Journalism isn’t about winning,” deadpans Nick Davies some way into The Hack. “It’s about the gradual erosion of self-worth.” Davies, played by an impish David Tennant, entered the 21st century as an enervated journalistic Cassandra. The Hack opens with him appearing on the BBC’s Today programme in 2008 to defend his new book Flat Earth News – an indictment of a news trade he believed had surrendered its pursuit of the truth in favour of recycling press releases and turning out “falsehood, distortion and propaganda” – and pretty much going down in flames.
For neither the first nor last time the journalistic establishment treated an attempt to hold it to account as an attack on its core freedoms.
“Alan, I’m knackered,” Davies laments afterwards to his editor at The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. “Nobody likes me.”
Barely has he slunk out of the newsroom than his phone rings with an anonymous tip that will lead to the story that defines his career: the revelation that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World was engaged in an industrial-scale campaign to hack the private voicemails of hundreds of people. Apart from the personal harm it did to its targets, the practice extended to the corruption of police officers and interference in a murder investigation.
The scandal reached into the office of then-Prime Minister David Cameron, but first it had to be proved. That was a slow, frustrating process that exposed Davies and The Guardian to the full ire of the Murdoch machine. The same was apparently true of the first attempt to adapt Davies’ book about the saga, Hack Attack. George Clooney announced in 2014 he would produce and direct the movie – then couldn’t raise the finance. “Nobody in the movie business wanted to invest in a project that would alienate Rupert Murdoch,” Davies said later.
British screenwriter Jack Thorne (Adolescence, This is England, His Dark Materials) was faced with another challenge: the whole thing is fiendishly complicated. The frequency with which Tennant breaks the fourth wall to deliver bursts of exposition and context-setting ruffled some UK reviewers, but was necessary Thorne says (“if we were trying to do a drama that had exposition in every single scene we would have really struggled to tell an entertaining story”).
If viewers weren’t already feeling the need to reach for Wikipedia, Thorne and his producers also decided to write in a second story with another real-life protagonist, Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook.
The lack of long-term consequences for most of those involved in the scandal is striking.
So after an opening episode that plays as a slightly surreal scoop drama, we’re tipped into a police procedural, with Robert Carlyle bleak and brilliant as Cook, a man crushed from all sides. The inspiration was the twin worlds of the Disney+ show WandaVision and, yes, we’re meant to be wondering if we’re accidentally watching the same programme.
That added enough story to require seven episodes to get through, but it does all begin to converge by the fifth (Davies does his philosophising about journalism over a drink with Cook). If it feels like a long road there, the meeting of the narratives underlines the rise of the Murdoch organisation as a secret power able to engage in a quid pro quo with the Met’s leadership, and willing to bribe officers in its ranks for information it wanted.
Cook’s boss, John Yates, eventually resigned after the Leveson inquiry found he had been “inappropriately dismissive” of evidence indicating that the practice of phone hacking had been far more widespread than supposed.
But the meeting of the storylines also suggests that virtuous journalism and dogged police work can strain ethical boundaries. The Hack’s major revelation is the key role of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown, wonderfully played by Dougray Scott, had a personal motive for helping Davies and Cook orchestrate the story so it stuck (he’d been hacked), but also an essentially political motive. He did not want News International to be able to take over BSkyB, believing it would make Murdoch’s power untenable. He succeeded: News withdrew its bid amid the scandal.
One of the challenges faced by Davies and Rusbridger in the series is trying to get anyone else to care about their story. It is Rusbridger (played in an odd but inspired piece of casting by Toby Jones, who is nearly a foot shorter than the real Rusbridger) who comes up with the idea of sharing Davies’ work with the New York Times, which has investigative resources and isn’t conflicted like the British papers. The alliance later extended into historic collaborations between the papers to report stories from Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. It signalled a new era for the practice of news.
But can the creators of The Hack really expect viewers who aren’t terminal news nerds to care? They do their best. A few elements don’t come off, notably the attempt to link Davies’ real-life abuse as a child at the hands of his father to his determination to reveal the way the Murdoch papers abused anyone in their way. But the writing is excellent, and a squad of name actors give their best.
The lack of long-term consequences for most of those involved in the scandal is striking. Andy Coulson resigned as Cameron’s communications director and served 18 months for phone-hacking as editor of News of the World and his predecessor, Rebekah Brooks, was acquitted. The Conservative government scrapped the second part of the Leveson inquiry, into the corruption of police, and Keir Starmer’s Labour government appears to have reneged on a commitment to revive it (Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, rubber-stamped Yates’ questionable decisions).
It may be that The Hack is the closest the public will get to an accounting.
The Hack, TVNZ 1, from Sunday, November 9, 9.30pm, and on TVNZ+
