The fall of the News of the World
The Sunday 10 July 2011 edition of the News of the World, a redtop tabloid newspaper and jewel in the crown of the Murdoch Press, was to be its last.
- On Monday 4 July, the Guardian - the UK's main centre-left newspaper - broke the story. The News of the World had already been accused of hacking the voicemail of various MPs and celebrities in search of dirt; the case had been chugging away in the national media for a while. But now there was evidence the paper had also hacked the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a schoolgirl murdered in 2002.
Missing Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked by News of the World | UK news | The GuardianThe News of the World illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family in March 2002, interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance, an investigation by the Guardian has established.Suddenly tabloid phone-hacking was no longer merely tawdry and intrusive: it was a national outrage. Various high-powered political figures expressed their disgust in the media...
...and in Parliament. British politicians are used to seeing the Murdoch Press as a Sword of Damocles waiting to destroy their credibility over the slightest indiscretion, so they took full advantage of this opportunity to strike back.
Simon Hoggart's sketch | Reprieved MPs reach for Roget to rail against phone hacking | Politics | The GuardianLike political prisoners no longer in fear of a tyrant, a liberated Commons did their best to exhaust section 867 of the thesaurus In 1992 Kelvin McKenzie, who edited the Sun for Rupert Murdoch, was phoned by the prime minister, John Major, who asked him how he intended to cover Britain's ignominious exit from the European exchange rate mechanism.- Twitter users, meanwhile, took direct action, targeting the NotW's advertising revenue by guilt-tripping the paper's major advertisers in their droves. Here's a sample of the tweetstorm.
- And guess what? It started to work.
- As ever greater scrutiny was brought to bear on the beleaguered paper, more revelations came to light. It transpired that Milly Dowler's was not the only tragic death to have inspired a NotW phone-hack.
- More organisations distanced themselves from the paper.
