Rob Winnett, a U.K. journo vet is set to take over WaPo in the fall. Some of his reporting tactics may raise eyebrows among the newsroom he’s about to lead.
” for his reporting across London newspapers. But as he’s set to take the helm of the storied D.C. newsroom later this year, the one where Woodward and Bernstein changed history by breaking Watergate, the shady methods he used to secure some of those scoops may come back to haunt him.
They included placing a reporter undercover in a government department where she removed official secrets which Winnett used to break stories. The reporter was arrested and could have been jailed., a paper he joined in 1995 while still a student at Oxford. One of his colleagues at the time was David Leppard who, according to formerThose methods included having a reporter go undercover within the government and leak its secrets.
According to Davies, Winnett and Leppard placed junior reporter Claire Newell within the U.K.’s Cabinet Office, the British civil service unit that supports the Prime Minister and their cabinet, in 2003 to feed them a stream of government documents. She worked as a temp within the Cabinet Office for 15 months until October 2004. After an angered Tony Blair ordered an investigation into the leaks, the country’s elite counter-espionage police unit arrested Newell for alleged leaking.
The use of so-called “checkbook journalism” has largely been disavowed by journalism ethics organizations—including the SPJ, which noted in its code of ethics that, while the practice has been used in the U.K., it can be “ethically perilous.” That issue, however, was dismissed by Lewis in a 2020“The payment thing is a red herring,” he said. “This is one of the most important bits of journalism, if not the most important bit of journalism, in the postwar period.
But in 2011, another brewing scandal in British journalism, the hacking of cell phones–including those of Princes William and Harry–by journalists from Rupert Murdoch’sexploded. Davies revealed that reporters had deleted the voicemail message of a missing 13-year-old girl, potentially impeding the search for the teenager, who was later found murdered., to run the so-called Management and Standards Committee, to oversee News Corp’s response to the scandal.
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