I'm no expert....

on the British media landscape, but Tim Montgomerie is, and his piece from Conservativehome earlier this week helps to put the British media scandal in perspective.

Requisite full disclosure, as they say: your humble correspondent is not in in the pay of Fox, or any News Inc. entity, though he would desperately love getting paid (lucratively!) by that firm (or any other) to write blog posts.

One thing that seems obvious is that the only thing journalists enjoy more than scandalizing and bringing down governments they don't like is scandalizing and bringing down their competitors. In a free media environment, this isn't particularly surprising, and is largely a benefit to society as a whole, as long as media pluralism continues to exist. A diversity of viewpoints and perspectives enables citizens to develop and craft their opinions based on what facts they find, and the relative importance of trade-offs, values, and conflicts that arise from these facts. Needless to say, if journalists are engaged in corrupting behavior, bribery, or blurring the line between the public and private, there are bound to be problems; however, free societies must judge for themselves the position at which this line is drawn, as well as what penalties society should mete out. (For example, in German newspapers, people accused of crimes as well as victims almost always given a pseudonym, unless they are already a public personality, such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn; in the UK, libel and slander laws are much stricter than those in the US.)

In light of this, two conclusions can be drawn: first off, News of the World had clearly overstepped the line which society had tacitly given it. The practices that it engaged in which were patently illegal must be punished; of this, Rupert Murdoch, as well as Rebekah Brooks certainly deserve a portion of the blame as higher-ups. The second conclusion, however, is more abstract, and concerns the role of the media in a free society. It is unsurprising for two companies to desire to destroy the other on the market; PCs and Apple will battle on every continent. Frequently, competition results in benefits for the consumers of that product, and information in particular is a product that can be easily and cheaply mined, refined, packaged, and sold. However, the BBC's extraordinarily comprehensive coverage of this seems more than a little unseemly. Clearly, Rupert Murdoch is a media threat to the established order, and particularly to the BBC, which represents a very different form of worldwide media empire. There can be little doubt of their natural antipathy. Nevertheless, the BBC, with 1) its market-dominating position in UK media, and more importantly 2) its level of state support gives it tools other news outlets simply do not and cannot possess. For the BBC, the UK is simply one battlefield in its war on Rupert Murdoch, who is a proxy for private media worldwide. And when private media, for all its faults, goes, what is left?

News of the World was a sleazy newspaper, obviously. It was sleazy even before it was corrupt, and unfortunately, that's also what made it so successful. But it certainly had no monopoly on sleaze in the UK, and indeed, many papers have long, proud histories of stalking the Royal Family, gruesomely describing the lurid details of murders, paying for photos of celebrities in compromising situations, slipping cash to the cops for tips, and ironically uncovering government waste and abuse using various unseemly tactics. (Perhaps MI6 will hire some of the out-of-work journalists from NotW that were smart enough to avoid getting caught!) Did Murdoch know the specifics? Probably not. Did he know the traditional formula for success in the UK newspaper industry? And if he did, who else does, and what are they going to cook up with that recipe?