Just this week Slate published a piece suggesting that the departure of Glenn Beck from Fox News showed that there were depths beyond which even the Murdoch empire would not stoop.
Evidently the standards are a bit looser on this side of the Atlantic, as we are now hearing allegations that the News of the World (R.Murdoch, prop.) may have paid a private investigator to tap the phone of a teenage murder victim, Milly Dowler. It's even suggested that the investigator deleted messages from Milly's phone, which may have both given her parents false hope that she was still alive, and hampered the police investigation.
The editor of the NotW at the time (2002) was Rebekah Brooks, now CEO of News International UK. Ms Brooks is, of course, shocked, shocked by the allegations, and says it is "inconceivable" that she knew about the phone tapping at the time. Inconceivable, in this context, appears to mean "impossible for anyone to prove". An even more disingenuous line has come from News International's official spokesman, who has called the whole story a "worrying development". You can hardly use the term "development" to refer to something that happened almost a decade ago, so he can only mean that he's worried about the fact that they've been found out.
A couple of months ago, Rupert Murdoch dropped everything to come to London in an attempt to control the damage from an earlier set of phone tapping allegations. Time for another visit, Rupert.
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