The joke is that the anti-Baldwin plotting petered out; when it comes to moguls and ministers, not all convenings are conspiracies, and few conspiracies succeed. It is natural, in the present frenzy, that Carl Bernstein, writing in Newsweek, should claim that comparisons with the Watergate affair are “inevitable.” But is that so? On the Presidential watch, men were hired to commit criminal acts; Cameron, by comparison, took on a man, Coulson, who had been tarnished by association with criminality, and gave him a respectable (if serpentine) job, which by all accounts Coulson performed with aplomb. The Prime Minister erred, but was he guilty of anything darker than lousy judgment? Ian Katz, the deputy editor of the Guardian, may well be right when he says, “The conspiracy reading is that Cameron wasn’t prepared to risk the ire of News International by dumping Coulson overboard, because once he dumped Coulson, the whole thing would chase back up the ladder towards Murdoch. I don’t really buy that. I think it was more a combination of arrogance and a reluctance to confront a really difficult situation.”

If the Nixonian shadow falls anywhere in this case, it is not on Cameron but on Murdoch, for it was doubtless under his aegis that cell phones were allegedly hacked, and the law transgressed. As he admitted, “I don’t know any better than anyone else where the electronic age is taking us, or how it will affect a large newspaper company.” Those words were quoted in Fortune, in February, 1984. Whether he is wiser now, more than a quarter of a century later, God only knows. And, as yet, no one has hacked His phone.

For a small nation, Britain has an awful lot of national newspapers. Six days of the week, you can choose among five tabloids, some of them known, for reasons of design rather than of ideology, as “red-tops” (the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, the Daily Star, and the Daily Mail), and five broadsheets—the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, and the Daily Telegraph. Only the last two are still technically broadsheets, in terms of their page size, but the term has adhered to anything that lays claim to higher ground. (There is also a new kid, simply called i, which the Independent launched last year, and which fillets much of its content from its elder brother.) On Sunday, there is the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, and the Observer, and, at the more perspiring end of the market, the Sunday Mirror, the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Star Sunday, the People, and the Sunday Express. There was the News of the World, the heaviest breather of all, but its final edition came out on July 10th. Murdoch, in a bid to avert the hacking crisis, shut the paper, like a veterinarian who takes one look at your boisterous, nippy, but otherwise healthy mastiff and puts it down.

This barrage of print has one overriding effect: in Britain, you cannot hear yourself think. You never really notice this until you leave the country, whereupon the white noise suddenly stops. The noisiest paper, without doubt, was the News of the World, which resounded with three continuous notes. The first and most defensible was sport; last year, the paper laid bare a match-fixing racket in Pakistani cricket—a bigger and more lucrative deal than it sounds. Then, there were television performers, who furnished an astounding proportion of the paper’s stories. (When historians come to measure the age of Murdoch, that symbiosis between media will loom large.) Last and most cacophonous, there was the assumption, or the ardent hope, that somebody, somewhere, was having sex with somebody he should not be having sex with. Viewed from outside, what this fixation suggested was a giggling braggart, fidgeting in the school playground, and pointing at girls with whom he would never stand a chance.

The resulting product was the best-selling newspaper in the country; make of that what you will. Murdoch certainly did. He bought the paper in 1969, acquiring the Sun later that year, and both Times titles in 1981. The News of the World had been alive since 1843, but, at the time of Murdoch’s approach, it had not been kicking for some while. In 1950, its circulation stood close to eight and a half million, an astonishing command of the reading public, but had since fallen to around six million. This was in line with a general subsidence; as Kevin Williams explains in his book “Read All About It,” “the decline of the mass Sunday newspaper is attributed to the incorporation of its values into the mainstream daily papers. The reader did not have to wait for the sleaze, scandals, and sex that up until the 1960s had only been available on Sundays.” Lurking somewhere behind this is a sulfurous inversion of religious practice: it’s not enough to confess your faith on the Lord’s day; you must go out and live it every day of the week.

One of the last people to inveigh, with any effect, against that heresy was Cardinal Heenan, the Archbishop of Westminster, who took Murdoch to task, in 1969, for having bought and splashed, or resplashed, the memoirs of Christine Keeler in the News of the World. She was the woman who had enjoyed simultaneous affairs with the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a Soviet attaché—a grave security risk and, by any standards, a superheated news story. But that had all happened six years earlier; Profumo had resigned and devoted himself to work among the poor, in the East End, and the saga had grown cold. Murdoch was warming it up again, because his instinct, as keen as ever, told him that the will to forgive is weaker, in the communal conscience, than the urge to drool. He was reported as saying, “People can sneer all they like, but I’ll take the hundred and fifty thousand extra copies we’re going to sell.”

