Watch Tv & Movie favoriteThe discovery of Amy Winehouse's body at her London home gave Rupert Murdoch and his clan a brief respite from an avalanche of bad press, supplanting the phone-hacking scandal that had remained the lead story for weeks in British newspapers and TV shows.
It is somewhat ironic that Winehouse's death inadvertently took some of the heat off News International, the British arm of the mogul's media business: The troubled star was frequently a target of the tabloid culture that Murdoch helped to foster. Her battle with her private demons was very public, detailed in a nearly constant stream of lurid tales in the tabloids. The Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper, for example, published images in 2008 of Winehouse smoking from a glass pipe alongside the headline "Amy Winehouse on crack," with a story claiming the singer had ingested a cocktail of drugs that included crack cocaine during a house party.
But the British tabloids' casual intrusiveness into the personal lives of the famous must be re-evaluated after the firestorm of revelations about News International's news-gathering methods. The scandal began with the egregious story that a private investigator in the pay of the company had hacked the cell phone of a murdered schoolgirl. Up to this point, tabloids seemed to have regarded this predatory intrusiveness as a moral right.
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