In terms of its net impact on human welfare, News of the World has been the least evil of Rupert Murdoch’s three-cornered Axis of Evil, the other two being the Fox News Network and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Still, evil is evil. It was one thing to gratify the Schadenfreude of readers by hacking the cellphones of footballers, movie stars, politicians, and royals, who have the consolations of money, power, and fame. It was quite another to hack and manipulate the phones of a missing and murdered young girl, of victims of terrorism, and of the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. As of Sunday, after several million copies of its final edition have rolled off the presses, News of the World will be hanged by the neck until dead.
I for one am not altogether happy to see it go. Founded in 1843 and dedicated from then until now to sensation, sex, gossip, and crime, News of the World (wonderful, audacious, absurd name!—especially for a weekly uninterested in either news or the world) was a living connection to the gin lanes and fog-shrouded mews of Victorian London. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson most likely read it; Moriarty certainly did. Inspector Lestrade might have been a paid source. Jack the Ripper probably saved his clippings. In 1946, George Orwell, always a sucker for dowdy, lower-middle-class, Wallace-and-Gromit Englishness, described its voluptuous pleasures:
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
Naturally, about a murder.
This week, the murder they’re reading about—even if it’s only a justifiable homicide—is that of News of the World itself.
News of the World has been routinely described as a tabloid, which it is. Strictly speaking, a “tabloid” is a newspaper printed on pages half the size of a “broadsheet” like the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune. In this sense, almost every British national paper is a tabloid. Of the former serious and sometimes-serious broadsheet dailies, almost all—the Times, the Independent, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express—went tabloid many years ago. The Guardian and its Sunday sister, the Observer, have switched to “Berliner” size, halfway in between. The Telegraph, long may it rustle, is the last of the daily broadsheets; its Sunday edition, along with the Sunday Times, are the last of the fullsize Sabbatarians.
For 143 of its 168 years, News of the World was a broadsheet, too. Murdoch, who bought it in 1969, didn’t chop it in half until 1984. (He did the same to the Times—still an O.K. paper, though a shimmering shadow of its once best-on-earth self—in 2004.) Of course, News of the World was always a “tabloid” in the broader, sex-gossip-murder-sensation sense of the word—the sense in which TMZ, the Headline News Network, and Gawker, though strangers to ink and paper, are tabloids, too. Murdoch just made it worse.
Murdoch is a complicated character. Say this for him: he loves newspapers. He has kept the New York Post going long after it had any hope of contributing to his bottom line—a dubious service to humanity, but still: the Post is fun, its reactionary politics notwithstanding. It is now a beloved symbol of New York raffishness, like Ed Koch and the Naked Cowboy. But Murdoch’s papers—and the news business in general—could use a little less of Murdoch’s brand of love. He is less sentimental about the non-news components of his giant News Corporation, such as 20th Century Fox and the Fox Entertainment TV network, and they are not especially evil. “The Simpsons” makes up for a lot.
Hanged by the neck until dead, did I say? Well, maybe not quite. Before long, News of the World will probably be dug up and sent lurching, zombie-like, toward the newsagent shops of every grimy city and thatched village in England, Scotland, and Wales. I expect it will resurface as a Sunday edition of the Sun, the Murdoch tabloid that is the largest-selling daily in Britain, just as News of the World was the largest-selling weekly. The resurrected paper will probably be called the Sun on Sunday, after the style of the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Mail’s version. (There is already a Sunday Sun, in Newcastle. Like a modern bride in a New York Times wedding announcement, it is keeping its name.) Or maybe Murdoch will call the new paper SunDay. Or, worse, Sun!Day. No matter what it’s called, its editors are likely to keep the cell-phone hacking to a minimum, at least for a decent interval.
So doff your cloth cap as the News of the World cortege passes. Proletarian English Sundays will never be the same.
(Photograph: Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images)