Nonetheless, he apologized to the Cardinal, thus setting a pattern that persists to this day. Murdoch would preside over an exclusive, reap the reward, and, if necessary, express contrition, while his underlings readied themselves for the next scoop. On July 16th of this year, as the hacking scandal bloomed, News Corporation placed full-page advertisements in several newspapers—including, with some panache, the Guardian—headlined “WE ARE SORRY,” and adding, “Our business was founded on the idea that a free and open press should be a positive force in society. We need to live up to this.” That is a direct descendant of a statement that Murdoch issued in 1995: “This company will not tolerate its papers bringing into disrepute the best practices of popular journalism.” The fault, on that occasion, was a story, in the News of the World, about Victoria, the troubled wife of Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother. Included were photographs, described by the paper’s editor, Piers Morgan, as “evocative,” of Victoria Spencer on the grounds of a private clinic. The matter was referred to the Press Complaints Commission, the invertebrate body that oversees the misdeeds of British newspapers. “That press complaining thingamajig,” Murdoch called it, according to Morgan, when they spoke a few days later.

Morgan owes much to Murdoch. He ran “Bizarre,” the show-biz column at the Sun, before taking the helm at the News of the World, in 1994, at the age of twenty-eight. From there, he left to edit the Mirror, the Sun’s enduring—and traditionally more left-wing—rival, from which he was sacked in 2004, having published photographs of British troops abusing Iraqi civilians. The front page showed a soldier urinating on one of his victims. It was more than possible that such images could stoke retaliation against British forces, and Morgan soon had a fresh problem: the pictures were fakes. (He has said that he is still uncertain of this.) For anyone who wishes to learn how the cycle of contumely and pardon—or simple forgetfulness—spins in England, note the consequence. Morgan went on to become a judge on “Britain’s Got Talent,” on ITV, and on “America’s Got Talent,” on NBC, before ascending to the throne of Larry King, on CNN.

Morgan’s diary, published as “The Insider,” in 2005, is a tour guide to the freakery of life among the red-tops. What stands out is not the crowing thrills, or the major foul-ups, but the run-of-the-mill assumptions on which the tabloid press relies; they are the secret of the Murdoch mill. In the News of the World, on November 13, 1994, Morgan ran a photograph of Spike Milligan, once a harebrained figure in British comedy and now, apparently, whittled to what the caption called “a shadow of his former self.” The picture, it turned out, was not of Milligan at all, but, as Morgan reassured himself, “Spike will see the funny side, I’m sure. He’s a comedian.” Four days later, when a letter arrived from Milligan’s lawyer, expressing a grievance and requesting compensation, Morgan wrote, “I genuinely cannot believe how prickly Spike is being over all this.” Such is the quintessence of the tabloid: to bruise and bully, and then to back off, exclaiming, Come on, we’re only having a laugh. Can’t you take a joke? The British sense of humor is both an invaluable broadsword and an impenetrable shield.

The most thickly armored warrior, in this regard, was Kelvin MacKenzie, who edited the Sun from 1981 to 1994. When it comes to ethical discrimination, MacKenzie makes Morgan look like Ronald Dworkin. Students of the period should consult “Stick It Up Your Punter!,” by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, much of which is consumed by MacKenzie’s reign. Here you will find, for instance, details of the interview with Marica McKay, the widow of a British sergeant who died in the Falklands and was honored with a posthumous Victoria Cross, the highest British award for gallantry—an interview compromised by the fact that she never actually spoke to the Sun. Or, there was the mission to out Peter Tatchell, the Labour candidate for the London constituency of Bermondsey, who was finally snared by the headline “RED PETE ‘WENT TO GAY OLYMPICS.’ ” MacKenzie was informed that Tatchell had not, in fact, attended the Gay Olympics in San Francisco, but, undaunted, the editor simply inserted the claim between single quotation marks and ran it anyway. It suited MacKenzie’s bellowing homophobia, which, in turn, was consonant with his racial fears. “Botha has said the days of white power are over in South Africa. What he doesn’t say is what’s going to happen when the darkies come down from the trees,” he said. That was reported in the New Statesman, in 1985, by Peter Court, who had briefly worked as a graphic designer for the Sun.

When “Stick It Up Your Punter!” first came out, in 1990, it was hailed for its comic momentum, and the back cover of the paperback is strewn with snippets of admiring reviews from, among others, The Economist, the London Review of Books, and, yes, the Guardian—the well-bred visitors laughing at the tabloid zoo. Read now, it seems less amusing, and what previously felt like a string of high jinks comes across as a tireless parade of emotional cruelty. Court had a colleague in the art department who was instructed by MacKenzie to “do us all a favour, you useless cunt—cut your throat.” According to Matthew Engel, in “Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press,” a news editor was discovered whacking his skull against a wall, in an effort to preëmpt what he thought a raging MacKenzie would do to him later.