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The publisher and the incoming editor of The Washington Post
used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles,
according to a former colleague, the published account of a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives.

Will Lewis, The Post’s publisher, assigned one of the articles in 2004 as business editor of The Sunday Times.

Another was written by Robert Winnett, whom Mr. Lewis recently announced as The Post’s next executive editor.

The use of deception, hacking and fraud is at the heart of a long-running British newspaper scandal,
one that toppled a major tabloid in 2010 and led to years of lawsuits by celebrities who said that reporters improperly obtained their personal documents and voice mail messages.

Mr. Lewis has maintained that his only involvement in the controversy was helping to root out problematic behavior after the fact, while working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

But a former Sunday Times reporter said on Friday that Mr. Lewis had personally assigned him to write an article in 2004 using phone records that the reporter understood to have been obtained through hacking.

After that story broke, a British businessman who was the subject of the article said publicly that his records had been stolen.

The reporter, Peter Koenig, described Mr. Lewis as a talented editor
— one of the best he had worked with.

But as time went on, he said Mr. Lewis changed.

“His ambition outran his ethics,” Mr. Koenig said.

A second article in 2002 carried Mr. Winnett’s byline, and a private investigator who worked for The Sunday Times later publicly acknowledged using deception to land the materials.

Both articles were produced during a period when the newspaper has acknowledged paying the private detective explicitly to obtain material surreptitiously.

That would violate the ethics codes of The Post and most American news organizations.

The Sunday Times has said repeatedly that it has never paid anyone to act illegally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/world/europe/will-lewis-records-uk-editor.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0E0._1yj.LsRWOQdgpAmk&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare