During the first full day of the Allen & Co. Conference in Sun Valley, Rupert Murdoch was almost invisible. He was not spotted at the morning panels or at the outdoor lunch where he usually arrives early and holds court. Presumably, he was holed up strategizing about how to extricate his News Corp. from the worst crisis it has faced since it nearly went bankrupt in the early nineties. The seriousness of the situation is reflected in the dramatic step Murdoch’s son, James, announced Thursday: closing the News of the World, a one-hundred-and-sixty-eight year-old paper. In his absence, many attendees asked: did Murdoch know his London newspaper hacked into the voicemail of private phone lines—not only those of the royal family, but of a thirteen-year-old murder victim, and possibly relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan—and paid police to unearth information?

The better question: is Murdoch responsible? Of course he is. He fathered a tabloid culture on three continents that reveled in the kind of news that could produce screaming headlines. He celebrated reporters and editors who generated such stories, and he sneered at “boring” newspapers that avoided them. There is simply no way that Rupert Murdoch, who has escaped more snares than Houdini, can cleanly escape the trap he has laid himself.

One aspect of the current scandal is the relationship between Murdoch’s executives and David Cameron’s government—Andrew Coulson, one of the editors involved, had been Cameron’s communications director before being forced to resign because of earlier phone-hacking revelations. But the use Murdoch makes of his ties to politicians is not a new question. When he was cornered in the early eighties, and regulators said that his media holdings in England should be limited, his prior support for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher paid off. She rescued News Corp. from further regulation. When he purchased Twentieth Century Fox in the United States, in the mid-eighties, and wanted to create a fourth broadcast television network, he was barred from acquiring the TV stations he wanted because he was a citizen of Australia, not the U.S. His Republican friends, joined by many Democrats who wanted to be his friends, helped him to switch his citizenship and become a U.S. citizen. More recently, he has needed allies to get approval for a deal involving his effort to take full control of the broadcaster BSkyB, a deal that could be threatened by this controversy.

Today, Murdoch cannot so easily escape. Beside his children and wife, he seems to have only two intimate friends. The closest is Robert Thomson, editor of the Wall Street Journal, who is not implicated in this scandal. (I wrote about Thomson recently for The New Yorker.) The other friend, Rebekah Brooks, is implicated. She was the editor of the tabloid the News of the World at the time of the latest scandal, and now oversees all of his British newspapers, including the Sun, the Times of London, and the Sunday Times. It is difficult to fathom how Brooks, or her successor as editor, Coulson, did not know what their reporters were doing. There is not an editor alive who does not ask when their reporter produces what will be a front-page story: how did you learn this? Who was your source?

Rupert Murdoch is a brilliant, daring business executive. He is, sadly, a man whose newspapers too often traffic in sleaze. That is the culture he built and that his minions immersed themselves in. Even taking the dramatic step of closing the News of the World will not, I suspect, tame the controversy and allow News Corp. to deflect blame. The phone-hacking scandal is one Murdoch cannot escape, because he is culpable.