Citation Needed - News of the World

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

The News of the World was a weekly national "red top" tabloid newspaper published every Sunday in the United Kingdom from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the world's highest-selling English-language newspaper, and at closure still had one of the highest English-language circulations.[4] It was established as a broadsheet by John Browne Bell, who identified crime, sensation and vice as the themes that would sell most copies.[5] The Bells sold to Henry Lascelles Carr in 1891; in 1969, it was bought from the Carrs by Rupert Murdoch's media firm News Limited. In 1984, as News Limited reorganised into News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation, the newspaper transformed into a tabloid and became the Sunday sister paper of The Sun.

Hello and welcome. Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, be a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. This is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and for today's discussion of the news game, I'll be the kid with the hat yelling extry-extry. And I actually have one of those hats. I'm joined by the rest of the journalism team.

We have the chief editor, the investigative reporter, the muscle and the grease man. Cecil, Marsh, Tom, and Eel. I just wish Eli would do one big meltdown an episode instead of 25 micro meltdowns. It'd be so much easier to cut that. It's true. It's true. Okay. And I know I'm not the chief editor

because I'm pretty sure that was a euphemism for what your people did you in the Trail of Tears. Jesus. I don't even know how to follow a joke from a British guy about the problematic nature of violent colonialist expansion now. Okay. With a yes and...

Tea parties. Tom, were they... Yes. All right. Let's get into it. Marsh, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? Or we're going to be talking about today. The News of the World. Great.

Sounds fucking terrible. What's the news of the world? The media landscape in the UK is quite different from that of the US. Because over here, news readers aren't hired on the strength of their vocability and are rolling news channels. typically don't jam their screens sawful of Kairons, logos, scrolling text alerts,

and over-the-top animated segment idents that you can only assume the director's vision was, what if Times Square was a Japanese arcade game? Also, like, we don't cut up on news into three-minute chunks that are punctuated by at least four minutes of aggressively-volumed adverts, half of which consists of little more than a list of all the ways you should ask your doctor

whether this new medication might accidentally kill you. Okay, don't take it if you're, we're allergic. It's right there in the warning. Also, don't tell me you don't care about looks in your broadcast talent march. I've seen Pierce Morgan, okay? Yeah, Pierce Morgan actually looks like an off-brand, constipated, disappointed father of Conan O'Brien. That's exactly what they're excited. Now, admittedly, some of that difference is because over here, we don't allow pharmaceutical

companies to advertise direct to consumers. And we've got fewer Christian nationalist billionaires willing to invest modest sums of their immodest fortunes into loss-making influence operations. Oh, JK rolling. I said less, not zero, just less. But mostly it's that up until recently, we really only had three or maybe four channels that produced news bulletins, and only two of those had a 24-hour rolling news service. However, what we lack in televised spectacles, we've always more than made up for in our

culture of print journalism, with our relatively small country supporting more than a dozen national daily newspapers and almost the same number of weekly Sunday papers. Yeah. I mean, what excuse are your nation's old guy is going to have to go to the pub at 9 a.m. if not read the paper, you know? Oh, you want us to wrap our fish in glossy magazine pages, huh? Is that what you want? Yeah, also for some perspective here, the state of Montana is larger than England.

So that would be like Montana having 12 more newspapers actually than it currently has. Similarly, a lot more people that can read them. A lot. Jesus. Christ. So among those many newspapers, there are the respectable broadsheets, titles like The Observer, established in 1791, or The Times that was founded in 1785. Now, that's the one that Americans often refer to as the Times of London, despite that, not being its name. And you do that because you want to avoid confusing it with the paper founded in New York, 70 years later, that you refer to as the Times, even though that's not its name.

because countries that aren't America are just NPCs. Okay, the Times is New York and the city is New York. Learn to put down an insurrection, motherfuckers if you want to be The Times. Well, what Britain can't make up for with good, they make up for with old, I guess, is what they do. And then beyond the broadsheets, seriously, can you put down an insurrection? Just like, can you come back? We'll give another shot. So being for those guys with the cross flags, that's who you want to aim for.

