Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison paints a devastating portrait of the unfolding scandal that continues to slowly consume Rupert Murdoch's British media empire [emphasis added]:

The phone-hacking scandal is the story of a breathtaking moral logjam, a cautionary tale about what can happen when the boundaries between powerful entities blur—when the police and the politicians and the media are jockeying for self-preservation, even as they are aligned in a common interest not to run afoul of one another. It is also what happens when one group, in this case News Corp., Murdoch's media conglomerate, holds the goods on all the others.

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The scandal has touched some of the most prized executives at News Corp., such as Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive for its U.K. newspapers, and Les Hinton, the chief executive of Dow Jones & Co., who used to have Brooks's job. Rupert Murdoch, 80, now must deal with allegations that some of his editors encouraged criminal activity and then repeatedly lied about it—sometimes under oath—to cover it up.