Hacking book: from the Wild West of the 1980s to voicemail interception

Here is the concluding part of my afterword in the second and updated edition of The phone-hacking scandal: journalism on trial,* in which I seek to place phone hacking in some sort of historical perspective.Yesterday's extract dealt with the methods employed by journalists from the 1950s onwards. Today, I pick up the story in the 1980s... In the immediate aftermath of the 1986 Wapping revolution there was a period of what can only be described as Wild West behaviour. It was led by the News of t...

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