The phone-hacking scandal that engulfed News International in 2011—revelations that journalists at the News of the World had hacked into the voicemails of murder victims, terrorism survivors, and members of the royal family—produced the most serious challenge to Rupert Murdoch's media empire since he began building it, and renewed arguments that the concentration of media ownership his companies represented was incompatible with democratic accountability.

The News of the World, Britain's most-read Sunday newspaper, was closed by Murdoch within days of the most damaging revelations—a calculated sacrifice of a 168-year-old institution to contain the damage to his broader British and American holdings. The closure did not, as he had hoped, end the story.

What emerged from subsequent investigations, parliamentary hearings, and police inquiries was a picture of a corporate culture in which illegal newsgathering methods had been widely practiced and senior executives had been aware of them. The Leveson Inquiry, a judicial inquiry into press culture and ethics, produced recommendations for statutory press regulation that the UK government partially implemented.

The structural argument against Murdoch's concentration of ownership is distinct from the hacking scandal itself, though the scandal illustrated it. When a single proprietor controls significant portions of a country's newspaper market and influential television news channels, the ordinary checks on power that market competition provides are weakened. Politicians who need favorable coverage in Murdoch papers accommodate his interests; politicians who don't need that coverage face the alternative.

The hacking scandal produced criminal convictions, parliamentary censure, and regulatory reform. It did not produce the dismantling of the empire.