The Tables Are Turned on Murdoch

By JOE NOCERA
NYT

You have to love the fact that when John Yates resigned on Monday as the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London — a k a Scotland Yard — he complained about the “huge amount of inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip” that had finally forced his hand.

My first thought was: He didn’t really say that, did he? My second thought was: Can any human being truly be that unaware?

When the writers and editors of the late, unlamented News of the World were busy bribing Mr. Yates’s police officers, what they wanted in return was — gosh! — malicious gossip. When they were hacking the phones of royal family members and murdered teenagers, they were seeking, you know, malicious gossip. When the recently arrested Rebekah Brooks called Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, to tell him that Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, which she then edited, was about to reveal that his infant child had cystic fibrosis — information that Brown is convinced came from a hacked phone message — she was telling him the paper was going to print a piece of gossip that a more humane institution would have let pass. She might not have viewed this as malicious, but the Brown family certainly did.

Let’s be honest here. There is something undeniably rich about seeing the tables turned like this. When I see photographs of Brooks, or Murdoch, or his son James (who until a few weeks ago was his father’s heir apparent at the News Corporation), sitting in their cars, staring blankly ahead, I can just picture the paparazzi horde jostling to get a decent shot of its prey. Murdoch’s papers have always feasted on scandals like this, picking the bones of their victims. Now Murdoch’s the one whose bones are being picked.

(More here.)