Beyond the broadsheets, they're also the far more modern and far less respectable tabloids, such as the Daily Mail, first published in 1896, or the relative spring chicken that is The Sun, which is first published in 1964, but for the whole of my life has been the most read daily newspaper in the country, reaching four million readers six times a week at its height in 1987. That's 7% of the UK population were Sun readers. Oh my God, is anyone else getting tired of Marsh's whole British people can read, humble bragging? But while the sun reached the most Brits per day during the week, it wasn't actually the most red newspaper overall in the country

because that honour went to its Sunday sister paper, The News of the World. Now, the News of the World was first published on Sunday, October 1st, 1843, and at its peak circulation, it was read by 7.5 million Brits. And that was in 1947 when the population was under 42 million, meaning at its height, the news of the world reached 18% of the UK population. That was at its height. This will not be a story about its heights, because for all of its wild popularity, the news of the world achieved some monumental lows to the point where attentive listeners

might have noticed, I've referred to it very firmly in the past tense here. Yeah, but he does that when he's mad at me too. And given that the paper spanned more than 170 years, it'd be neither fair nor particularly interesting to try and do justice to the majority of that near bicentennial run. Unfortunately, we don't really have to because the first century or so, it was a relatively unremarkable tabloid for its time. It specialized in stories that were shocking or lurid, focusing on vice prosecutions or heavily biased police descriptions of raids on brothels or the crimes of what the newspaper described as streetwalkers and immoral women. Okay, I know you mean slut-shamey stuff

when you say immoral women, but in my head there was just a bunch of really sexy articles about the Walton family and Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, they were basically free ads for their broth. And this wasn't particularly uncommon for the era, because the expansion of literacy among the working classes opened up a market for titillating stories, and a number of publications duly rushed in to fill that gap. This was the era of the Penny Dreadful, and the notorious illustrated police news, and the news of the world

was very firmly cut from the same cloth. Frederick Greenwood, who was the editor of the Palmaal Gazette, once explained that after taking a single look at an edition of the News of the World, he threw it in the waste paper basket before reconsidering and told the owner of the paper, if I were to leave it there,

the cook may read it, so I burned it. And then I killed the cook, just to be sure, you know, you gotta make sure. And then I had a delicious, soothing palm. Paul Mall. When the help gets uppity and your trigger finger gets itchy, the smooth aroma. An unbeatable ashy flavor reminds you who's in charge.

Now, as one tabloid historian explained, the news of the world was often seen as being cut from the same tradition as the saucy postcards on sale at British seaside resorts, with the newspaper actually having a particular pontchant for the sex lives of British. Sorry, you have fucking weird postcards over there. Oh, yeah, we do. You really do. Saucy? Yeah, yeah, we do, yeah. Saucy Seaside Resorts. Yeah. So, just the postcard.

The resorts are not saucy at a, like Blackpool is not a particularly saucy place. But you can pick up a pause card there. So the reason that they were so obsessed with the sex lives of Vickers was that at the time there was a loophole in the libel laws that meant vicars weren't allowed to sue anybody. So, yeah, that's what they were doing that. So it's pretty clear that from the off, the newspaper favored a certain kind of story. And in the boom in readership after World War II, that favoring, that favoring, was only going to develop into a very singular focus. And like almost all terrible things in

recent news media, that shift into the gutter will be the responsibility of arguably the person to have caused the most global suffering in the second half of the 20th century, Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch's role in the story of the news the world very nearly didn't happen. Because as you might remember from my previous citation needed essay, the paper was squarely in the sights of a different media mogul, the Czech-born, definitely not a spy wing, Robert Maxwell. And Maxwell tried to buy the paper in 1968, only to be met with hostility, with the editor of the paper at the time declaring that it would never be in foreign hands because it is, quote, as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. And then six months later, it was sold to the

Australian Rupert Murdoch. And it became the first of his British newspaper acquisitions. Okay, but like, you know, talk funny, sound funny English, right? Certainly closer than Czechoslovakia. And now Murdoch's publications are exposing birthday books with pedophile skits from Donald Trump signed in fucking pubes compiled by Robert Maxwell's daughter, Forge Jeffrey Epstein. God, it's so fucked that Rupert Murdoch is a relative good guy now. But also definitely evil, Marsh. So we back to you for the evil part.

So the news the world would then soon be joined in Murdoch's news. use international media empire by the Sun, and also the Times and the Sunday Times, meaning that Murdoch owned the highest-selling gutter-rag tabloids of the week, but also the highest-selling broadsheets of the week, and he'd used the latter to deflect criticism of his operation of the former. How can he be a parasite on the media, cheapening public discourse and feeding an appetite for trash, when he was the proprietor of the most respected newspapers in the land?

