It can't really have escaped the notice of anyone, not even News of the World and Sun readers, that the whole phone-hacking business has blown up quite spectacularly.
It turns out that News International employees really were hacking everyone's phone - even dead people. Milly Dowler, for example, who adorned the front page of so many of their papers back when she originally disappeared, had her phone hacked - and the hacks doing the hacking even deleted some messages, making her parents and the police think she might still be alive. That's got to disturb the moral compass of even the most hardened Murdoch media reader (who usually reserves his ire for parking wardens and immigrants).
It was possible to not give a shit about all the previous revelations, just about - apart from the occasional involvement of Sienna Miller or Paul Gascoine, they would barely have made your average pub debate. Certainly the ones that Paul Mulcaire got jailed for would never have scratched the surface. Nobody really expects celebrities, footballers and the royalty to have that great a degree of of privacy anyway, living as they do in the public eye - they're almost considered fair game, to an extent. But these latest revelations - and we're now including those murdered Soham schoolgirls, various 7/7 victims and their families - are different. They're tailor-made to boil the blood of your average tabloid reader. The victims of these hacks are people that those same newspapers strove to build a huge platform of sympathy for, in order to shift copy, and it's that same sympathy that's now going to come back to bite them in the arse.
This has been underlined by a host of big companies who usually market their products to the millions of readers of the Sun and the NOTW, who have started dropping their ad contracts. Ford and Vauxhall have led the way, with numerous other companies mulling over whether their family image would be tarnished by any connection to the papers. There are relatively few ways to hurt News International, but that's one of them - hit them in the pocket. Everything they do is commercially driven - and this strikes right at the heart of that. They can survive a dip in circulation thanks to their advertising backup and the huge income of Sky TV, which is why their "journalists" can generally get away with doing whatever the hell they like, but this goes beyond mere circulation. If they alienate the consumer, it's going to have a knock-on effect on the companies who want to appeal to said consumer.
It's a multi-faceted bucket of shit that NI are sitting in right now, incidentally; the Sun are also up in court right now on Contempt charges relating to yet more questionable journalism, namely their coverage of the Joanna Yeates murder investigation, when they demonised the wrong suspect. Add that to the looming deadline of the Commons decision on the BSkyB takeover and it's enough to make even the cold-blooded Murdoch himself break into a sweat.
One thing I would underline right now is that while all of this is blowing up, the public consultation on said BSkyB takeover is still going on. If there was ever a time to get involved, it's now. Broadly, that consultation is about the plurality of the media, whether it's OK to allow one man to own such a large percentage of it, but it's got to be worth bringing up the character of that man at the same time, or at the very least the extremely questionable practices of his papers. Taking it as an abstract question of "should one man be allowed to run most of the (supposedly) independent media" is all well and good, until you insert the caveat that the man in question is pure evil.
