LONDON, 9 May 2004 — The feisty editor behind the pictures and the stories that have put the British Army on the spot over the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners is no stranger to controversy.
Not yet 40, Piers Morgan of the Daily Mirror, who shortened his full name — Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan — early in his journalistic career, stands out as one of Britain’s most renowned and polemic media fixtures.
Morgan unleashed an uproar when his tabloid, which sells 1.9 million copies a day, ran photos on May 1 purporting to show members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment beating and urinating on an Iraqi prisoner.
On Friday, it pursued the story with testimony from an anonymous reservist who claimed that he had seen four incidents of Iraqi prisoners being punched and kicked by members of the infantry regiment.
And yesterday, it published claims that soldiers even made CDs of beatings to keep as souvenirs.
The Ministry of Defense confirmed that the Royal Military Police was questioning the reservist, on top of an investigation into the photographs.
Some experts have expressed doubts about the authenticity of the photos, noting that the assault rifle, truck and hats seen in them are not identical to those used by British forces, which occupy southern Iraq.
But Morgan — who editorially opposed the Iraq war — insists that the pictures are real, and he is prepared to say as much to the House of Commons Defense Committee, which intends to summon him.
Given his brash personality and his meteoric rise — he was a mere 28 when he was named editor of the racy News of the World, the best-selling Sunday newspaper — many would like to see Morgan’s head fall.
His detractors include members of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s entourage, where the Daily Mirror’s staunch opposition to the Iraq war drew much ire — especially as the newspaper is pro-Labour at heart.
Prior to the Iraq war, Morgan — who took the helm at the Daily Mirror in 1995 — was quoted as saying: “I think we’ve moved the paper away from being the Labour government’s poodle and we’ve become their rottweiler.”
“Which means that we are still invited to the garden parties but you have to put a muzzle on us.” He said that, since coming to power in 1997, Blair’s Labour government has been wooing Rupert Murdoch,” the global media tycoon who owns the rival Sun, the News of the World, the upmarket Times of London and the Sunday Times.
“I said: there has to be a bit of a pay-back here.”
Like other mass-market tabloids, the Daily Mirror offers its readers a diet rich in sports news and celebrity gossip; one of Morgan’s innovations was to form a band of fearless gossip reporters dubbed “The 3am Girls”.
But the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, triggered a change in tone.
“I was determined, when the initial rush of Sept. 11 coverage ended, that we would not then reverse back to the more trivia-led agenda that we struggled with for 25 years,” he told an interviewer.
To beef up coverage, he brought in the left-wing journalist John Pilger, a sharp critic of US President George W. Bush who once unabashedly branded the United States “the world’s leading rogue state.”
But Morgan did not entirely give up on gossip.
In November 2003, one of his young reporters, Ryan Parry, wrangled himself a job as a Buckingham Palace footman just ahead of Bush’s state visit to London, resulting in a bold expose of royal security — as well as tantalizing tidbits about the daily life of Queen Elizabeth and her family.
Just a month earlier, the Daily Mirror beat its competitors in obtaining juicy excerpts of the memoirs of Paul Burrell, the former butler and confidante of the late Princess Diana. But Morgan’s impressive troves have not always come without a cost.
This week the Daily Mirror lost a long-running legal battle when the Law Lords, the country’s de facto supreme court, ruled that it had invaded the privacy of supermodel Naomi Campbell by exposing her addiction to drugs and her efforts to overcome it.
The newspaper has reportedly been left with legal costs of one million pounds ($1.78 million).
Morgan is also still trying to live down the big Mirror blunder of October 2003 when it scored a “world exclusive” with details of rock star Paul McCartney’s new baby boy Joseph.
Twenty-four hours later, McCartney and wife Heather Mills announced the birth of little Beatrice. A girl.
