Kevin Marshall's America
After more than 168 years, Britain’s News of the World will permanently cease operations effective this Sunday.
It all started with a scandal over five years ago, when it was revealed that a journalist had hired a private investigator to hack into the phones of hundreds of mobile phones. The reporter plead guilty, but it was revealed to be far from an isolated incident when The Guardian revealed that journalists hacked into a missing girl’s voicemail and deleted messages, giving family members the mistaken impression she might still be alive. She was found dead several months later.
Four days and three arrests later, it’s been announced that Parliament will launch a public inquiry into the matter and News of the World has been permanently shut down by parent company News International, part of Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp conglomerate (which stateside is best known for 20th Century Fox and Fox News).
Over the course of four days a publication goes from #1 to shut down. Crazy.
Coverage from The Guardian:
- Missing girl’s phone was hacked by News of the World
- Family of murdered girl shocked by hacking revelations
- Investigative journalist Nick Davies gives a timeline and summation of the events that led to the closing
- Read the announcement on News of the World’s Website
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7 Responses to Britain’s most-read tabloid shut down by scandal
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STALK ME
What will happen to Rat-Boy and Alien Elvis???oh wait, is that a different paper?
Outrageous and unbelievable.
Wow. Deleting the voicemail of a missing person??? Just wow.
Outrageous and unbelievable????
Really?? We’re talking Rupert Murdoch here.
It would be outrageous and unbelievable to think that he had no knowledge of all this.
Something owned by Rupert Murdoch did something unethical for the sake of sensationalism!? I refuse to believe it, that’s just rubbish.
Of course the move to close the paper is purely cynical, Murdoch is positioning to buy the controlling shares in BSkyB television and it doesn’t look good when your media empire is exposed as deviant, irresponsible, and against the public interest (our love/hate relationship with Fox News here in the States is no fluke.) As for losing money,there’s been speculation that he’s wanted to add a Sunday edition to The Sun tabloid (another trash paper that he owns over there) anyway, if he does he loses nothing. Truly if there’s any one man who’s done more to cheapen the cultural landscape or gutterize the political tone of the English speaking world in the last thirty or forty years than Rupert Murdoch, I’d like to know who that is. He makes the publishers of the Enquirer look like Ivy League elites.
#4 Peter, the goings-on of the paper are as stated aka SHOCKING.