"Good Bloody Riddance"

So says the Spectator's Charles Moore on the demise of the News of the World. Moore sifts through the paper's montage in its farewell edition of past front pages from its long history.

The ... thing so apparent from the paper’s final edition was how it has got worse. The early- and mid-20th-century front pages which it reprinted had plenty of text and informative headlines which used now-impossible words like ‘accession’, ‘readiness’, and ‘allegiance’. By the end of the century, the total number of words on the front was down to about 25, and the subjects treated had reduced to sex, drugs and football (usually in combination). Defenders of such papers always say how ‘robustly’ they advance the cause of the many against the few, but in fact they have retarded it. They do their best to create what Marxists call ‘false consciousness’ among the many, while their owners and bosses establish collusive relationships with the powerful. This problem goes much wider than the News of the World, of course, but its closure is at least a start. To sum it all up in a red-top headline; ‘good bloody riddance’.