News of the World Tabloid Shuts Down

Come this Sunday, the largest-selling English language newspaper in the world and by far the most popular tabloid in the UK, News of the World will see its last print issue. Following the wiretapping scandal, Rupert Murdoch, head of parent organization News International, has decided to shut down the tab.

The scandal in question goes back many years, when it first emerged that NOTW editors and journalists were tapping into people’s phones for scoops and leads on stories they were working on.

They even tapped into a missing 13-year-old girl’s phone and deleted messages to make room for more, thus giving her parents hope that she was still alive – her body was uncovered later and two NOTW journalists were sentenced to jail.

In recent months, celebrities, politicians and families of deceased British soldiers have stepped forward to say that their phones had also been hacked into and it seems that the scandal was too much for NOTW to handle, the LA Times points out.

Murdoch also owns Times of London and The Sun and the NOTW scandal has also affected their sales, so it was deemed best that it be sacrificed.

“The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account, but it failed when it came to itself,” Murdoch said in a statement in which he says News Int. owns up to its share of responsibility in the scandal.

He also stresses that the way in which the NOTW journalists behaved in the case of the 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped and murdered was “inhuman and has no place in our company.”

As such, Sunday’s edition of the tabloid will also be its last. Still, the LA Times points out, the move is a strategic one because, by sacrificing one tabloid, Murdoch makes sure the other two continue to bloom.

“The closure will mean the death of a weekly newspaper that has been a part of the British media landscape for more than a century. The News of the World enjoys a circulation of more than 2.5 million, far beyond its closest rival,” the publication notes.

“The elder Murdoch and News Corp. evidently felt that the hacking scandal had created too toxic of an environment for the company and that the News of the World had to be sacrificed,” says the LA Times.

“News Corp.’s British subsidiary, News International, also owns other iconic publications, such as the Times of London and the Sun tabloid, which have been caught up in a boycott campaign by Facebook and Twitter users angered by the allegations surrounding the News of the World,” the same media outlet notes.

Whether the “sacrifice” will manage to appease the public is yet to be determined.