I’m thinking that unexplained deaths of News Corporation whistleblowers aren’t going to help make the story go away. It’s pretty rare for someone in their mid-forties to drop dead. And the timing couldn’t be more suspicious.
Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead.
Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, was said to have been found at his Watford home.
Dead men tell no (more) tales. This guy had been singing like a canary, but this might have been what caused his death.
Hoare returned to the spotlight last week, after he told the New York Times that reporters at the News of the World were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals in exchange for payments to police officers.
He said journalists were able to use a technique called “pinging” which measured the distance between mobile handsets and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location.
Hoare gave further details about the use of “pinging” to the Guardian last week. He described how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: “Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say ‘right that’s where they are.'”
He said: “You’d just go to the news desk and they’d just come back to you. You don’t ask any questions. You’d consider it a job done. The chain of command is one of absolute discipline and that’s why I never bought into it, like with Andy saying he wasn’t aware of it and all that. That’s bollocks.”
He said he would stand by everything he had told the New York Times about “pinging”. “I don’t know how often it happened. That would be wrong of me. But if I had access as a humble reporter … “
He admitted he had had problems with drink and drugs and had been in rehab. “But that’s irrelevant,” he said. “There’s more to come. This is not going to go away.”
Well, part of it just did go away. The police say that the death is unexplained but not suspicious. Under the circumstances, there is no such thing as “not suspicious.”