People and Politics by Patrick Roberts

Old interview reveals Piers Morgan, CNN host, used phone hacked stories, despite his recent denials

Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 07:11 AM

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CNN have a major issue on their hands with the surfacing of an old interview with Larry King's replacement, Piers Morgan, in which he admits phone hacking went on during his time as editor of the Daily Mirror in England.

He edited both News of the World and then Daily Mirror from 1994 to 2004.

The London-based Daily Telegraph this morning publishes extracts from that interview which stand in dire contrast to Morgan's earlier outraged comments that he never involved himself in such things.

Contrast these two statements by Morgan;
Last week:

“For the record, in my time at the News of the World and the Mirror, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone,” he said last week on CNN.

That is very different to his response when asked during an interview with the BBC on Desert Island discs in June 2009 about the same subject

The question asked by host presenter Kirsty Young was “What about this nice middle-class boy, who would have to be dealing with, I mean essentially people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people’s phones, people who take secret photographs, who do all that nasty down-in-the-gutter stuff,” . “How did you feel about that?"

Morgan's response was telling : “To be honest, let’s put that in perspective as well. Not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work.

"I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to, and I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do,”

“I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide, and certainly encompassed the high and low end of the supposed newspaper market.”

This will surely land Morgan in deep trouble with his CNN bosses given his earlier denial.

Back up for the accusation comes from James Hipwell, a Daily Mirror financial columnist between 1998 and 2000, who has stated that said that illegal phone hacking was “endemic” during Morgan's editorship.

"You know what people around you are doing,” he said.

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4 comments

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maloney | Jul 27, 2011, 07:06 PM EDT

oops! a cnn liberal guilty of Murdoch's employees bad habits.

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PhoenixZouave | Jul 27, 2011, 01:03 PM EDT

Piers Morgan? Just another slimey Englishman. Notice he flew back to England for the "Royal Wedding!" Yeah he's filling in for Larry King, a Jew from Brooklyn...what else will these English do for the Yankee Dollar????

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cillowen | Jul 27, 2011, 10:55 AM EDT

such type of bottom of the barrel scraping is practiced. Wiki stuff and that of daniel ellberg's