In case you missed it, the News of the World spent lots of money bugging lots of peoples' phones (illegally, of course). Not the phones of evil-doers, of course - investigative journalism isn't really that paper's forte. No, they hacked into the voicemail of sports players, minor royals and micro-celebs. For some reason, they did it it Gordon Taylor, head of the footballers' trade union, the PFA - and paid him £1m to shut up about it. One of their journalists went to prison for hacking into some prince's phone, and they claimed it was an isolated case. The editor, Andy Coulson, unconvincingly claimed that he knew nothing about it, but resigned anyway. Guess where he is now! He's David Cameron's director of communications! Ironically, given his party's clamour about Gordon Brown's alleged bullying, one of his journalists was paid £800,000 compensation for 'persistent bullying' by… Andy Coulson!
Er… the Guardian found that 91 people had been hacked, that the police knew, and did nothing about it.
Now the Parliamentary Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport has issued a big report on privacy and the press, with a large section on Murdoch's paper. They condemn the paper for being obstructive and imply that the paper's executives lied to them, and criticise the police for not wanting to do a proper investigation.
What's News International's response? That the report is a political conspiracy between the Guardian and the Committee - not natural bedfellows given that the chairman is a Tory. It's an important report for media/cultural studies students because it raises issues about morality, journalistic ethics and justification and about press regulation. The Press Complaints Committee is run by the newspapers and is notoriously useless - but would you want a state committee overseeing what goes into the papers?
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