The phone-hacking scandal as it unfolded in 2011
Remember phone-hacking? The drama that followed explosive revelations in July 2011 that the British newspaper the News of the World had illegally accessed the voicemail messages of a murdered 13-year-old girl rapidly spiralled into a scandal as shocking and sensational as any the tabloid had itself covered during its 168-year history.
Exactly how these revelations led to the closure of a national newspaper, the convictions of a number of its employees, the resignation of a Metropolitan Police chief and a public inquiry into ethical conduct across the UK media as a whole emerged as a story of many, many moving parts and conflicting testimonies. Towards the end of that year we tried to make sense of the story so far; it remains an astonishing sequence of events. Hover over the infographic below to disentangle the key moments and major players in the ever-evolving aftermath of what Ed Miliband had called “one of the darkest days in journalism”…
This is an edited version of an infographic which first appeared in DG #4, published in November 2011. The timeline below has been updated to reflect events that have taken place since that time.