And meanwhile, the news of the world focused on more and more salacious stories, actually earning the nickname The News of the Screws due to its propensity for checkbooks journalism. You're paying surprisingly large fees to acquire stories of celebrity kiss and tells, and they even paid for the stories of key witnesses in notorious crimes, like The Moore's Murders by mass murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, or in 1999, the story of the paedophile pop star Gary Glitter. Hey, guys, I didn't get that reference, so I googled Gary Glitter. And I need the story. story of a guy named Gary Glitter

to be way less horrifying and sad. Oh my God, I agree. And Mariah Carey was terrible in the movie. That too. It's perhaps no coincidence that the newspaper elected to pay for information on Glitter in 1999, because

around the turn of the millennium, scare stories about pedophiles and stranger danger had become bread and butter to the news of the world. When an eight-year-old called Sarah Payne was abducted and killed in July 2000, the news of the world seized. on the public fervor and outcry to launch their name and shame anti-pedophile campaign. And the campaign called for a version of Megan's law, including making the personal details and

addresses of people convicted of sex offenses publicly available. Yeah, what we need to be doing is advertising these lists to potential school shooters, right? It's like, hey, I get your unpopular now, but if you want the Mangione treatment, let me tell you how to get it. So they called for this publishing of sex offenders names and addresses. When the government confirmed they had no plans to create a publicly accessible list of offenders, the newspaper decided they take the task on themselves, promising to publish the names and home addresses of 100,000 sex offenders in their national newspaper at the height of a moral panic about pedophiles. Who knew Prince Andrew had that many houses? Look, I know I get a lot of shit about moral panics, but, I mean, Marsh, you've got

100,000 known and convicted pedophiles on an island smaller than Michigan for a crime with a notoriously low report and conviction rate. Like, I'm not sure this is a panic so much as just like, hey, there's a lot more pedophiles than we should be comfortable with here, guys. Yeah, but I didn't add known and convicted pedophiles, Tom. You added that bit and the paper certainly didn't figure out who do. Yeah, that is a problem, isn't it? We don't convict people who didn't do it. That doesn't even make sense. Why would you do this? Amazing. So the results here are exactly as you'd expect.

After the first batch of names were published, a group of mothers in Hampshire began organizing nightly marches and vigils near the addresses that they'd seen in the newspaper, while in nearby Paulsgrove, protesters hanged a life-sized doll on the street, chanting, we'll lynch the pubs. And in Plymouth, a mob of 150 people began to attack the police while carrying printed copies of the News the World headlines.

And meanwhile, in Greater Manchester, a mob of 300 people surrounded one man's home shouting, pedophile, rapist, beast, pervert, after which that mob dragged a six-year-old child to his door while asking, Do you want this one? Okay, I bet old guys walking around their backyard wish Marsh was as sympathetic to them as child molesters.

And like, look, I know what you're thinking, okay, this kind of public disorder is bad, and the spite offering of six-year-old to suspected pedophiles achieves nothing positive. It was a bit. It's a bit that got carried out. I understand it. I'm not saying I would do it. I'm saying I get the idea and you think it's going to be super funny, but the kid is crying. I get it. But you're thinking, right? That's all bad,

but these were all sex offenders. So how much of our sympathy should they get? Well, the thing about a mob is it's hard to direct it once you've whipped it up and told them there's paedophiles literally everywhere and they're coming for your kids, especially when members of said mob were interviewed by the news of the world, proudly declaring they would lynch any sex offender they found and some of the people targeted by the mobs took their own life rather than face that lynching. And from the tone of your voice, this is bad. Bad.

Yeah, like, I wonder if Marsh knows how much vigilanteism it takes to shock an American conscience. I don't know either, but it's more than this. Yeah. Okay, okay, that's fair. But I will point out, not all of the people targeted were sex offenders. Some were suspected of crimes but were never convicted. Others had been falsely accused. There were cases across the country of the mob distributing leaflets accusing men of crimes that they hadn't committed. With at least one of the cases, the police began printing their own leaflets to clarify the guy's innocence.

