The revelations of misdeeds committed by the British tabloid News of the World are horrific but should not be surprising. There have been suspicions about the paper's behavior for years but a perverse fascination with its reporting — like the inability to not watch a car wreck — and a casual refusal to contemplate where its information came from inoculated the tabloid from serious scrutiny. On top of these, the paper had a far-too-cozy relationship with institutions that are supposed to check journalistic misbehavior.

Efforts to fix these problems need to focus on the behavior and the environment that permitted them, rather than just the illegal acts (and their condoning) by a few individuals.

NoW, as the paper is known, had been accused of phone hacking in the past, but those victims were royals and celebrities (and in the world of such journalism, seemingly legitimate targets) and the instances were said to be limited.