Well,
this will put you off your breakfast:
[Rupert Murdoch] flew straight into another storm as it was claimed 9/11 victims may have had their mobiles tapped by News of the World reporters.
Yes, it's the Daily Mail, a rival British tabloid. And for a lot of people, that'll make it suspect. But man alive, what's being claimed here is about the most disgusting thing an American could contemplate. (Well, any human being, really. But the "science is still out" on Murdoch's status on that count.)
More:
[A] former New York cop made the 9/11 hacking claim. He alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.
Yum. Classy.
'His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.
Seriously, though. Would the Murdoch empire sink that low?
The News of the World was shut after 11,000 documents seized from a private investigator revealed the ugly truth behind many of its scoops.
One police source said: 'These documents show the hacking was not just one or two attempts at accessing voicemails. More than 4,000 people had their phone hacked. This was hacking on an industrial scale.'
So, is it just the fabrication of a rival tabloid? Always possible. Of course, to this point, stories very nearly as unbelievable have turned out to be true, and the insistence spun out from the Murdoch side (by the man who's now the once-venerable Wall Street Journal's publisher) that the scandal was compartmentalized and contained has turned out to be empty lies as well.
And of course, no one needs any special prompting to go where Tom Watson has:
That toxic media culture is resident in the deepest hallways studios of Murdoch's American venture, Fox News.
But I'm sure that greatest of American "news" consumer virtues, the deep and reflective appreciation of nuance, will help Fox's supporters shield Murdoch's "American" baby from the ghoulishness now seeping into and destroying the other arms of his empire.