Peter Worthington does not mourn the News of the World

Peter Worthington writes in the NatPost:

The general reaction to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s decision to shut down the 168-year-old British weekly, News of the World, is that it’s something of a journalistic tragedy.

In my uninformed view, it’s more blessing than tragedy.

It was a professional, competent, catchy, powerful and widely-read newspaper, but it was also an awful newspaper.

Hacking into private phone calls and intruding into criminal cases, secretly feeding off relatives on soldiers killed in Afghanistan, bribing cops and chequebook journalism, were all standard fare for the newspaper, which boasted the largest circulation of any newspaper in Britain, at 2.7 million copies per Sunday.

That’s pretty impressive, but it’s still a decline from the 9 million or so who bought the paper around the time that Rupert Murdoch did in 1969.

Click on the title to read his full column.