News of the World was not such a steal for Murdoch | Simon Jenkins

It may have made him piles of money, but the News of the World has proved more trouble to Rupert Murdoch than it was worth

When Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World from its ancestral owners, the Carr family, in 1969 he called it "the biggest steal since the Great Train Robbery". Now it has turned and bit the hand that did the stealing. The paper was Murdoch's first big acquisition, a prelude to the Sun and the Times. But the glory soon passed when he serialised the Christine Keeler