Arrested News of the World executive was employed as Metroplitan Police adviser

[Turborama]

Source: The Guardian

Neil Wallis, who has been questioned over phone hacking, advised commissioner on communications, Scotland Yard says

Vikram Dodd, crime correspondent | Thursday July 14 2011 17.21 BST

Scotland Yard has admitted it employed Neil Wallis, a former executive at the News of the World, as an adviser to the commissioner until September 2010.

Wallis was employed to advise Sir Paul Stephenson and John Yates on a part-time basis from October 2009 to September 2010. During this time the Yard was saying there was no need to reopen the phone-hacking investigation – a decision made by Yates despite allegations in the Guardian that the first police investigation had been inadequate.

Wallis is a former News of the World executive editor. He was arrested on Thursday morning as part of the police's renewed phone-hacking inquiry.

Wallis joined the News of the World in 2003 as deputy to then editor Andy Coulson. In mid-2007 he became executive editor, eventually leaving the News International title in 2009. Police say he supplied "strategic communication advice". The Met said his company was chosen because it offered to do the work for the lowest price. He was paid £24,000 by Scotland Yard to work as a two-day-a-month consultant.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/14/news-of-the-world-neil-wallis

[Kaleko]

1. It's heartening to see how doggedly The Guardian is pursuing

the various leads in the Murdoch case. I don't see a comparable news organization in America capable of doing this work anymore.

Unfair and criminally imbalanced R US.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. And he was on the Editors' Code of Practice Committee until August 2009

http://www.editorscode.org.uk/downloads/press_releases/PR_hannahwalker.pdf

which is an industry body meant to set the standards:

The Editors' Code of Practice is the foundation stone of the UK press self-regulatory system. It sets out the rules that the industry itself has drawn up voluntarily and pledged to accept.

It is by those self-imposed standards that newspapers and magazines can be held to account via the Press Complaints Commission, the independent adjudicating authority.

Unlike the PCC, which has a strong majority of lay members, the Code is drafted by a senior committee of editors, representing the national and regional newspaper and magazine industry.

There is symmetry in this. For just as the PCC's authority derives from having a lay majority to guarantee independence, so does the respect that the Code commands throughout the industry flow from it having been produced by editors for editors. That guarantees the universal compliance upon which the system relies for its success.

http://www.editorscode.org.uk/welcome.html

Fills you with confidence about their high standards, huh?