Calls for CNN Host to Testify in Hacking Scandal (Piers Morgan)

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

LONDON — Piers Morgan, the CNN talk show host and a former editor of the British tabloid The Mirror, faced calls on Thursday from prominent British lawmakers to appear before a parliamentary committee investigating the illegal hacking of cellphone messages.

The calls came amid fresh signs that separate parliamentary and police inquiries into investigative practices in British newsrooms are on a course to expand beyond The News of the World tabloid, now defunct, and the executive chain in Rupert Murdoch’s stable of British newspapers to rival publications. The inquiries seem sure to encompass two papers owned by the Trinity Mirror group, The Mirror and The Sunday Mirror, the toughest competitors for the Murdoch-owned tabloids here.

Mr. Morgan, 46, who in January took over the CNN talk show slot previously held by Larry King, has issued a series of denials in recent weeks that he had any knowledge of phone hacking at The Mirror when he was the editor from 1995 to 2004. He was forced to resign in an uproar over faked photographs that the paper published with an article about accusations that British troops beat Iraqi detainees after the 2003 invasion, but he rebuilt his career on television, making his American debut on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” in 2006.

On Wednesday night, Mr. Morgan was thrust back into the furor that has already forced the closing of The News of the World and the arrest of 11 people linked to accusations of wrongdoing at the paper. The BBC program “Newsnight” reported that a voice mail message left in 2001 by Paul McCartney, the former Beatle, on the cellphone of Heather Mills, then his girlfriend and later his wife, had been intercepted. The BBC report quoted from an article by Mr. Morgan in The Daily Mail in 2006, in which he said he had listened to a tape of “a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone” and had found it “heartbreaking.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/world/europe/05hacking.html?pagewanted=all

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1. I've read Morgans' written response to the accusuations of Heather Mills

and I found them to be more than just a little bit snarky. I hope they have a real roast with him and I hope they nail him to the cross word puzzle of life......to across and three down.

[VWolf]

3. EVERYTHING about Morgan is snarky. n/t

[dipsydoodle]

2. Sometime maybe

But Mr Whittingdale said Mr Morgan would not immediately be called in front of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which is investigating phone hacking, because the police inquiry 'has to be the priority '.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2022174/Piers-Morgan-answer-questions-phone-hacking-says-select-committee-chairman.html#ixzz1U8mduxkm

Its also worth searching exactly what the Judge had to say about Heather Mills after the divorce settelement proceedings.

This isn't a defense of The Mirror : just pointing out doubts about the allegation after 10 years or so.