And what does Phone Hacking contaminate next?

So, News Corp withdraw their bid for BSkyB just a few hours before the House of Commons debates the Labour (opposition) lead motion that News Corp should withdraw its bid for BSkyB.

Lets look at the News Corp strategy so far:
- Rupert Murdoch comes to the UK in 1969, and buys the News of the World; his first outside Australia purchase
- He thn buys The Sun in 1971, and The Times in 1981. All of these titles are coglomerated under a new UK regsitered comapny News International
- Murdoch starts Sky in 1989, which in 1991 is equally merged with British Satelitte Broadcasting, to form BSkyB. News Corp owns 39%, James Murdoch is chairman
- In 2000, Rebekah Wade becomes editor of The News of the World. She became editor of The Sun in 2003, and CEO of News Corp in 2009
- In late 2010, Murdoch launches his bid for complete control of BSkyB
- In agreement with Culture, Media & Sport secretary Jeremy Hunt, he agrees to effectively "chinese wall" SkyNews, to avoid issues of plurality across his media interests, and hence avoid an investigation by the Competion Commission
- January 2011, and News International starts paying out in public for what are admissions of phone hacking from pre-2007 imprisonment of reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glen Mulcaire
- June/July 2011 and all hell is let lose politically and opposition media wise, with revelations that NotW hacked the phone of murder victim Milly Dowler
- Murdoch closes NotW
- 3days later, News Corp withdraws bid for BSkyB

The logic behind the bigger deal is that BSkyB holds some assest (Premier League rights), and has some commercial ability (to extract maximum revenue/profit from Pay TV), that expanding the model and management into Asia would allow News Corp to expand quicker. While the News Corp of the 1960s/70s was newspaper lead and Sky was jokingly called a Emergency Room case, today the reverse is true: The Times is in effect kept alive by The Sun, and The Su by BSkyB.

The choice to close NotW was to stop the contageien spreading into News Interational. But with James Murdoch facing prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Payments Act in the United States, share holders taking legal action in Delaware, and now British campaigning MP Tom Chmabers rasing the issue of News Interational journalists hacking 9/11 victims. The question has to be: where does the contaigen end?

What ever strategic choice is now made, I can't see the next controller of News Corp being a Murdoch. Secondly, the close ties between politics and News International/Murdoch are not dead, but alsmot now that they are transparent.

This story is not dead: according to DAC Sue Akers, in charge of the new Met Police investigation, only 147 names from a list of nearly 3500 have so far been contacted. Bring on an enquirey, or two actually!