WaPo’s CEO & executive editor clashed about covering Prince Harry’s hacking case

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Prince Harry’s long-running lawsuit against News Group Newspapers is still winding its way through the British courts. NGN is the British arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – NGN publishes the Sun, the Times of London, the Sunday Times and it used to publish the now-shuttered News of the World. Harry has accused NGN publications of phone hacking, blagging and all kinds of criminal activity. Other celebrities have done the same, and NGN has paid out tens of millions of dollars/pounds in settlements so that these cases are never adjudicated in a courtroom. NGN has reportedly made some settlement offers/overtures to Harry, but he continues to pursue this through the courts.

Last month, a British court said that Harry could cite the names of many former and current NGN editors in his lawsuit. Among those names was Will Lewis, the current CEO of the Washington Post. Lewis moved from NGN’s British outlets to the Wall Street Journal, and from there, he was hired by Jeff Bezos to revamp WaPo. We heard last month, as Harry got a ruling on naming NGN editors, that Lewis attempted to bury the story and he was particularly prickly about the implication that he was up to his neck in criminal activity when he worked in the UK. Well, as it turns out, that Prince Harry story is one of several reasons why WaPo’s executive editor Sally Buzbee quit the Post on Sunday.

Weeks before the embattled executive editor of The Washington Post abruptly resigned on Sunday, her relationship with the company’s chief executive became increasingly tense. In mid-May, the two clashed over whether to publish an article about a British hacking scandal with some ties to The Post’s chief executive, Will Lewis, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions.

Sally Buzbee, the editor, informed Mr. Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s scheduled ruling in a long-running British legal case brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids, the people said.

As part of the ruling, the judge was expected to say whether the plaintiffs could add Mr. Lewis’s name to a list of executives who they argued were involved in a plan to conceal evidence of hacking at the newspapers. Mr. Lewis told Ms. Buzbee the case involving him did not merit coverage, the people said. When Ms. Buzbee said The Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision represented a lapse in judgment and abruptly ended the conversation.

The interaction rattled Ms. Buzbee, who then consulted with confidants outside The Post about how she should handle the situation. When the judge ruled several days later, on May 21, that Mr. Lewis could be added to the case, The Post published an article about the decision.

Mr. Lewis did not prevent the article from publishing. But the incident continued to weigh on Ms. Buzbee just as she was considering her future at the paper, according to the two people with knowledge of her decision-making process. Her eventual decision to resign has shaken one of the country’s top news organizations.

The interaction over the court ruling was not the primary reason for her resignation. Ms. Buzbee had already been mulling her future at The Post because of a plan by Mr. Lewis to reorganize the newsroom that he laid out to her in April, the people said. Mr. Lewis had offered Ms. Buzbee a job running a new division focused on social media and service journalism, according to the people. She considered that a demotion, since her job as executive editor included overseeing all parts of the news report.

Mr. Lewis declined to comment to The Post for its article about the ruling in the phone hacking case. But in numerous previous media interviews, he has strongly denied the allegations that he was involved in covering up phone hacking while he was a senior executive for Mr. Murdoch. The Post published an article in March about the lawsuit that also named Mr. Lewis.

[From The NY Times]

There’s been a lot of conversation about the pro-Trump or right-wing takeover of many mainstream American media outlets – and that’s a real thing – but it’s worth discussing the specifically British editorial takeover of so many American newspapers. All of these British hacks who cut their teeth in the glory days of British phone hacking, stalking and blackmail are all now being whitewashed by the Murdochs’ American media arm and filtered out to legitimate newspapers. Will Lewis was probably stunned that Buzbee wasn’t acting like this was an old boys’ club and he could make a backroom deal to bury the story. Which is exactly how it would have happened at The Sun or The Times or the News of the World. It’s also fascinating to watch as Prince Harry’s media lawsuits are revealing this insidious British-tabloid-mentality takeover of American media.

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  3. WaPo’s CEO & executive editor clashed about covering Prince Harry’s hacking case

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