The death of NOTW,
the 168-year-old UK Sunday (1)

Dr. Yuk-Ching Hon

11 July 2011

On July 7, we heard about the closure of the New of the World, Britain’s best-selling Sunday paper after a week of claims of illegal, corrupt and immoral practices in news reporting. The phone hacking scandal has rung the death toll for one of the Murdoch Empire’s best known asset. James Murdoch announced that the paper’s weekend edition would be its last. To save the skin of one person (Rebecca Brooks, chief executive of News International), 200 people working for the paper have now been sacrificed. But you would have expected this from Rupert Murdoch, the universally acknowledged ruthless newspaper publisher.

James Murdoch’s press release admitted the reputation of NOTW has been seriously tarnished by repeated “inhuman" editorial behaviour which was "without conscience or legitimate purpose"; that the paper has failed to investigate itself properly and executives had misled the police, misled parliament and misled the public. This is a loud and clear admission of criminality, incompetence, negligence and deception. If it happens in any other company, it would mean resignations of all the senior executives. Someone somewhere has to take responsibility, instead of hiding behind many of their innocent and now redundant staff. So who is the “wrongdoers” in James Murdoch’s statement who turned “a good newsroom bad”? Who are these people whose actions/inactions caused the death of this famous newspaper?

If Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International was not one of the “wrongdoers” then she was guilty of editorial blindness and incompetence that she should immediately tender her resignation. But the blunt conclusion is: Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s former press spokesman and former editor of NOTW has been arrested, more than 200 news workers lose their job and she stays.

Of course, the closure of NOTW is blatantly clear a desperate move to saving executive skins, including James Murdoch’s. The fact may also be that News International knows there will be further revelations of wrong doings, this coupled with a catastrophic suspension of advertisements and escalating commercial boycott, shutting down the newspaper seems the only logical move from the management’s point of view. The Guardian suspects that there have already been plans to merge the Sunday and weekday editorial staffs into a seven-day operation. According to Sky News, the paper may even one day return in a different form. The internet domain name thesunonsunday.co.uk was registered on July 5 to a company named Media Spring!

What happens with NOTW is much worse than Asia TV's wrongful report of Jiang Zemin's death, it involves unlawful phone hacking by private investigators employed by NOTW's journalists and editors to obtain private information on murder victims, celebrities and even grieving families of dead soldiers. There are allegations that its journalists also paid police for information.

It has also turned into a time bomb for our PM. As Andy Coulson was appointed by David Cameron as his communications chief six months after his resignation from NOTW, the prime minister is now under huge pressure for being lacking in judgement.