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It’s a radical gesture. Confronted with revelations about phione hacking conducted by dozens of staff at the News of the World, the head of News International, Rupert Murdoch, has decided to close the 168-year-old weekly. “Yesterday a little bit of England died, and it is a moment to mourn,” writes The Times, the group's flagship paper. “The investigative techniques of the newspaper at their worst have now resulted in its closure. But at their best they produced great stories, and sometimes exposed great wrongs.” For The Times, the scandal involves only “a handful of people [who] have trampled upon others in grief and despair. They have shamed themselves, destroyed a newspaper and damaged trust in the free press. It will be a long time before that trust is regained.”
While the daily stresses that “the catastrophic fall-off in advertising” was the final blow for the News of the World, The Independent believes that “the newspaper has been sacrificed for one woman” – its former head, Rebekah Brooks, very close to Murdoch, who still leads News Corp’s UK newspaper division.
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