(and thus the boss of News Corp.'s British newspaper division, News International), was sent an email in 2008 by a deputy that contained, as the Times put it, "explosive information" about the scope of the phone-hacking scandal. (James Murdoch has generally maintained that he had no idea that the phone hacking was as widespread as it was.)

Guess what? One copy (the one that should have been in James Murdoch's email archive) was conveniently deleted from News Corp.'s servers during what the company (hilariously) called an "email stabilization and modernization program," while another copy (the one belonging to its sender, Colin Myler, former News of the World editor) was supposedly lost because of a "hardware failure." Inconveniently, investigators recently discovered a printout of the email.

Since we now know thisemail exists and was in fact sent to James Murdoch, what's his excuse for not acting on it? You really have to read the dry Times account to appreciate the extent to which the assorted News Corp. scandals have metastasized into farce. James' response is not too far off from "The dog ate my homework."

Another must-read: This blog post from Roy Greenslade at The Guardian, the British paper that has doggedly pursued the News Corp. corruption story in all its forms. Greenslade deconstructs other newspapers' coverage of "the civil war at The Sun," including an editorial today in The Sun itself, by Associate Editor Trevor Kavanagh, titled "Witch hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on press freedom." Greenslade's reading of Kavanagh's rant: "His overt message is an