And they had like a little leaflet off. There was a man in Glasgow who was beaten to death by vigilantes who accused him of being a sex offender without any evidence at all. And there was also a retired sea captain who was wrongly accused and was most. murdered by vigilantes who fired bombed his house. And then there was the notorious incident in which vigilantes bandalize the home of a woman from Gwent, who they thought was a paedophile, because they'd misunderstood her job title, pediatrician.

Shut the fuck. This seems like a problem of execution rather than philosophy. I want to say that. The execution was bad. Stop. Look at the business card. I saw this coming. Look at the card.

If fuckless doctor for kids, I knew you were going to make this to stay. Yeah, for real. I'd take back all my jokes about humble bragging over literacy. Yes, that's clearly not a problem. So in the end, the News the World's Name and Shame campaign published 81 names across their two editions before canceling the campaign in August. And it was a first failure by its editor at the time won Rebecca Brooks. But it was not her last failure as editor, nor would it be her most spectacular.

Okay. I like how Marsh fleshes out the bad guys into the complex characters they really are. And I'm, like, confused about what to think, you know? I guess I'll figure it out, you know, where to land after a quick break. Or some apropos of nothing. All right, everyone, gather around, gather around. Today we're all going to do some vigilante justice against kid didlers. Yeah, ah!

Right. Sorry. Oh, my God, Marsh. You never let us do anything. Look, I'm just saying we've got to be careful here. Why? Well, because we could accuse someone who isn't a peter fire. and then we're just attacking it innocent person.

I mean, if you want to make an omelette, you're going to break a couple of eggs. Right, yeah. But like, imagine if someone accused you of being a paedophile. Wait, that guy's a paedophile? Get them! Okay. So I'm in charge of the mob now. What were you saying, Marsh?

No, that's not what I meant. The idea of paedophiles going around molesting strange kids. It's mostly a myth, right? Most abusers are someone the child knows. A huge percentage of them are related. You heard him, everyone. Let's go kick our dad's ass. Yeah!

I've really got to stop trying to convince people to believe true things. You really should. You all right? I got what I deserve. Okay. When people hear that Mim Mobile plans are only $15 per month, a lot of people wonder, what's the catch? Well, I can tell you from first-hand experience, there isn't one.

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a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower, about 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan, additional taxes fees, and restrictions applies. See Mint Mobile for details. And we're back. When we left off, Marsh told us about how news of the world was exposing pedophiles, but it led to some

guess, admittedly, light lynching. We're going to let him cook. Marsh, what's next? The downfall of the news of the world can largely be traced to two overlapping. You can tell March was not prepared for these entertainment. The downfall of the news world can largely be traced to two overlapping scandals. The first and the least significant concerned the paper's long-running relationship with Mazair Mahmoud,

an undercover reporter who specialized in enticing celebrities and public figures into all manner of crimes and impropriety in his guise as a phony Middle Eastern businessman, or as the newspaper dubbed him, the fake shake. padophiles and celebrities who get trapped into crimes. Turn in for Marsh's next essay. Billionaires are people too. While he was never pictured in the newspaper, Mahmood would dress exactly as he'd imagine the fake shake to be dressed. I don't have any preconceived notions here. What do you think he wears, Smarsh?

And then he would meet with celebrities a day. Most often, to begin with, sports stars, for which he won several journalism awards, like legitimate awards. He filmed snooker players John Higgins and Pat Mooney agreeing to cheat in a non-crucial frame

of snooker in return for a large bribe. And he recorded footballer John Fashanoo offering to take a bribe in order to throw a game. Though Fashanu claimed he knew it was a sting

all along and he was only appearing to be corrupt in order to gather evidence to take to the police. Yeah, most people don't know this, but the cops won't let you turn in a draft of your bribery essay. You have to be the final thing

or else they won't even let you start to turn it. turning it in at all. Okay, are we all just going to lie over the fact that Marsh made up the game of schnucker for this essay?

How fuck is that? It's fucking a good at. Snooker? Not content. You literally made that up. You literally made that up. It's such a great game.

