Coroner & Legal
Rolf Harris: Mail and Sun blame Leveson inquiry for his ‘secret’ arrest
*Pic: It was Leveson … not these innocent News Ltd senior chaps …
The conviction of Rolf Harris on 12 counts of indecent assault dominates today’s national newspapers. It gets front page treatment in each of the 10 titles and I counted a total of 43 pages devoted to the case, plus several leading articles.
The Daily Mail carries the most (nine pages) while the Daily Star and Metro, with two pages each, publish the least.
Given Harris’s fame, the scale of the coverage is unsurprising. Here was a man, to use the Mail’s front page headline phrase, who was “for 50 years… the face of wholesome family TV” who was, in truth, “a predator who duped us all.”
According to the Guardian’s splash, he was portrayed in his trial “as a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character who used his celebrity status to grope and abuse young women and girls.”
There was, by contrast, precious little space given over to the phone hacking trial, which (aside from the Guardian), got short shrift. It meant that readers of most papers were not informed about the astonishing mitigating statement on Neville Thurlbeck’s behalf by his lawyer and the plea for leniency by Glenn Mulcaire’s lawyer.
But phone hacking did get a sort of walk-on role in two interesting leading articles about the Harris verdicts in the Mail and the Sun, Extract:
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“To their shame the Metropolitan police, revelling in the new culture of secrecy launched by Lord Justice Leveson’s abject inquiry, refused to identify him… even after his name was put to them for confirmation…
It may be too much to hope that the celebrities backing Hacked Off’s tribal war on the tabloids would ever pause to think what they’re doing.
But let them not pretend, as they do, that Leveson’s recommendations have anything but grave consequences for our press and our democracy.”
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The two papers blamed the Leveson inquiry, which was set up as a result of the hacking revelations in July 2011, for the police’s initial refusal to confirm that Harris had been the subject of police interest.