In the wake of that revelation came these results: both Rupert and James Murdoch, the chief executive and deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, which owned The News of the World, were called before Parliament; the company decided immediately to close the 168-year-old newspaper; more than a dozen former employees have been arrested; the article about Milly Dowler by Mr. Davies and Ms. Hill won top honors from the Foreign Press Association in London last week; and a broad investigation by the Metropolitan Police of London called Operation Weeting yielded more than 5,800 victims.
Oh yes, and the police have zeroed in on one more reporter: Ms. Hill.
Last August, after the Milly Dowler story broke, Ms. Hill wrote an article about the arrest of James Desborough, the former Hollywood reporter for The News of the World. The police decided that their investigation had been leaked, a detective from Operation Weeting was arrested and Ms. Hill was brought in for questioning “under caution,” which means she was read her rights and any answers she gave could be used against her in a criminal case.
Ms. Hill was initially questioned on a charge that she had induced a police official to illegally share information. Then in September, word came that she might be charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act. The police backed off that charge after a huge outcry in the British press, but she remained at risk of being prosecuted on the original charge.
After the investigation into her reporting was announced, Ms. Hill suddenly found herself hunted, with reporters from the tabloid press camped out at her doorstep, digging into her personal life and following her with cameras when she went shopping for groceries.
“I am amazed, given that what I was doing was good old-fashioned journalism,” she said in an interview at a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan. “I have done nothing more than speak to a source, without confirming or denying who that source is, and to criminalize that is utterly shocking. It is beyond ‘Alice in Wonderland’ territory.”
To be clear, Ms. Hill is not being pursued on the grounds that she paid bribes to the police or used anything more technologically advanced than shoe leather to obtain her story.
“Amelia paid no one, hacked no one and just did her job as a journalist,” Mr. Davies, whose reporting broke open the scandal to begin with, said in an e-mail.
With all of the targets of opportunity — 28 journalists have been named so far in the investigation of bribes and hacking — Ms. Hill remains surprised that reporting that helped uncover the illegal conduct in the first place has made her a target.
“It shows how emotional the police have become,” she said, tugging at her big multicolored scarf. “They have let their fury and embarrassment caused by my reporting distract them from the heinous crimes that repeated investigations had failed to uncover and sought to criminalize my work as a reporter. I showed the inner machinery of their investigation, which is what journalists do.”
Perhaps, but the results were not typical. In a matter of days after the article she wrote with Mr. Davies on the Dowler affair appeared, The News of the World was closed.
“I’m not proud of that,” she said. “I don’t think that we need fewer papers, we need more. The reporters there were just collateral damage, sacrificed to save Rebekah Brooks, and she arguably was being used to protect James Murdoch.” Ms. Brooks, the chief of News International, the British newspaper arm of News Corporation, eventually resigned.
Britain is now in the midst of hearings that are broadly looking into the conduct of the press. Last week, the so-called Leveson hearings included a red carpet full of celebrities who testified that their private lives had been kidnapped by tabloid aggression.
Ms. Hill believes the inquiry has value, but she says that most of the British press was far too quiet when it came to the allegations raised by Mr. Davies’s reporting back in 2009.
“All of the organs of truth were in this complicit silence after Nick’s stories,” she said. “People were terrified of Murdoch and they have every right to be terrified. With the politicians he is friendly with, the newspapers and television stations, he was able to punish his enemies. Remember that he was within days of getting his hands on BSkyB when this story finally took hold.
“This is not like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when they pulled back the curtain and it was just a little man sitting there. He has serious weaponry at his disposal in Britain,” she said.
There are fewer arrows in that quiver. Just as News Corporation was about to swallow the majority share of the satellite service BSkyB that it did not own, it found an enraged public and government at its throat. The News of the World is gone and word came last week that James Murdoch had stepped down as a director of two subsidiaries that publish Murdoch-owned newspapers in Britain.
Ms. Hill, who came to The Guardian from The Observer a year and a half ago and has a broad range of interests as a reporter, does not want to spend years chasing the fallout from the hacking story, but for the time being she is very much in the middle of it. The police have concluded their investigation into her reporting and she anxiously awaits word on whether the Crown Prosecution Service will proceed with the case.
It’s a predicament she does not find amusing.
“I’m trying not to be on tenterhooks and think about what happens if the Crown Prosecution Service takes on the case, but if I am honest, it’s gnawing away at me,” she said. “It is upsetting and destabilizing. I can’t ever quite forget the nightmare could explode again. And this time, it would be really serious.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n
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