It's so, we were at the crucible in the last of great. It's like zip line jousting or what? What is this? So not content with outting transgressions by sport stars,

Mahmood then turned his eye to more serious offenses. And here's where it's start to come a bit unstuck. In 2003, he claimed to have uncovered a plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham. The ransom was called the spice trade. Oh my God, it's good. Excellent. There's a spice girl. Now, that made for a dramatic front page of the paper, but in the subsequent criminal trial, it emerged that Mahmoud's main informant was a guy called Florim Gashi, and he'd been paid 10,000 pounds by the paper to be a witness, and he was found to be not remotely reliable. As a result,

the case collapsed and one of the alleged kidnappers sued the news of the world for libel and won. And the paper issued an apology and paid libel costs. And Gashi later admitted in court that he was often paid by the paper to just make up stories. Yeah, Bat Boy and Alex Jones are both like you to hold their respective beers actually at this moment. Actually, Alex Jones won't hand his over, but you still get the idea. He's a demon. It just hands you a can. It's empty. I'll stomp Your guts out. A year later, Mahmood paused as a Muslim extremist to expose three men who were trying to buy radioactive material for a suspected Muslim terrorist group seeking to carry attacks in the United Kingdom.

However, the men were later found not guilty at trial with the judge criticising the news of the world for not checking the credibility of the story. Not least because the radioactive material that these would-be terrorists had been cajoled into trying to buy was called Red Mercury and it didn't exist. So, wait, maybe these weren't committed jihadis after all. Sorry, red mercury. That sounds like the guy from Queen. Did you just make that up, like, just now?

Or is it really bad stuff? Come on. Eventually, Mahmood's habit of entrapping his targets caught up with him. After a string of stings in which he persuaded celebrities to sell him's cocaine, and then had them arrested for selling him the cocaine he persuaded him to sell him, only for those trials to then collapse you to the lengths that he was found to have gone to in order to entrap them, the Crown Prosecution Service announced an investigation

of their own into more than 30 criminal trials where his evidence was cited. And in October 2016, he was sentenced to 50 months imprisonment for perverting the course of justice. Okay. It didn't occur to the British courts at this point that maybe if you have a bunch of people

and a newspaper doing its own law enforcement that the problem might be them? People don't dig wells when the water from the tap runs well. You know what I'm saying? Okay, I got to say, it's pretty telling that Mahmoud was able to keep doing

the same shake identity that many times. So, like, British celebrities just being like, yeah, it's probably another, you know, different urban guy approaching me out of nowhere about doing a crime together. There's lots of those running around the UK right now. This is all checks out. Especially with celebrities who had no intention

of committing crimes until they had, like, were coerced by this guy repeatedly until they eventually. Okay, fine, I'll get you some Coke. Bang. Marsh, we have a very complicated moral philosophy on this show. We are pro-bike theft. We are pro-vigilantes, hurting people mistakenly. It's going to get more complicated as we go along.

That's all I'm saying. Every single sentence we say is literal and not at all is open in this comedy podcast. You don't exaggerate at all. Everybody who's listening should understand everything exactly literally and then complain about it. Citation needed the serious podcast of our. actual opinions. Okay, well, by the time he did go to prison, his employees at the News the World had undergone their own moment of reckoning in what turned out to be the biggest media scandal in British history. The News The World had this reputation for breaking juicy,

scandalous stories about people in the public eye, and there's only so many ways you can get those stories. You can send in an undercover reporter in fancy dress to entrap people into crimes, or you can pay exorbitant sums to witnesses and mistresses in all. to get exclusive rights to their stories, or you can pay police officers for the kind of details of a story that aren't publicly available. Say, for example, the names and addresses of suspected sex offenders, or, for example, their series of stories about the daughter of a famous actor who'd ended up destitute and was working as a sex worker up until her suicide in 2003, which the paper ran a lot of stories about her that they bought from the police. But all of those

cost a lot of money, and they take quite a lot of time to set up. So what if there was an easy way to shortcut all of that expensive legwork and just get the juicy gossip directly from the horse's mouse or rather from the horse's answer phone. Okay, so there's a song that has the lyric and it says answer phone and lyrics. And until right now, I had no idea it meant voicemail. I thought it was like movie phone, but for answers. I had no idea what it was. I didn't learn that just now too. Hello. And welcome to answer phone. If you know the question you'd like to answer, press one. That's what I thought it was.

For the smooth, satisfying taste of call mall, press two. To tell us where to fly a camera drone to invade someone's privacy for titty picks, press three. Why don't you just tell me the question that you would like the evil answer to? Did you guys call it a voicemail

when it was like a little machine that plugged into the phone? It was an answering machine then. Yeah, it was an answering machine or voicemail. That's what we always called it. It was on the machine and answer phone here. Anyway. Yeah.

