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by city and as the reportorial core became professionalized, papers typically shed overt partisan ties on their news pages as their publishers sought to appeal to the broadest possible audiences. In recent decades, talk radio and cable news channels have taken up ideological banners.
    Heavily regulated by the government as to content, British broadcasters adhered to nonideological programming and saw news shows as a public service, not a profit center. The newspapers were fractious, contentious, and opinionated. British newspaper journalists often argued that their American cousins lost something vital in the process of shedding partisanship from the news.
    â€œI find American newspapers boring—and biblical,” said Simon Jenkins, the former editor in chief of Murdoch’s center-right Times of London who now writes columns for the liberal Guardian . “These are news sheets for a genre of readers who want vast slabs of information and get entertainment in a different way. And they are micro-monopolies, all of them.”
    Murdoch’s editors call these papers the “unpopular” press. His heart has always been with the scrappier tabloids—the “popular press” for which Fleet Street is perhaps better known. The midmarket daily tabloid newspaper is a peculiarly London invention that, depending on the particular title, mixes elements of TMZ.com , the Economist , ESPN, the National Enquirer, Maxim , the Huffington Post, Time , the Weekly Standard , and Politico . The ensuing coveragesounds much as though Capitol Hill, the Garment District, Hollywood, K Street, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street all met for drinks, got soused, and started to dish.
    The papers are locally produced, nationally distributed, and wildly competitive. In most American cities, the majority of those who read printed papers are subscribers, providing a guaranteed audience to publishers and, more importantly, to advertisers. By contrast, many UK readers pick up papers at newsstands, which helps explain why the front pages of tabloids rely on sensationalism, scandal, sex, violence, shock, rough-edged political satire, and celebrity watching.
    In 1989Murdoch sketched out his philosophy: “Anybody who, within the law of the land, provides a service which the public wants at a price it can afford is providing a public service.” The immediate context for Murdoch’s remark involved British television programming, specifically the BBC, which he argued failed to satisfy viewers. But he had articulated his approach to publishing: let the people decide with their pocketbooks.

    IN DECEMBER 1989,Prince Charles, by then married to Princess Diana, telephoned his girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles. He expressed his desire to live eternally in her trousers, as a tampon if necessary. The conversation became infamous after the adulterous talk was published several years later, first in a Murdoch-owned celebrity magazine in Australia, later in British tabloids. The Sun initially held off, then asked readers to call in to say whether they wanted to see the transcript in print. They did. At least some of the public clearly wanted the service that Murdoch’s paper provided.
    It was never exactly clear how an Australian publication—though, as part of the Murdoch stable, one with strong British ties—had first obtained and published the conversation. Former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan saidthe prince’s sexual banter was captured from his portable phone by reporters sitting a few blocks away from Buckingham Palace in a converted London taxicab kitted out with a police scanner and recording devices. Portable phones at that time were not manufactured with encryption.
    For all the rapacious hunger of the tabloids,the British press faces tight regulations from the government and its own industry that its American counterparts do not. British newspapers cannot report about the details of ongoing court