The freshly appointed publisher of The Washington Post, Will Lewis, and its incoming executive editor, Robert Winnett, both used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles while they were journalists in London some two decades ago, according to reporting from The New York Times.
The articles, published in the British broadsheet newspaper The Sunday Times, were produced during a period the organization “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 NYT‘s Justin Scheck and Jo Becker wrote on Saturday. Their reporting is based on interviews with a former colleague, a published account of a private investigator, and an analysis of newspaper archives.
The British newspaper has repeatedly denied paying anyone to act illegally.
“I have asked my friends and family to stop sending me links to stories about Will Lewis,” a Post employee told Politico. “Every scoop is worse than the last. I can’t focus on my work when each headline heightens what’s beginning to feel like an existential crisis.”
Lewis, who was the publisher of The Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2020, assigned an article in 2004 while he was working as business editor at The Sunday Times. The author of that article, Peter Koenig, said this week that Lewis “had personally assigned him to write an article in 2004 using phone records that the reporter understood to have been obtained through hacking,” according to the NYT.
After that article was published, the subject, a prominent British businessman, publicly said that his records had been stolen. While it remains unclear who initially obtained the records—they’ve never been caught—it was reported at the time that someone had called into the phone company and impersonated the businessman. In the U.K., this kind of deception is referred to as “blagging,” which holds special allowances under British law, should the obtained information be in the public interest.
The Times’ review of Mr. Lewis’s career questioned a decision the new publisher made back in 2009 when working for The Daily Telegraph in Britain to “pay more than 100,000 (GB) pounds for information from a source. Paying for information is prohibited in most American newsrooms,” the journalists write.
In a November meeting with Post staff, Lewis reportedly defended the payments and said the money in question had been put into an escrow account to protect a source. “But,” the Times’ team writes, “the consultant who brokered the deal said in a recent interview that there had been no escrow account and that he had doled out the money to sources himself.”
A spokeswoman for the Washington Post told the Times that Lewis declined to answer a list of questions.
In a November meeting before officially stepping into the role, Lewis told a room of Post staffers that his “plan is to arrive and for us to together craft an extremely exciting way forward. I can smell it. I can feel it. I know it.”
In light of questions raised in yesterday’s reporting, it’s unclear what Lewis’ future looks like at the organization.
Sally Quinn, a long-time Post columnist who has shown support for Lewis’ proposed changes to the newsroom, said about the Times article that “total transparency is key” and “it’s only fair to give Will a chance to speak for himself,” according to Politico.
As Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein has reported, these findings come after a particularly tumultuous transition period for the Post. For the team at the legacy newsroom, this past year has been filled with the introduction of new executive staff, like Lewis, over 200 buyouts across the organization, persistent financial concerns, editorial restructuring, and general confusion about their future. The Post was particularly rattled by the abrupt exit of Sally Buzbee, who had led the paper since May 2021 and was the first woman to do so.
Katie Herchenroeder
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