, we all worshipped the red tops, as Britains tabloids are known. Sure, the stories were tacky and intrusive. Did it really matter if an ex-footballer had shagged someone from Coronation Street? But the crisp writing, the cheeky headlines and the sheer audacity of the exposes were a wonder to behold. We cadets would hang out for the mail bag bringing week-old copies of The Daily Mail, News of the World and our British namesake, The Sun. Wed study them like tomes and imagine life on Fleet Street, prowling pubs and night spots in search of scoops and scandals. Two decades on, Londons tabloids had grown fat and lazy. Instead of wearing out shoe leather, reporters were paying private investigators to hack famous peoples phone messages. It was unethical, illegal and usually pointless. My main criticism of phone hacking is by and large it was rubbish, a hack turned publican named Paul McMullan told me. I mean you got really rubbish information. You got stuff like, Im just going up to Tescos to get a pint of milk, would you like anything else love? Well thats not great is it? Its not like oh Im just smuggling in some plutonium. I was on assignment in Britain last October looking at the ongoing scandal of phone hacking by McMullans former paper, The News of the World. As he explained it to me, hacking was simple in the early days of mobile phones. Youd ring a number with one phone then quickly dial the same number from another phone to get through to voicemail. Punching in the pre-set code of 0000 usually got you to message playback. If the code had been changed things got more complex. Youd have to hire a private investigator to bribe someone at the phone company to get the new code. The practice became so common that bills for PIs (private investigators) soared to embarrassing levels. Some months we spent three or four thousand quid, McMullan told me. When I became Deputy Features Editor I thought my God, how much are we spending? Youre joking! Weve really got to cut this down. Stop ringing up the PIs. Do some work properly yourselves for a change. It all started to unravel in 2006 when police charged the papers Royal Correspondent, Clive Goodman with paying a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire to hack the Royal Familys phone messages. Four years on, despite mounting evidence of widespread phone hacking, the papers owner, News International (part of Rupert Murdochs empire) was still insisting Goodman had been a rogue reporter. McMullan knew that was a lie.

At the time in the late 90s and in the early 2000s I think it was something that everybody did and I did it and I put my hands up to it. Anyone in the showbiz field, well it was a tool of the trade. I mean you were not just expected to do it, you were expected to get a story. It was a fascinating story of criminality and cover-up. Police had found evidence that Mulcaire had hacked thousands of peoples phones on behalf of journalists, including the then deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. But nobody else had been charged and the papers editor, Andy Coulson, whod resigned in disgrace, was now running the Prime Ministers media office. News Corporation executives, including Murdoch himself, were running the palpably false line that Goodman had been the only reporter involved. You couldnt make up a better story about Britains tabloids. Just about every celebrity and politician you could think of was worried his or her phone had been hacked. Newspaper executives were paying out millions of pounds to keep the issue out of the press, settling celebrity legal actions with huge payouts before they went to court. A former police commander told me investigators were scared to prosecute journalists because they were scared the papers would turn against them. This was a cracker yarn that would have brought my old bosses from The Sun rushing back to Jones Street from their mid-morning crme-de-menthes at the Great Western pub. Strangely enough, the story was barely being covered in Australia by our largest newspaper group, News Limited. Editors and reporters seemed unable to see any story in celebrities having their phones hacked. Why of course not. How could a story involving Elle Macpherson, Jude Law and Sienna Miller be of any interest to Daily Telegraph readers? The Australian, which publishes the countrys only serious media section, seemed equally oblivious to the worlds biggest media story. Even the editor of Cut and Paste would have found it hard to selectively pick a paragraph from the scant coverage to prove the story was covered with a blanket. The only lengthy article I could find echoed the corporation line; competitor newspapers had devoted extraordinary resources to beat up the story despite several inquiries producing no evidence. Oh dear. As the world now knows, the rogue reporter line was as about as accurate as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thanks largely to investigations by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, sordid details are emerging like a dam bursting, with a daily torrent of revelations of malpractice and corporate deceit. Timid parliamentary inquiries into the affair have at last found some backbone. Even the flawed police investigation is now facing a judicial review. News Ltd papers have even started, kind of sort of, writing stories about it, though without the usual acreage devoted to imagined failings at the ABC. In fairness to Murdochs morally grubby British reporters and executives, they were just the only ones caught. It was common knowledge that all the tabloids were hacking phones. You only had to look at the scant coverage in papers like The Daily Mail, relegating the unfolding scandal to News in Brief rather than following the customary practice of kicking competitors in the goolies.

The collective failure of the red tops to fess up to what theyd done and offer guarantees they wouldnt do it again has left the once mighty fish-wrappers in a parlous state. Politicians on both sides of the house may still be intimidated by the press barons but judges hold no such fears. The unwillingness of parliament to protect even the privacy of phone calls has been more than countered by judicial zeal, with judges tossing out super-injunctions to protect the privacy of otherwise publicity-hungry celebrities. No amount of squealing about the publics right to know whos up who (and see the pics) is likely to bring back the good old days. As the former Labour Party spin doctor Alastair Campbell blogged about a recent super-injunction: The papers are under pressure. Take away from their staple diet stories of kiss and tell and the synthetic anger and envy in which they specialise and the pressure grows. That is what the last few days have been about. Magna Carta? Cant. Freedom of expression? Hypocrisy, especially in light of the near blackout on phone hacking. Sex sells, apparently. Celebs sell, apparently. What they are fighting for is the right to write about sex and celebs. Thats it. Back in Australia, of course, were wrapping ourselves in moral zeal over growing judicial constraints on naming prominent defendants and ... oh, humanity! ... printing photos of dead kids. But with News Ltd at the forefront of the Right to Know campaign, I wonder if a tad of credibility has been lost by its long failure to notice the dead cat in its own reeking attic. The publics right to know surely extends to knowing that Murdochs London papers fostered a culture of criminality and spent years trying to cover it up. Its a good yarn after all, and as my tabloid chief-of-staff used to tell me, thats what sells papers. Eric Campbell is a roving reporter on Foreign Correspondent on ABC 1 and author of the best-selling memoir Absurdistan.