So you see the news the world, And your family would make one together? It was fun. The New Zealand regularly contracted. Somewhat inefficient. God, I hate your family. Did one of those with the whole family. I sang a song and everyone liked it.

What song? Something. He didn't say a song. He's why. Is it a hip a violation? Marsh, are you telling a story? I was, I was.

You see, the New World, they regularly contracted. I was having a ninth grade, motherfucker. The News World, they regularly contracted somewhat unofficially, a coterie of freelance blaggers. These were private investigators who specialized in calling up phone companies or banks or the tax office, you name it, and then tricking them into sharing personal information on celebrities and public figures. And one of their favorite tricks was to hack into the voicemails of those figures and then listen to their messages. And it was surprisingly simple because cell phones at the time had a voicemail inbox that you could access by calling your own

phone number and then pressing a couple of keys to go through the voicemail. And from there, you just had to enter a four-digit pin code to prove that you were you. But if you hadn't gone through the effort of setting yourself a new pincode when you bought the phone, you'd be left on the factory default code, which was 0-0-0-0-0. Yeah. And there was this pause for a second when the lady said, you have one new voice message. First voice message was the best.

It was the best because then it was going to be... And you could hang up with like a flip. Oh, that's great. Everything was better then. So the blaggers, they realized that as soon as you got the personal phone number for whoever you wanted to target, sometimes by paying the police for it or sometimes by getting it from their bank through trickery, you could just call that phone number from one phone, make sure it started to ring,

and then immediately call them from a different phone. At which point you'd get the engaged tone, and you'd be able to then just tap the few keys, go into voice bill, and enter the default code, and hey, Prestor, you can now listen to every message ever left for that person without them ever realizing you've done it. Okay, okay, I know I'm getting off track here. This isn't the point, but if I get a voicemail

describing the crime I'm doing that I'm in right now, I'm deleting that voicemail. And I'm getting new partners in crime who aren't fucking stupid, or I guess clearly narcs working with cops and trying to trap me. Okay, well, I wouldn't have to leave. of you voicemails about my crimes if you would pick up the phone. So that, it turns out, is how one of the paper's star journalist, Neville Furbeck, won a British press award for Scoop of the Year for his exclusive story about David Beckham having

an affair, and that story came from Thurbeck, Thurbeck hacking David Beckham's voicemails before the paper then paid Beckham's alleged mistress a hefty sum of money to publish a story. It seems to have a knack of knowing every little thing about Prince William's personal life. And that came not from secret sources inside the palace, but because he'd just been listening to Williams' voicemail. And not just Williams, in fact, he'd monitor a network of contacts around the prince, all of whom might leave each of the voicemails that would contain something juicy about the prince's schedule. Now, initially, this was all played off by the newspaper as the actions of one rogue reporter at the news of the world. Goodman acted alone in hacking

these voicemails. He was hiring a blagger by the name of Glenn Mulcair without the knowledge of anyone senior at the paper. Except that obviously wasn't true, because the police investigation at the time found evidence that Mulcair had already been working with three other News of the World journalists. And when that came out, the editor at the time, Andy Coulson, resigned. And then promptly walked into a job as David Cameron's Director of Communications while he was Prime Minister. And Clive Goodman went to prison for four months. And also among those files seized from Mulcair's office was a list of almost 4,000 names of celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials, and crime victims whose fawns may have been hacked because Mulcair had their numbers written in his little

book. And with so much evidence to go on, London's Metropolitan Police did nothing. For like a long time. They sat on the list of 4,000 victims for five years. And that might seem like an odd move by the Met until you realise just how cozy a relationship they had with the paper at the time. When the news the screws wanted to buy information, whose pockets were they lining? Did the Met really want to turn that tap off? Obviously not. Well, sure, but also,

and I don't really want to victim blame here, but I need to remind people that they didn't hack anything. Nothing. The whole thing relies entirely on people committing salacious acts, talking about it on a recording, and not changing their fucking password away from zero, zero, zero, zero.

No hacking was involved. Wrong word. They were asking for it. They were asking for this to happen. What was their phone number wearing? Into your house by turning the knob. Like that's, yeah. What the fuck.

