Scotland Yard covered up evidence of potentially 4,000 people hacked by Murdoch papers

The coziness between the Metropolitan police and News Corp raises a number of questions. The revolving door problem (as we have in the US) is also alive and well in the UK. Somehow the London police never manage to make it very long without a new scandal which suggests deep problems at the highest levels. Corruption is not just a Third World problem.

NY Times:

For nearly four years they lay piled in a Scotland Yard evidence room, six overstuffed plastic bags gathering dust and little else.

Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.

Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.

How interesting that Murdoch's Wall Street Journal published an editorial yesterday that is nothing less than sickening, and a wee bit hysterical (in both the funny way, and the "take a valium" way). It seems Murdoch's growing scandal at multiple papers (the WSJ tries to pretend it's only one) is hitting a bit too close to home for the shining jewel of Rupert Murdoch's faux news propaganda empire.

For the Wall Street Journal to pretend that this scandal is about freedom of the press only goes to show that our greatest fears, about Murdoch's yellow influence corrupting what was once a fine, albeit conservative, paper, were well-founded.