THE NEWS OF THE WORLD

For much of its 168-year old history, the British Sunday newspaper The News of the World has been one of the biggest-selling papers in the country. With its mix of sport, scantily clad women and investigations into the peccadilloes of the rich and famous, it was either (according to your taste) giving the people what they wanted or pandering to the lowest common denominator in the English language. However, on one thing all could agree; along with its Monday to Saturday sister paper The Sun and its up-market cousin The Times, it shaped British public opinion, and thereby gave its owner News Corporation (controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch) huge political and social influence.

Why then has it just been announced that this coming Sunday's edition will be the last, and that the paper will close thereafter? The answer lies in a phone-tapping scandal that - like Watergate - just won't go away and seems to get bigger and bigger. Back in 2007, the News of the World's royal editor and a private investigator employed by the paper were jailed for hacking into the mobile phones of members of the Royal Family, something which is illegal in the U.K. The paper's editor insisted at the time that this was all the work of a rogue elephant, and that he knew nothing about it; but he resigned anyway in order to take responsibility for what had happened on his watch and honourably put the matter to rest.

This editor, Andy Coulson, is interesting, since he subsequently became Conservative Party leader David Cameron's media advisor, and then (after the 2010 election) the Prime Minister's Press Chief. In the meantime, thanks mainly to the dogged investigations of another newspaper, the Guardian, the phone-tapping problem wouldn't go away. It turned out that the number of people hacked by the paper could have been in the thousands; that they included politicians, celebrities, and all sorts of other people, not just members of the Royal Family; and that the initial police investigation into the story might well have been deliberately soft-pedalled. Worst of all, there was more than a suspicion that many more people at the paper than the rogue elephant knew about and/or authorised what had happened. In January 2011, Andy Coulson resigned from his post at Downing Street.

The straw that broke the camel's back this week were the twin revelations that the News of the World had in the past paid some members of the police to give them the inside track on especially interesting crime stories; and that in particular, the newspaper had hacked into the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, a teenager who was abducted and murdered a decade or so ago (they deleted some messages in the voicemail box, thereby giving the impression that the girl was still alive). Public opinion was disgusted, and advertisers began to leave the paper in droves. Without advertising, newspapers can't function; so deciding to close the paper was probably a smart business move. Particularly if it will soon be replaced by a new "Sunday Sun".

What is left is a host of unanswered questions. The general ones concern media regulation, of which there seems to be none in the U.K. at the moment; the cosy relationship between senior politicians, senior police officers and the press (or, at least, certain sections of it); and the limits of the right to privacy. The specific ones concern the fate of Rebekah Brooks, currently Chief Executive of News International but the editor of the News of the World at the time of the alleged Milly Dowler hacking; and the outcome of News International's bid for the 61% of broadcaster BSkyB that it doesn't already own. Under media rules, the owners of news broadcasters such as BSkyB's Sky News have to be "fit and proper". Many people now say that News International does not meet that criterion. Although some of those people have an obvious axe to grind in their opposition to Rupert Murdoch's influence, a lot do not. The bid had looked pretty much a shoe-in until this week, but doubts have now surfaced. Just the sort of story for the News of the World, in fact - if it had survived.

Walter Blotscher