The dog that didn't bark

Though the punters (that's you, dear reader) aren't usually let in on the secret, it is a truth universally acknowledged among journalists that any story belonging exclusively to the competition must be rubbish. This has nothing to do with politics: in the early days of the Watergate scandal the New York Times, which had endorsed George McGovern, ran fewer than a third as many column inches on the story as the Washington Post. There are (very rare) exceptions: one of the many pleasures of Robert Caro's The Power Broker is his account of the way Fred Cook, the great muckraking reporter at the New York World-Telegram (and a longtime contributor to The Nation) kept his expose of Robert Moses alive by sharing the material with a friend (and competitor) at the Post. But so far the Guardian, which last Wednesday broke the news of how two newspapers belonging to Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked into the mobile phone accounts of "two or three thousand" people, as well as "gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized phone bills [belonging to] Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars" has the story pretty much to itself.