News Corp News

Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of News Of the World, was arrested over the weekend for her possible role in the phone hacking scandal that has caused Rupert Murdoch's media holdings in Britain to unravel and taken down at least one Murdoch employee in the U.S. so far - Les Hinton, the former chairman of News International (Murdoch's U.K. subsidiary) and until just a day or two ago the head of the Dow Jones division that publishes the Wall Street Journal, has resigned. Unaware of the dirty deeds on the other side of the pond, Hinton nonetheless thought that resigning was the proper thing to do.

Brooks resigned July 15 as chief executive officer of News International and was taken into custody in London for questioning. She was released on bail. As all this is going on, the London Metropolitan Police are looking into accusations that officers on their force were paid for information on various stories. This is the biggest thing to hit the British media establishment since Thursday.

With the sun setting on Murdoch's British empire and with Brtitish politicans no longer afraid of calling him on his underhanded practices, some have turned attention to the U.S., where Murdoch bases his media conglomerate. If News Corporation, an American company, has bribed anyone, it's a violation of the anti-bribery statute of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the U.S. Senate's second-highest-ranking Democrat, has called for a congressional probe into the affair. Republican reaction to the scandal involving the owner of Fox News has been incredibly silent, but we can expect Fox commentators like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee to dismiss Durbin's call as a witch hunt.

Say, those two names sound familiar . . ..