British hacking scandal reaches new heights

The news from the British phone hacking scandal revolving around Rupert Murdoch's empire (although it's far from the only offender) has been so disgusting to journalists that we've become inured to the drip, drip, drip of scandal.

But Tuesday's testimony is so openly offensive that we should all read it just to give our ethic brain nodes s a jolt. The New York Times called some of the testimony "jaw-droppingly brazen," a phrase that I've never heard about alleged journalists (and I'll not dignify those in this scandal by calling them journalists).

The Times said that after Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at the now-shuttered News of the World tabloid, "had finished his jaw-droppingly brazen remarks at a judicial inquiry on Tuesday, it was hard to think of any dubious news-gathering technique he had not confessed to, short of pistol-whipping sources for information."