CNN statement denies Piers Morgan connection to phone hacking

Chatshow host made remarks about tabloid journalism practices on Desert Island Discs and in 2007 interview Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror, has for the second time in a week denied that he printed stories obtained through phone hacking. CNN, which now employs him in New York as a chatshow host, issued the latest denial over comments Morgan made in a Radio 4 Desert Island Discs interview , which threatened to drag him into the scandal. In another interview, Morgan expressed sympathy with the News of the World royal reporter, Clive Goodman, who had been jailed for phone hacking, saying he was merely a “fall guy for an investigative practice that everyone knows was going on”. The 2007 Press Gazette interview was tweeted by MP Louise Mensch. Last week she locked horns with Morgan on a CNN show, when he robustly denied any involvement saying he had “never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone”. Hours earlier, CNN issued a statement saying Morgan’s 2009 Desert Island Discs interview did not contradict that statement. In the interview, presenter Kirsty Young asked: “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 do you feel about that?” Morgan replied: “Well, to be honest, let’s put that into perspective as well. Not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done by third parties, rather than the staff themselves.” He continued: “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 a lot encompassed the high and low end of the supposed newspaper market.” In the CNN statement, Morgan said there was “no contradiction between my comments on Kirsty Young’s Desert Island Discs show and my unequivocal statements with regard to phone hacking”. “Millions of people heard these comments when I first made them in 2009 on one of the BBC’s longest-running radio shows, and none deduced that I was admitting to, or condoning illegal reporting activity.” “Kirsty asked me a fairly lengthy question about how I felt dealing with people operating at the sharp end of investigative journalism. “My answer was not specific to any of the numerous examples she gave but a general observation about tabloid newspaper reporters and private investigators.” But the emergence of the tape shows how sensitive the issue of phone hacking has become for all newspapers. Morgan, who is a Twitter enthusiast, has been conspicuously quiet on the issue of phone hacking since the scandal blew up three weeks ago. Phone hacking Piers Morgan CNN Newspapers & magazines National newspapers Newspapers TV news Television industry United States Lisa O’Carroll guardian.co.uk

Posted by on July 28, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.