Earlier this month, The New York Times’ Justin Scheck, Eshe Nelson, and Tariq Panja wrote about the “fresh eyes” that were suddenly on an “old scandal” involving Will Lewis, the publisher of The Washington Post: allegations that he covered up the full extent of illegal phone hacking and other unethical reporting practices at Rupert Murdoch’s UK media empire in the early 2010s, when he was supposed to be cleaning up that mess. On Monday, it was Scheck and a colleague, Jo Becker, who published the most forensic look yet at the claims. They found that Lewis’s role remains murky in many respects, but that he gave a “green light” to delete internal emails and that police in London came to view him as an “impediment” to their probe. (He denies wrongdoing.)
The Times’ story was the latest in a string of similar reports in the US press since Lewis tapped Robert Winnett, a fellow Brit, to lead the Post’s newsroom in early June. Journalists dug into Winnett’s deployment of undercover reporters, payments to a source, and alleged writing of stories based on deceptively obtained records; an article in the Post itself tied him to a self-described “thief.” (Winnett did not comment for any of the aforementioned articles in the Times, Post, and Daily Beast.)
In addition to the hacking-coverup claims, Lewis was implicated in several of the stories about Winnett and accused, by The Guardian, of advising the then British prime minister Boris Johnson to “clean up” his phone during a major political scandal. (Lewis denies this too.) Late last week, the Post announced that Winnett will no longer take its top job. Lewis is hanging on for now, but serious questions remain as to whether his position is tenable.
In addition to the stories about Lewis’s and Winnett’s pasts, pundits have homed in on the pair’s nationality, first in the context of a supposed “invasion” of British journalists helming US outlets, including The Wall Street Journal’s Emma Tucker and CNN’s Mark Thompson, then in a wave of alarmed commentary about the perceived laxness of British journalists’ ethics. Some of this commentary has made fair points. Reporters going undercover or paying for information, for example, are more commonly accepted in UK journalism than they would be in American circles.
But even these differences are complicated: such practices are not consensus norms in the UK, and when they are employed these days, it is often on public-interest grounds. (Investigative journalists, for instance, must often go to greater lengths to stand up stories in the UK, which has stricter libel laws than the US.) And at its least nuanced, the commentary around Lewis, Winnett, and their compatriots has smacked of moral panic—focusing, as Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic, on their “‘rough and tumble’ nature” and “backward ways, as if they resembled Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.”
William Lewis, the new CEO and Publisher of the Washington Post Company speaks to the staff and employees at the headquarters in Washington, DC on November 06, 2023.by Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post/Getty Images.
It’s understandable that Post staffers in particular would be concerned about the specifics of Lewis’s and Winnett’s biographies—not least Lewis’s alleged role in the aftermath of the hacking scandal. But the broader idea that Brits don’t understand—or, worse, actively scorn—American journalism’s pristine ethics rests on several, often parochial generalizations about the state of British journalism, and how it has changed in recent years. As Semafor’s Ben Smith put it after Winnett renounced the Post’s top job, “These Brits now exist in pure caricature in the U.S.”
For starters, the stories about Lewis’s and Winnett’s backgrounds are more different from each other than their cumulative weight of controversy suggests. The pair’s roles in paying a whistleblower for a cache of lawmakers’ expenses data in 2009, for example, is certainly debatable from an ethical standpoint, and there appears to be a discrepancy between Lewis’s account of the episode and a source with knowledge of the situation. But the data itself was undeniably in the public interest, and—as James Ball noted last week, in an astute Politico column skewering the idea of an ethical gulf between US and UK journalism—it may not have seen the light of day without the payment, after parliamentary authorities slow-walked its release under public-records laws.