News Of the Worst

The News of the World, Britain's largest newspaper in terms of circulation, a newspaper so much a part of British popular culture it is mentioned in two British rock songs ("Polythene Pam" by the Beatles and "Back On the Chain Gang" by the Pretenders) and lent its name to the title of a Queen album (the one with "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions"), is publishing its last edition tomorrow, after 168 years in publication.

The paper, which Rupert Murdoch bought at the beginning of his quest for British media domination (world media domination would come later), was found to have hacked the cell phones of British royalty and celebrities, and then it hit a new low by hacking phones of murder victims and families of slain soldiers and terrorist attack victims. The News Of the World even hacked the cell phone of a thirteen-year-old girl who was murdered and kept listening to and erasing messages left by her family, leading them to think the girl was alive.

Though Murdoch is shutting down the paper after Sunday, the only people who will lose their jobs as a result will be low-level reporters and editors, not the News Of the World executives who allowed about all this and have since left.

Oh yeah, Andy Coulson, a former News Of the World journalist and a former aide to British Prime Minister David Cameron, was arrested for being greatly involved the scandal.

This affair shows just how incestuous British politicians and media executives are with each other - even more so than the United States. For a long time, British political leaders have acquiesced to the demands of the U.K.'s commercial media and have let them get away with anything. Fox News and the New York Post look like the BBC and the Boston Globe, respectively, in comparison to the media operations Murdoch runs in the mother country. Fox News merely promotes an agenda and hires Republican insiders as commentators; News International, Murdoch's British affiliate, pretty much has politicians from both the Labour and Conservative parties kowtowing to it for support . . . but especially to Murdoch and his henchmen - and henchwomen, like Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor who's now a News International executive editor and a close friend of Cameron. The politicians looked the other way while the News of the World perpetrated this disgusting and reprehensible hacking practice.

News International recently handed over to the police e-mails showing that, while at News Of the World, Andy Coulson was actively condoning payments to the police, not just for stories - common practice in the United Kingdom - but also payments for confidential information and other things that are illegal to pay the police for.

Murdoch's attempt at buying acquiring parts of BSkyB, a major British satellite television company and subject to review by the British government, is pretty much in trouble now. Pretty soon, Fox News in the United States is going to be investigated for lying about, well, just about anything, and I hope I'm around to see it.