It's that age old combination of power, corruption and money rearing up again.
It was greed for power that led to this, Murdoch wanted even more of a stranglehold on the media and it's resulted in the unravelling of his 'empire' and shown him and his businesses up for what they are - built on foundations of sleaze and nastiness.
Not that any of it is any great surprise -it wouldn't take long, if anyone had stopped to think about it, to realise that Gordon Brown or the NHS wouldn't necessarily volunteer information about his seriously ill son for 'our entertainment', or that all the leaks and revelations about Milly Dowler's then alleged killer hadn't been obtained from legit sources.
The NOTW staff are the first casualties but of course this will be widespread across the newspaper business, I'm sure even the more respectable ones will have done some underhand stuff in order to sell copy and they'll be shitting themselves about what is going to come out.
Trouble is there is an appetite for this stuff, and while those who read it (and I personally couldn't give a flying fuck about Posh's latest Caesarian or which arse cheek Kylie is having Botoxed this week) talk about it for a couple of days and move on to the next celebrity shag fest lives are being wrecked in the process.
There will be more of course, this is just the beginning, and it's just another example of how things that feed the public's ever growing need for sensationalism and excitement by proxy spiral out of control.
We are lucky enough to have freedom of speech and a relatively unfettered press system in this country and look what's been done with it.
I shall now make an excuse and leave