ABSTRACT
The printed issues of Britain’s most popular national newspapers, known as red-tops, have suffered substantial losses in circulation since the arrival of the internet. This chapter discusses the history of red-top investigative journalism, the context in which phone-hacking occurred, a taxonomy of the methods used and a look at recent investigations. Misbehaviour by popular newspaper journalists did not begin in 2006, when the phone-hacking phenomenon emerged in public. ‘Blagging’, the custom of obtaining information over the phone through impersonation, is well known to journalists from their earliest days in the trade. The phenomenon of phone hacking, first surfaced in public in August 2006 with the arrest of the NoW’s Royal Editor, Clive Goodman, and a freelance investigator and self-confessed blagger, Glenn Mulcaire.
