A LEFTIE Financial Times reporter has been suspended pending investigation in a major phone hacking scandal.
Former BuzzFeed media reporter Mark Di Stefano is alleged to have listened into private phone calls and confidential and sensitive video calls at rivals The Independent and The London Evening Standard.
Australian-born Di Stefano, who once ran a crusade against Politicalite and attempted to defund independent news will now face an investigation.
The ‘leftist bitch terrier’ is alleged to have hacked phones as staff were told about salary cuts and furloughs by editors and senior managers.
The Independent reported that “log files show an account registered to Di Stefano’s FT.com email address joined the private video call for The Independent staff on Thursday for 16 seconds.”
“The caller’s video was disabled, but journalists saw his name flash briefly on screen before he left the meeting.”
“Five minutes later, a separate account joined the call, this time unnamed.”
“Again, video was switched off so that only a black square was displayed among the screens showing up to 100 people who had been invited to attend.”
“The anonymous user account, which remained in the meeting until the end, was later shown to be linked to the mobile phone used by the same Financial Times reporter.”
Di Stefano later posted the hacked news on Twitter while The Independent’s staff were still being told of salary cuts.
He then filed a report for the Financial Times including confidential details about the company’s advertising downturn.
His article stated that “people on the call” were the source of the story.
The investigation by The Independent also shows that the account linked to Di Stefano’s mobile phone gained access to an Evening Standard video call made by editor George Osborne, announcing large-scale furloughs and salary cuts to staff on 1 April.
The editor of The Independent Christian Broughton told The Independent: “We respect freedom of speech and understand the challenges of newsgathering, but The Independent considers the presence of a third-party journalist in a staff briefing to be entirely inappropriate and an unwarranted intrusion into our employees’ privacy.”
A spokesperson for the Evening Standard told The Independent: “For a journalist from the FT to have illegitimately accessed a private Zoom call is unacceptable.”
“We are sure the FT will want to offer an immediate explanation and an apology.”
Article Courtesy of The Independent
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