Ouch.

Actually, this isn’t going to be a full-bore expose of how the law and the media in the UK are in league. Because I’m absolutely sure they aren’t.

But the News of the World phone “hacking” scandal that is doing the rounds at the moment, while raising some obvious and extremely serious issues, is perhaps not quite the revelation it at first appears. Journalists have long used some questionable methods for getting more information than their rivals and for breaking stories in the first place. Police have, in my experience, had either awareness or strong suspicion of some of these low-level techniques, but pursuing matters has never been in the public interest, it seems.

Plus I need to be careful not to say too much here, obviously. It’s not down to the police to decide what’s in the public interest of course. When I was in journalist, admittedly just for a few years in the early 1990s, the way the relationship between police and the media, albeit by journalists rather than coppers, work was referred to as ‘the game’.

Police knew or suspected that journalists would ‘cut corners’ to get stories. There was, with doubtless some technical exceptions but mostly in the case of fairly arcane or harmless laws, nothing illegal about that. Here are some examples:

The police frequency
How did journalists manage to turn up at crime scenes within minutes of an incident being called in, when they hadn’t yet been told about it in an hourly check-in call with police? A radio in the newsroom tuned to the police frequency perhaps? Naughty, but how many of us did that as a kid at home?

Arrested/questioned/charged
Technically, you are not able to reveal more than basic details about a suspect once they have been arrested and been questioned by police. Most media bend the law on this, and have done for years. Most media will not, though, go beyond those basic details once the accused has or have been charged with a crime. I can recall several occasions when, after hours of questioning, charges were conveniently made a few minutes after the paper had gone to press, enabling a fuller account of the allegations to be carried. This is not news; it is, or was, considered part of the fabric of journalism.

Pick you up, put you down
Like football managers, journalists ran stories to informal cycles of positive stories about the local police and then a bad article. Why? To keep everyone ‘honest’? Perhaps because they could. And journalists felt it in the public interest to keep police on their toes. It’s not for either party to decide what’s in the public interest. But this tended to be innocent stuff. ‘Police accused of picking on gypsies’ followed the next day by ‘Hero copper rescues albino cat from tree in gale’. Pretty tepid.

Lean on the junior bobby
Police press officers are pretty smart cookies. Young bobbies at the scene were easier to get to cough up information. A few seemingly harmless questions, a bit of flattery and ego massage and they may well let you through the police cordon to interview those on the inside or take pictures (some of which were too shocking or tasteless to be published anyway).

The socialising
This is not intended to conjure a vision of Gene Hunt, but press and police would often socialise in the past. It rarely happens these days, which is perhaps why – allegedly – some journalists have to use more strong-arm methods to get information. In the past, certainly in the pre-mobile phone era, police and hacks would sometimes meet for a few pints after work, and be on good personal terms. There’s nothing wrong with this, given the stress of the jobs and the unspoken feeling, particularly after major incidents, that they’re virtual colleagues. Providing they stick to the rules. But there will always be grey areas, voicemail access or no voicemail access.

So what of the current News of the World probe? Well, firstly the term hacking is not strictly accurate – if the accusation is that journalists guessed passwords to download voicemails, then surely the most likely primary charge to be brought would be theft? Though, as Guy Clapperton pointed out, no less a crime really.

Technicalities aside, there is more than one way to access phone conversations and messages. Guessing passwords is basic social engineering, but in the past if journalists had wanted to be naughty they’d have tried to get someone on the inside on-side. Perhaps that’s where the probe will prod next.