Elinor Goodman has been appointed to the official inquiry into the ‘phone hacking scandal.
Elinor, a former political editor of Channel 4 News, got the phone call asking her to join the inquiry team while she was at the Marlborough Jazz Festival on Saturday (July 17.)
Elinor, who has lived in the Marlborough area for many years, left Channel 4 News in 2005 and became chair of the Affordable Rural Housing Commission. Since then she has been heard regularly on BBC radio chairing The Week in Westminster and reporting for countryside and farming programmes.
She told Marlborough News Online: “The scandal has shown up the two poles of journalism – the high and the low. The question is how you stamp out the low without endangering the high which includes the kind of investigative journalism which has revealed this scandal.”
The inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, will investigate the ethics and culture of the media as well as specific claims about hacking at the News of the World, the shortcomings of the initial police inquiry and allegations of illicit payments to police by the press.
And today (Wednesday, July 20) the prime minister, David Cameron added another element: he wants Lord Leveson to consider the limits on media ownership.
The first part of the inquiry – into the ethics and culture of the media – will start immediately. The inquiry into hacking and the police’s role will have to wait until the police investigation is completed.
The others on Lord Leveson’s inquiry panel are: Shami Chakrabarti (director of Liberty), Sir Paul Scott-Lee (former chief constable of the West Midlands), Lord Currie (former chair of the media regulator Ofcom), George Jones (former political journalist with the Daily Telegraph and the Press Association) and Sir David Bell (former chair of the Financial Times).
Elinor joined Channel 4 News when it (and Channel 4) began in 1982 – she was previously a political reporter on the Financial Times. She became political editor of Channel 4 News in 1988.
