Early on in The Hack – Adolescence writer Jack Thorne’s new series about the News International phone hacking scandal – Guardian journalist Nick Davies appears on the Today programme to promote his 2008 book, Flat Earth News. It is an indictment of the contemporary British press; its sloppiness and corruption. “The logic of journalism has been overwhelmed by the logic of commercialism,” he tells the host and a glowering Stuart Kuttner, the managing editor of the News of the World. Nowadays, says Davies, so-called reporters are simply “passive processors of unchecked second-hand material”.
My first thought is: OK, this is not your common-or-garden ITV drama. No hand-holding, no pandering, no schmaltz; we’re about to get a proper, grownup deep dive into the tabloid malfeasance – illegal surveillance, toxic power plays – that Davies began exposing in this newspaper in 2009. Bring on the machiavellian office politics, the labyrinthine narratives of your Successions, your Industrys, your Line of Dutys. (My next thought is: second-hand material? What, like yet another dramatisation of a recent major news story?)
