Introduction

On 5 July 2011, I was working flat out to finalise my PhD on how production processes affected storytelling on British crime dramas. At the same time, I was putting the finishing touches to an application for a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford, exploring much of the same territory but this time looking at crime reporting. In the middle of this, a friend texted me to ask if I’d heard about the phone- hacking scandal and told me to check the news.

I checked The Guardian’s website to see that the lead headline read ‘Missing Milly Dowler’s voicemail hacked by News of the World’. The report by Nick Davies and Amelia Hill revealed that when 13-year-old Milly, who was later found murdered, had gone missing in 2002, the News of the World had hacked or gained illicit access to her phone. The story was followed by further revelations that bereaved relatives of victims of the 2005 bombings in Central London had also had their mobile phones hacked; and that payments had been made by News International, then the publisher of the News of the World, to a number of Metropolitan Police officers. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, and the assistant commissioner, John Yates, resigned. Days later, the News of the World closed down. There could not have been a more auspicious time for submitting a proposal to research police/news media relations in the United Kingdom.

I started my research at Oxford in the autumn of 2011. At the same time, three reviews of police/news media relations (HMIC, 2011; Filkin, 2012; Leveson, 2012a, 2012b) and three major police investigations – Operation Elveden (into phone hacking), Operation Weeting (into illegal payments by the press) and Operation Tuleta (into computer hacking) – were being carried out. Although evidence was still being heard daily as part of the Leveson Inquiry, there had already been a swift clampdown on all contact between the press and police, both official and unofficial.

Among the crime reporters I spoke to at this time, there was anger at the way in which many of their colleagues had been arrested, with respondents describing dawn raids, the breaking down of doors and what they suggested was overzealousness on the part of the Metropolitan Police.