Media and Motives re: Phone Hacking.

Phone hacking came to prominence during the News of the World affair, in which the British tabloid had been involved in the interception of voicemail messages of the Royal Family, other public figures, and the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

What appears not to be quite so readily apparent is that all this was old news and apparently of no great interest to anyone at all until such time as Rupert Murdock was trying to buy a British television network and become an economic threat to the BBC.

Then the revelations about hacking a missing school girl's cell phone seems to have become a story with legs. Now the great attack is on. A paper folds? So what? They are all losing money to the online news agencies. Hacking a missing teen age girl's phone and deleting some messages to make room for more became a great rallying cry for an anti-murdoch campaign but most of the cellular hacking had already taken place and was well known.