LONDON — It was perhaps inevitable that the phone-hacking accusations in Britain would cross the Atlantic and reach Piers Morgan, the flamboyant former Fleet Street editor who is now the host of “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN.
James Hipwell, a former journalist at The Daily Mirror, a tabloid edited by Morgan until 2004, now says that phone hacking was “endemic” at the paper. “Piers was extremely hands-on as an editor,” Hipwell, 45, told the British newspaper The Independent in an interview published Saturday. “I can’t say 100 percent that he knew about it. But it was inconceivable he didn’t.”
In an e-mail interview, Morgan struck back at that allegation and other suggestions by members of Parliament and a widely read political blog that his reporters had landed scoops at The Daily Mirror based on phone hacking. Members of Parliament have also said that Morgan should be questioned.
“I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone,” Morgan said.
