Christopher Hitchens on the phone-hacking scandal

Legendary journalist Christopher Hitchens has a typically insightful piece on the phone-hacking scandal on the Slate website.

A couple of highlights. On the News of the World:

Hand it to Rupert Murdoch and his minions: They got hold of the solid old “News of the Screws” or “Nudes of the World” and made it into a paper where the question was not how low can poor human nature sink, but rather is there anything, however depraved, that a reporter cannot be induced to do?

And on the political fallout:

The comparative fallout of the scandal on Britain’s two main political parties is probably fairly even. Successive Labour governments maintained much the longer and warmer relationship with Murdoch, while Conservative Party leader David Cameron did employ a former News of the World editor who is implicated in the phone-hacking scandal in a senior government media position (and Cameron has, aside from professional politics, himself pursued no career except that of a PR man for TV companies).

And finally, in praise of the Guardian:

The most neglected aspect of the entire imbroglio is this. Most of the allegations of shady practice against the Murdoch octopus have come from another newspaper. Under the editorship of Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian has been engaged in breaching an old unspoken code of the British press racket—that “dog does not eat dog.” The prime minister’s office showed itself incapable of conducting an investigation; the courts and the prosecutors appeared to have no idea of the state of the law, and the police were too busy collecting their tip-off fees. Admittedly, it isn’t usually the job of these institutions to keep the press honest. (Indeed, I could swear that I read somewhere that the whole concept was the other way about.) Still, it’s encouraging to record that when the press needed a housecleaning, there was a paper ready to take on the job.

Do read the whole piece.