Okay, okay. Well, in my opinion, it gets even worse because at the height of their hacking operation, the news the world paid $150,000 a year to a guy called Jonathan. Just going through his essay writing, in my opinion. So they paid $150,000 year to Jonathan Rees, who ran a private investigations agency called Southern Investigations. And he ran that alongside a former Met Police Detective Sergeant, Sid Fillory. Now, Philly had been kicked out of the Met for corruption,

but he still had a lot of friends and crucially corrupt contacts in the Met. And here's a fun fact. Jonathan Rees originally ran southern investigations with a guy called Daniel Morgan, until 1987 when Morgan was found murdered in a pub car park with an axe in his head. It's one of the UK's most high-profile unsolved murder cases, except it's not. It was obviously Reese and Philly who were behind the murder. And we would know that, except when that unsolved case,

kept getting reopened, Philleri got the News of the World to assign photojournalists to follow and harass the lead investigator and then they got Glenn Mulcair to hack into his voicemail and obtain personal information

from his bank. And when all of that came out that they were harassing the person investigating the murder, the Met Police met with the editor of the News The World, Rebecca Brooks, and decided not to investigate

things any further. Okay, the ex-cops who were too corrupt for the corrupt cops and started a shady P.I firm and murdered a business partner. That all makes sense. But, okay, the axe is a weird thing, right? In a car, no less. I mean, getting an overhead swing has got to be a nice thing. You're dragging him out of the car. You're hitting him. You're putting him back

in the car. It's a terrible jabbing weapon. All of the criminality might have been buried at that point. If it weren't for the work of Nick Davies at the Guardian and his editor, Alan Rusperger, who managed to find out that some of those. 4,000 victims had quietly taken out civil cases against the news of the world, and the paper spent more than £2 million settling their cases. And in 2010, they found proof that a senior editor at the paper had specifically instructed Milcare to hack into the voicemails of Sienna Miller and Jude Law, proving that phone hacking was widespread and encouraged by seniors. In 2011 came the revelation that would bring the whole newspaper crashing down. It turns out

they hadn't restricted their use of fawn hacking to celebrities and sports stars, or the police officers investigating murders committed by friends of a friend. The paper had also been targeting the relatives of soldiers who were killed in Iraq, victims who were killed in the 7-7 London terror attacks, and the murdered schoolgirl, Millie Dowler. Okay, it's obviously very sad that this gentleman was killed in Iraq, but he did keep leaving the garage unlocked, no matter how many times his wife reminded him. Is that anything? Thanks for coming for the morning editorial meeting, everyone. How are we doing with the theft of journals from lifelong charity workers? How's that coming along?

Okay, but I'm sorry, how is this still working? How many of these stupid fucks didn't get an answer phone pen? What is happening? Zero, zero zero zero zero. No, good point. Dead school go. Why didn't you change your answer phone. I mean, it's not her fucking answer phone. It's your goddamn parents' answer phone. Zero, zero, zero, zero. Come on.

It didn't get hacked. Well, the Millie Dowler case in particular disgusted the public when the Guardian revealed it in July 2011. Because Millie Dowler was a 13-year-old who went missing in 2002, whose body was found six months later. And during the six months of a disappearance,

the news of the world was regularly hacking into a voicemail to try to get the first scoop on the fate of the most high-profile missing person's case in the country. And it was even alleged in The Guardian that the news the world had hacked into voicemail, found it too full to accept any new messages. So they started deleting old messages to make space. And that activity then gave the family hope that she was still alive in checking messages. Okay.

This is fucked up. But like, what new voicemail were they hoping for? Just like, hey, Millie, haven't seen you in school for a few days. Hope you didn't get murdered by your most likely murderer whose name is Nigel fucking Troppington. I'll describe him in detail right now in the rest of this voicemail. Hey, Millie, it's Nigel. I know it's crazy to leave you a voicemail since I just murdered you.

But I just wanted to remind you this is your fault for not changing your password. Jesus Christ. I'm Tom Curry. It's her parents answer phone. He's 13. I have a goddamn answer phone.

