Gotcha!

The last time I saw PC Plod, he was having a Scanner Darkly moment. Guided by a CCTV dispatcher, he was chasing himself around the streets of a town in Sussex.  Every time the operator told him the suspect was round a corner, he ran round it to find it - empty! Because, you know, laws of physics.

Today Constabule Plod has redeemed himself, by raiding the offices of The Sun, a Murdoch rag which although it is pretty insignificant in the overall Murdoch empire, owning as he does Fox and Sky, is the tenth biggest selling paper in the world. It's roundly hated by me and by many people like me. It's what I cut my hating teeth on. It was always a dull paper, largely designed to appeal to the working classes while attempting to gently ease us into stupidity in some Orwellian language-based fashion. After Murdoch bought it in 1969, it became a propaganda machine and entrapped more readers by the use of the famous Page 3 Girls,  topless models, sometimes photographed as young as legally possible - on their sixteenth birthday - draped over what passed for news reporting.

Two weeks ago, four senior staff  at the Sun were arrested on corruption charges. The Daily Mail reports that the deputy editor, the picture editor and several others were arrested yesterday and released on bail. And the paper says that the investigation has "widened" suggesting that there is a suspicion of other kinds of corruption. The DM has a handy timeline of events in the investigations of Murdoch journalists, which has been dragging on since 2007. Possibly this indicates that "agents of the crown" who are bought, stay bought. At least for about five years.

The journos seem to think this is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - or in newspaper parlance, breaking a butterfly on a wheel - and it probably is. But since it's the Super Soaraway Sun we're talking about here, I can't help smiling.