George Clooney's Next Flick!

“There’s something terribly exciting about getting at the truth when powerful people are trying to conceal it,” Nick Davies told Hollywood on the Potomac about being an investigative reporter. Davies is an award-winning special correspondent for The Guardian and his book “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch” is being made for the silver screen by George Clooney.

“It’s about the pivotal role the newspaper played in exposing the British phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid The News of the World, and cast an unforgiving light on the incestuous ties among the country’s most powerful media conglomerate, the police and the political elite.” New York Times “I guess they usually conceal it,” Nick added about powerful people, “because they’re abusing their power. It’s very satisfying to expose abuse of power I suppose.”

“Essentially I’m lucky because I’m freelance. Nobody tells me what to try and sniff out. It’s just a question of what appears to be important at any one time. I went through a phase of being very shocked about the scale of poverty in England. I ended up spending years writing stories about poverty in England and doing a whole book about it. Other times I got worried about the decline of our state funded schools. I spent several years on that. The war against drugs I thought was a very bad thing so I tried to expose that.

This book actually started like ten years ago. After the invasion of Iraq, I was frustrated by the fact that when it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction, new organizations reported that as though it was a problem created by governments and intelligence organizations. Whereas, clearly, the misinformation had a third player which was news organizations. I started looking at why news organizations produce so many stories which are false or distorted. I wrote a book about that called Flat Earth News. While I was doing that, which involved talking to reporters from other papers about the stories behind stories, some of them started telling me about illegal things they had been doing to get their stories. That then led on to looking at the illegality which produced the whole phone hacking scandal,” Davies explained.