Steal that kid's bike. Well, I run a While the message deleting made for the most sickening detail of the story, that was actually probably an overreach. It's actually more likely that the older messages just auto-deleted after a period of time. And there was a second irony in that the paper who a decade previously had used the death of Sarah Payne to launch their name and shame anti-pedophile campaign was now the one committing crimes against a dead child. Also, the cherry on top? The paper had also hacked in the voice bill of Sarah Payne's mother via a mobile phone gifted to her by Rebecca Brooks.

the editor of the paper. Okay, but I feel like if People magazine gave me a cricket phone with the password one, two, three, I'd have follow-up questions. Who did you guys have follow-up questions? Hey, Millie, you don't know me. It's Nigel's uncle. I think my nephew is a murderer.

I don't know. Did he kill you yet? Give me a call back. I bought your mama phone. She just taught it. Regardless, the fact that the country's most popular Sunday newspaper had been routinely hacking at the voicemail of a murdered 13-year-old elevated this whole affair from being an unsightly airing of the media's dirty laundry into a full-blown national scandal. On July 7, 2011, three days

after revelation about Millie Dowler, the news the world announced that it would be ending publication. The full extent of their criminality may never be known, because it turns out they've been routinely purging their email server and deleting millions of pieces of potential evidence. But as it was, more than 100 people were arrested in connection with the hacking scandal, of which only 14 were convicted. Rebecca Brooks was acquitted on all counts and was later reappointed to the board of Murdox News International. Okay, but I bet people steal stuff off her desk on a pretty regular basis, and when she complains, they all give her just the like, really? After 168 years in print, on the 10th of July 2011, the news the world ran its final ever front page. and simply read,

Thank you and goodbye. And it was a poignant send-off for a news beam off, except five days previously, the day after the Guardian published that Millie Dowlo allegation, News International, it turns out, had bought the web domain

the sun-on-sunday.cour.org. And less than a year later, they just launched a Sunday version of their six days a week, The Sun. And it was just the news the world in a false mustache. In fact,

its lead investigative journalist, Mazair Mahmoud, the fake shake. Oh my God. Amazing. All right. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

That phone hacking was something that only the news the world figured out how to do and none of the other people who worked for near identical outlets were doing it or admitting to it

in interviews like Pierce Morgan definitely did that one time live on Earth. And are you ready for the quiz? I am, but most because I already hacked all of your phones to get the right answers. Okay, Mars.

we talked about the mobs of people hurting other people and hunting them down earlier in the show which the cast is four by the way so remind all the listeners we're pro that when you take justice

in your own hands so you get hungry so you need a refreshing afternoon snacks so what's the best kind A red Robin Hood B vigilantee

C count of Monte Cristo sandwich or D Bernie Galettes yeah I've got to go Vigilantee. I like Vigilent Tea.

I'm British. He's going to tea every time. Correct. Correct. All right, Marsh, when people think about hacking,

everyone thinks hacking is fancy shit sitting at a systems terminal or something. But A, it's not. Not B. It's mostly some asshole, not changing their password or clicking on a prize.

It doesn't exist. In an email from an address they didn't recognize. See, that's hacking. That's like 99% of all hacking. It's mostly all of it. Okay,

but once in a while, somebody tries to like give you a blowjob and you're so confused that you can't act. What movie is that from? Sorfish. That's right. I think it's B it's just that sometimes that asshole is a dead 13 year old. But other than that, you're absolutely

right. Jesus Christ. Change your fucking pin for you die. Fucking lazy. That's Nigel. Oh, God. Good in full sense. I believe that. By the way, I believe to work. I have to work so hard on this essay. I'm going to have to edit the shit out of this thing. Why was this week's episode three and a half minutes long?

Just Marsh talking in a long tunnel. Millie? Is that you? All right, Marsh. Kind of seems like none of the bad people in this story had any consequences. How should we comfort ourselves? A, maybe they got some real pedophiles with the fake ones. B, the fake cheek costume.

seems hot in the summer. Itchy. See, you can't really do a crime to a teenager when they're already. Jesus, fuck. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

I'm going to go Secret Answer D, the fake shake, found out how aggressively Islamophobic this country is and did something. Yeah, no, I don't do it. Get you every time. All right, Eli, you are the winner. Fantastic. I would like a Cecil essay next week.

All right. All right. Well, for Marsh, Cecil, Tom and Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to cognitive dissonance, no rogan experience, skeptics with a K, dear old dad's god off movies,

the scathing atheist, a skepticrat, and D&D Minus. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media or take a little of show notes. Check out citationpod.com.