Fleet Street's Demons

The phone-hacking scandal has already led to two arrests, the closure of a newspaper, a public inquiry, and some serious grave-dancing.

The News of the World phone-hacking scandal has rocked the British newspaper industry and threatens to infect the office of Prime Minister David Cameron. The Guardian, whose reporter Nick Davies is largely responsible for the stunning revelations that NoW had hacked the voicemails of everyone from war widows to terror victims' families to murdered teenagers, wonders, in an editorial, why the management of News International, the Rupert Murdoch-owned company in charge of NoW, and a stable of other right-leaning British papers, still have their jobs while the entire staff of the tabloid was thrown under the bus. “If Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, was not herself one of the 'wrongdoers' then she was guilty of such editorial blindness and managerial ineptitude that she should resign,” the editorialists opine. In any other company, that would probably be the case, but hubris is something that Murdoch's properties clearly have in spades.

The New York Times' John F. Burns and Jo Becker elucidate the level of influence that the Murdoch family has had on the British political class. “Since he began building his media empire in Britain 40 years ago, Mr. Murdoch, who was born in Australia, has been a figure of towering political importance, credited by many British politicians with the power to make and unmake governments as well as influence government policies that affect the fortunes of his newspaper and television interests,” they write. Murdoch's influence was such that, as Simon Hoggart points out in The Guardian, “MPs feel, like political prisoners after a tyrant has been condemned to death by a people's tribunal, that they are at last free ... They've got their testicles back.”

Those at The Economist figure there are a host of concerns about this “depressing mess,” the foremost being that if NoW was paying private investigators to break the law, then it's more than likely the rest of Britain's cutthroat tabloid press could have done so as well. “It is notable that Britain’s other tabloid newspapers, which love to kick a rival when it is down, have been disturbingly quiet about the allegations of phone hacking,” they note. Toss in concerns about police corruption and the cosy relationship between polticians and the tabs – both Tony Blair and Cameron hired media chiefs who had been editors on Fleet Street – and the only way to rectify it is “a judicial inquiry, with the power to call witnesses, including police officers, under oath” that covers all of Fleet Street. At least they can rest assured that coverage of this fiasco will keep their circulation up for quite some time.