[News] News of the World to end this weekend

So this Sunday's News of the World, the longest running tabloid newspaper in British history is set to be the last. For those not following the story, there's been a long-running scandal about NotW journo's hacking into people's mobile phone voicemail accounts in order to get stories.

When it was just celebrities and politicians it was fairly serious but nobody really gave a fuck. Now however it turns out they hacked the voice mail of a missing school girl who later turned up dead and worse than that, when her voice mail box got filled up with messages from concerned friends and family, they deleted messages to make room for more, meaning her parents thought she was still alive and accessing her voicemail.

Anyway, in order to sweep the whole thing under the carpet, James Murdoch has annouced the paper is to close this weekend.

Only they're just going to launch a new one, probably a Sunday version of the Sun, with all the same staff, so the whole thing is not much more than a cynical PR exercise and has a lot to do with News Internationsl trying to buy BSkyB at the moment without the monopolies commission telling them to do one.

I know it's a journalist's job to uncover stories and such like but surely a line has to be drawn and one would think that drawing it before you were hacking into the phones of people who are missing, presumed horrifically murdered in order to get the inside scoop on the story would be common sense. How far do you support the notion of a free press, insofar as doing dubious shit like this to score a sensationalist headline goes?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

While some call the shuttering of News of the World abrupt and surprising, it may not be without careful consideration. If the tabloid were to be handed over to a firm for liquidation, the firm may decide to simply default on all pending claims instead of defending them. It is then free to destroy all records associated with News of the World.

Quite a clever way of covering ones tracks and making sure additional dirty laundry doesn't come to air.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I can't stand stuff like this. Freedom of the Press has nothing to do with it - this is illegal breaches of privacy, plain and simple. As a journalist, you're allowed to go after a story, but that doesn't mean you suddenly get immunity from the rest of the laws of the society you live in.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

I can't stand stuff like this. Freedom of the Press has nothing to do with it - this is illegal breaches of privacy, plain and simple. As a journalist, you're allowed to go after a story, but that doesn't mean you suddenly get immunity from the rest of the laws of the society you live in.

Quoted for truth. Their sin wasn't reporting things, their sin was hacking, and the reason we're all ready to toast them is that they did it in such a way to cause the parents of a dead girl a lot of pain.

I don't think journalists should get any sort of immunity from our regular trespassing, or other applicable, laws.

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