Bulletin: Fall 2011, Volume 17, Number 1

Sidebar: America’s Phone Hacking Scandal

A July 28, 2011 story in The New Yorker describes the 1998 “Chiquita Banana scandal,” which Stephens said discouraged American journalists from the practice of phone hacking more than a decade before its widespread use across the Atlantic was revealed.

The Cincinnati Enquirer published an exposé on Chiquita International, alleging that Chiquita employees and a subsidiary “were involved in a Colombian bribery scheme, that it secretly controlled dozens of supposedly independent banana companies in an attempt to avoid Central American restrictions on land ownership, and that its ships had been used to smuggle cocaine,” the story said, although Chiquita later denied the allegations. According to The New Yorker article, when the newspaper later issued a retraction (and paid Chiquita more than $10 million), it suggested that reporter Mike Gallagher had actually hacked into the company’s phone system to get part of the story.

According to a June 29, 1998 story in The New York Times, Enquirer publisher Harry M. Whipple printed an apology stating that “the facts now indicate that an Enquirer employee was involved in the theft of this information in violation of law.” Renowned First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams told the Times that “there have been settlements in substantial amounts after someone has lost a lawsuit, but I can’t think of a situation in which a publication has been obliged to pay a figure on the order of $10 million in circumstances in which there was never litigation.” Abrams told the Times that when the Enquirer admitted the information was stolen from Chiquita, it was on weak legal ground. “A great deal of aggressive newsgathering may be protected by the First Amendment, but stealing isn’t,” he said.

– Emily Johns
Silha Research Assistant