Piers Morgan might have been speaking nonsense when he made the modest claim that all he knew of phone hacking was that someone once told him that it was possible. The embattled CNN host, who has spent a fair amount of time defending his knowledge on hacking lately, appears to have forgotten about a 2009 interview.

Like a good search engine optimisation strategy, journalists are beginning to link the terms “Piers Morgan” and “phone hacking” quite well now.

While Piers did not specifically admit to the interception or “hacking” of voicemail messages himself, he may well have been influential in the unlawful black-market trade in confidential personal information.

The Daily Beast’s editor-at-large, Lloyd Grove, is one of those journalists getting good at having a closer look at Piers Morgan.

Look at what he’s done here:

In the June 7, 2009, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 of “Desert Island Discs”—in which guests select musical works, books, and luxury items for an imaginary marooning on a remote island—interviewer Kirsty Young pressed the former Fleet Street editor about tabloid tactics that were being widely condemned at the time in Parliament and elsewhere.

This is how that little section of the conversation between Kirsty and Piers went:

Kirsty Young: And what about this nice middle-class boy who would have to be dealing with, I mean, essentially people who rake through people’s bins for a living? People who tap people’s phones, people who take secret photographs… who do all that very nasty down-in-the-gutter stuff—how did you feel about that?

Piers Morgan: 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. That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work.

Now, another respectable trait an ethical journalist often possesses is the ability to throw in some credible sources and statistics. Here’s Grove’s choice:

A recent official government report on privacy violations by the British press, “What Price Privacy Now?” listed, by newspaper, the number of transactions between journalists and private investigators from an earlier probe in 2003, when Morgan was in charge of the Daily Mirror. That newspaper ranked third, ahead of the fifth-ranked News of the World, with 681 transactions involving 45 staffers.

And so, one has to wonder who Piers was referring to when he made these comments and what he really knew about what was going on.

Was this happening while Piers was editor at the News of the World, while he was editor of the Daily Mail, or both?

It’s no secret Morgan moved to the US to start a new life, but this might be the ghost of phone hacking past tapping on his shoulder.

And don’t forget, if you feel like you might be a bit behind on the phone hacking vibe, be sure to check out the first episode of a new 2oceansVibe segment: “What’s The Vibe?”

You’ll quickly see where Piers fits in to all of this and why it’s imperative he is honest about things.

[Source: DailyBeast]