By Bagehot
TOM Watson, the Labour MP who has done more than most members of the British Parliament to uncover wrongdoing within the media companies run by Rupert Murdoch, likes to compare the Murdoch press to an organised crime gang. Tiring of claims by James Murdoch—the patriarch’s son and a former boss of the firm’s British media interests—that he knew nothing of illegal behaviour in his firm’s tabloid newsrooms, Mr Watson famously called him “the first mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise”.