News of the World signs off after hacking scandal

[Don]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43695253/ns ... ?GT1=43001

LONDON — Britain's tabloid News of the World signed off with a simple front page message: THANK YOU & GOODBYE.

Reporters, editors and production staff walked out of the newspaper's headquarters in east London en masse late Saturday. Editor Colin Myler showed the front and back pages of the final edition. He paid tribute to "this wonderful team of people here."

"This is not where we wanted to be or where we deserve to be," he said, before concluding with "and now in the best traditions of Fleet Street, we're going to the pub."

News of the World journalists wrote their own obituary before sending their final edition to the printing presses as Britain's media establishment reels from the expanding phone-hacking scandal that brought down the muckraking tabloid after 168 years.

Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire owns the paper, will arrive in London on Sunday on a scheduled visit, a person familiar with his itinerary told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Buying the News of the World in 1969 gave Australian-born Murdoch his first foothold in Britain's media. He went on to snap up several other titles, gaining almost unparalleled influence in British politics through the far-reaching power of his papers' headlines.

Now he is facing a maelstrom of criticism and outrage over the sequence of events set off by allegations the paper's journalists paid police for information and hacked into the voicemails of young murder victims and the grieving families of dead soldiers.

The recent revelations culminated in the decision to close the paper and put 200 journalists out of work — but the move failed to stem broader questions about corruption at the newspaper and press regulation in the U.K.

The sordid affair has played out at breakneck pace in the media and prompted soul-searching at the highest levels of officialdom. Prime Minister David Cameron has called for a new press regulation system and pledged a public inquiry into what went wrong; the head of Murdoch's U.K. newspaper operations has alluded that more revelations are yet to come.

[SusieP]

Our news programmes are full of this scandal.

I think most of us knew this kind of thing went on - but they crossed a line when they hacked into the mobile phone of Milly Dowler.

Milly was a teenage girl who went missing on her way home from school.
There was a hunt for her and for a while it wasn't known whether she was alive or dead.

She had been murdered.


But, while she was missing and it was hoped she was alive, the News of the World allegedly hacked into her cell phone, listened to voicemails and deleted some of them.

Her family thought Milly had deleted the voicemails herself, and so for a time they were given false hope that she was still alive.


They have also been accused of intercepting emails from soldiers serving in Afghanistan. The soldiers had been killed and the newspaper has allegedly read the emails the soldier's had sent to their families.


And the current CEO of Rupert Murdoch's company [who was Editor of the News of the World at the time] has admitted paying Policemen for information. Which is illegal. And yet, the CEO [Rebekah Brooks] is still in her job.



So, as you can imagine, there is outrage that the journalists and their private investigators have gone so far in their desperation to get a story and there is total incredulity that the CEO hasn't resigned.



Can of worms.