(Newser)
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The phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. gets worse by the day, and while the big man himself has called the allegations "deplorable," he is sticking by news exec Rebekah Brooks even as the UK government promises an inquiry. This is no fleeting scandal, writes Jeanine Poggi at the Street. It "poses a significant threat to Murdoch's media empire, which is currently in the process of planning a takeover of British Sky Broadcasting."
And Murdoch has nobody to blame but himself, writes Alex Pareene at Salon. "Whether or not he personally condoned the hacking, it's his corporate culture—the same corporate culture that allows Roger Ailes (of Fox) and Col Allen (of the New York Post) and, for a time, Judith Regan to run amok—that enabled the practice," he writes. "In other words, the practices of News of the World are an outlier, but not an anomaly, for News Corp."
