The two crucial names in the investigation are, however, not as well known. The first is Gordon Taylor. He is the chief executive of the English soccer players' trades union, the Professional Footballers Association, whose cell phone was hacked by a private investigator hired by News International. In 2009, James Murdoch approved a settlement said to be worth around £1 million to Taylor in court costs and damages, but it was conditional on Taylor agreeing to the court records being sealed and that he would make no public statement about the content of the trial. Murdoch had bought his silence. Nick Davies, an investigative reporter at the Guardian, pursued the attempted cover-up through his contacts in the legal world. Initially, Davies and the Guardian were greeted by what investigations editor David Leigh described in an interview as a "fusillade of lies" from News International and the police, some of whose officers had illegally sold material to reporters. Even Britain's Press Complaints Commission accused the Guardian of "exaggerating." For two years, Davies kept going, amid considerable hostility. The Trinity Mirror papers, Associated Newspapers (publishers of the Daily Mail), and News International, which includes the London Times, were all but silent about the hacking story. When the story might have flagged, the Guardian finally got support not from the British press but from the New York Times, which sent three journalists to write a long piece for the New York Times Magazine in September 2010, adding new details and fresh life to the investigation. The papers were also cooperating on the WikiLeaks revelations.

The second name, which transformed the power of the story, was that of an English schoolgirl. Millie Dowler was 13 years old in 2002 when she was murdered by Levi Bellfield. For six months, her body lay undiscovered and her disappearance was the subject of national attention. The Sun, the News of the World's daily sister paper, offered a reward of £100,000. That was not all. Journalists at News International, it was later revealed, had hacked Millie's phone records, hindering the police investigation and causing enormous distress for the family of the missing girl. The British public, which had not been unduly angered about the invasion of privacy of stars and politicians, was outraged. The lack of respect shown to a dead schoolgirl and her distraught, grieving family brought the News of the World to its knees because, among the public, it "touched a huge emotional button," according to Leigh.

Suddenly, as the Guardian's story resonated across the U.K., the two-year investigation blew wide open, finding its way into the media around the world. The public was made starkly aware that nearly anyone could be the victim of a grotesque invasion of their privacy. Almost overnight, News International acquired pariah status, the share price of BSkyB fell as the takeover seemed in jeopardy, and the News of the World was shuttered. Leigh compares Nick Davies to Woodward and Bernstein: he was one dogged reporter who broke the story in the face of widespread institutional denial. But Davies needed a strong editor and paper at his back. Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of the Guardian, gave the story his staunch support partly because he had for years been arguing that the U.K. press inadequately policed its own standards and would eventually be punished. He broke the unwritten gentlemen's agreement that newspapers don't criticize the behavior of rival newspapers, that you don't "piss on your own," as one journalist put it. The fact that the Guardian is owned by a trust, and therefore is not beholden to owners or shareholders who might in such situations be put under pressure, allowed the paper to keep going when the denials were at their fiercest. As Leigh put it, "we have pretty clean hands" and, in Alan Rusbridger, "the only guy willing to take on Rupert Murdoch."

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Peter Osnos is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs books and a media fellow at the Century Foundation.