Rupert Murdoch Closes News of the World to Save Face from Hacking Scandal

With News of the World closing down after almost two centuries of business, it reflects how serious the newspaper's hacking scandal has become. Once the staff was caught hacking into mobile phones, including those belonging to soldiers and a murdered teenager, it was clear the paper would suffer. Yet no one counted on Rupert Murdoch closing the tabloid down himself, after seeming to be passive during most of the scandal.

Murdoch and his son James came under fire for letting the hacking go on and not acting quickly enough when it was found out. But completely shutting down News of the World seems to be the other extreme, and a preemptive strike against any further backlash and boycotts.

Since the newspaper has been around for 168 years, and the Murdochs have owned it for over 40 years, history indicated it would eventually survive this mess. Instead, the shutdown shows just how far the paper fell, serving as another blow to Murdoch's name.

In trying to limit the fallout, Murdoch has only made the story blow up even more. In fact, since the hacking brought down one of the longest and most famous papers in the industry's history, it only makes the media magnate look even worse for letting it get this far.

But Murdoch seems to have focused on the financial bottom line in order to justify this move. News of the World is accused of letting a PI hack into phones of a murdered teen, British servicemen killed in the Middle East, survivors of the 7/7 terrorist attacks, and Hugh Grant. With those kinds of revelations, sales would have plummeted for the foreseeable future, especially as more dirt kept coming out.

If Murdoch had decided to let the newspaper endure, would sales have gone down so much that he would have had to close it anyway? It is still one of the most powerful papers in the world, selling more than 2.6 million copies a week, according to The Guardian. So perhaps it could have survived after a while, yet with this kind of scandal, Murdoch didn't appear eager to chance it.

The damage has already been done to the paper and Murdoch. His media empire, which stretches from News Corp to the New York Post to Fox News, is already regularly criticized for its brand of coverage. But this goes further than just using regular tabloid tactics or having an entire news network attack a Democratic president.

In these troubled times, the closing of newspapers is often due to low sales, cutbacks and increasing irrelevance. Yet shutting down over years of illegal hacking is something else entirely, and can even destroy a company that's survived for almost 170 years. That shows how far and how fast things fell at News of the World under Murdoch's watch.

Sources

The Guardian- "News of the World to close as Rupert Murdoch acts to limit fallout"