Update: Title change, to reflect research taken up in response to a challenge received from commentator (H/T) Grannus who opines that it wont happen here. So I did research and found one learned expert in the Columbia Journalism Review exactly of that opinion. Link below (And bunches of other links via Nieman Lab in comments).
CJR Author's point: No precedents but trouble coming as we pay for exclusive interviews. As for Fox, the worse thing is everything they do is legal.
Original Text, pre update:
Brit and his crew can put this in perspective better than I, so consider me the messager, not the message.
However, thought Nightowlers might like a chance to contemplate a man who did not give up on hope. It's an interview with Tom Watson, the labor backbencher (MP, not in cabinet) on his life as one of the two MP's who took on NI and News of the World, even when Blair was playing message tootsie with Brook's footsie and warning Watson that the end was nigh.
Warning: he makes predictions, so if you want the chance to be happy or hopeful, you have to put up with spoilers. Money quotes below the fold.
Here''s one:
So how have the last few weeks been? "Sleep-deprived, totally crazy," he says, sitting in his parliamentary office during what seems to be a rare moment of calm. "But also, there's been a great sense of relief. I think I said something to David Cameron about a month before: that there were powerful forces trying to cover this story up. At some points over the last two years, I thought it might blow. But I've also thought that the lid could be welded back on. But when Nick Davies broke the Milly Dowler story, that was the point where I knew they'd never get the lid back on."
When I was first elected, I was a completely naive and gauche politician. You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers – they've all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show. Why didn't I know that 10 years ago, and why didn't I rail against it? Why did I become part of it? I was 34. I'm 44 now. I was naive. But I'll never let that happen again."
MP Tom Watson for those look for hope
And now alas, in the BlueState, it's 2:30 and the Redhead need a pillow and some sleep.
Update money quote CJR:
"Egregious screwups. But institutional scale criminality? No......A. C. Grayling had one of the better lines of the scandal when he accused Murdoch of taking NotW, and thus, all of British tabloids, “from the gutter into the sewer.” Us, we’re still safely in the gutter.