And just like that, the News of the World is gone. Never mind that Rupert Murdoch’s racy tabloid was the best-selling and most profitable weekly in Britain, with a circulation of some 2.6 million. After the paper was caught hacking—repeatedly, and flagrantly—into the phones of everyone from the royals to a child murder victim, and once advertisers started fleeing en masse, a death sentence was the only option left.

The NOTW meltdown has led to lots of focus on the bizarre, hyper-aggressive world of Britain’s red-top tabloids—and, for that matter, Britain’s broadsheets, which often aren’t all that better behaved. While NOTW may have been particularly egregious, odds are decent other papers could have scandals lurking. (As Nick Davies, who broke open the phone-hacking story, noted in his 2009 book Flat-Earth News, more than a dozen British papers have hired private investigators to suss out confidential personal info, often through legally dubious means.) But even setting aside potential lawbreaking, many of Britain’s papers were famous for their reckless pursuit of stories at any cost, their thin regard for accuracy, their adventures in outright libel. No wonder American journalists have been feeling awfully smug this week.

So how did the British press get so irresponsible—especially compared to its (relatively) staid and sober cousins across the Atlantic? It’s especially curious when you consider that U.S. newspapers enjoy sweeping First Amendment freedoms, while the British press has to operate under some of the strictest defamation and libel laws on the planet. Is it possible that Britain’s stricter press laws actually encourage bad behavior?

MEDIA ANALYSTS LIKE to note that it’s tough to understand the British press, without noting the intense competition its London papers face. In the United States, for much of the twentieth century, most papers had comfortable quasi-monopolies in each city, so the sober pursuit of objectivity was a perfectly reasonable business strategy. In Britain, however, the tabloids and Fleet Street papers have long jockeyed with each other for scoops and eyeballs across the nation. (It’s notable that the U.S. paper that most resembles the British tabloids is The New York Post, which is both owned by Murdoch and struggling for attention in New York City.)

As a result, the race for stories can be cutthroat. The Columbia Journalism Review recently offered up some lurid examples of the lengths to which British tabloid reporters will go: “There was the tabloid freelancer who hid in a church organ for several days, defecating in a plastic bag, to get pictures of Madonna’s baby’s christening; there was the time Rebekah Brooks, then a lowly reporter [and, most recently, Murdoch’s British newspaper overseer], disguised herself as a cleaner to infiltrate the newsroom of a sister publication and nab a copy of their scoop.” While American journalists wring their hands about ethics, British reporters don’t have the time. Here’s Simon Jenkins, one of the more respected British reporters around: “I was trained as a reptile lurking in the gutter whose sole job was ‘to get the bloody story.’”