Joe Nocera on the Foxification of a once-great newspaper.

As a business story, the News of the World scandal isn’t just about phone hacking and police bribery. It is about Murdoch’s media empire, the News Corporation, being at risk — along with his family’s once unshakable hold on it. The old Wall Street Journal would have been leading the pack in pursuit of that story.

Now? At first, The Journal ignored the scandal, even though, as the Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff pointed out in Adweek, it was front-page news all across Britain. Then, when the scandal was no longer avoidable, The Journal did just enough to avoid being accused of looking the other way. Blogging for Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, the media critic, described The Journal’s coverage as “obviously hamstrung, and far, far below the paper’s true capacity.”

On Friday, however, the coverage went all the way to craven. The paper published an interview with Murdoch that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department. He was going to testify before Parliament next week, he told the Journal reporter, because “it’s important to absolutely establish our integrity.” Some of the accusations made in Parliament were “total lies.” The News Corporation had handled the scandal “extremely well in every way possible.” So had his son James, a top company executive. “When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right,” he said. He was “getting annoyed” by the scandal. And “tired.” And so on.

In the article containing the interview, there was no pushback against any of these statements, even though several of them bordered on the delusional. The two most obvious questions — When did Murdoch first learn of the phone hacking at The News of the World? And when did he learn that reporters were bribing police officers for information? — went unasked. The Journal reporter had either been told not to ask those questions, or instinctively knew that he shouldn’t. It is hard to know which is worse. The dwindling handful of great journalists who remain at the paper — Mark Maremont, Alan Murray and Alix Freedman among them — must be hanging their heads in shame.

One of the side-effects of the Digger’s PR-driven ‘conversion’ has been to divert attention from David Cameron’s role in the scandal. He’s up to his neck in it too, so it’s nice to see that the Daily Telegraph isn’t letting go.

The Prime Minister has also done his best – unsuccessfully – to deflect attention from the fact that he spent Christmas with Mrs Brooks and her husband, and that Mr Coulson visited Chequers as recently as March. In addition, he is planning a long-term diversionary strategy that could impose state regulation on all newspapers, including those that, unlike the News International titles, did not shower him in hospitality.

The front cover of today’s UK edition of The Economist.

Now let me get this straight.

1. Yesterday, July 14, the Digger gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal (one of his media properties) in which he declared that News Corporation has handled the #hackgate crisis “extremely well in every way possible,” and had made just “minor mistakes.”

2. Today, July 15, he meets the parents of Milly Dowler, the murdered teenager whose mobile phone was hacked by his goons. According to the Daily Telegraph report of the meeting,

The media mogul held his head in his hands as he repeatedly apologised to Milly’s parents Sally and Bob and sister Gemma and said “this never should happened”, the family’s lawyer said.

Speaking outside the central London hotel where the hastily-arranged meeting took place, Mark Lewis said: “He was humbled to give a full and sincere apology to the Dowler family.

“I don’t think somebody could have held their head in their hands and said sorry so many times.”

What links these two contradictory stories?

Simple. On June 14, News Corporation hired Edelman, a global PR company, to try to dig the Murdochs out of the hole they were busily excavating for themselves. As NBC Chicago reports it:

A large public relations firm co-based in Chicago has been hired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to help it manage its way through the ongoing phone-hacking scandal.

“Edelman has been retained by the Management and Standards Group at News Corp to provide communications support and Public Affairs counsel,” confirmed Cheryl Cook, the agency’s Executive Vice President and Director of Media Services.

No U.S.-based Edelman office will be doing any work for News Corp. All activity will be come from Edelman’s London office, said Cook.

The hypocrisy implicit in the Digger’s volte face is staggering. But what is truly nauseating is the way the Dowlers are being exploited by the Murdochs for the second time. First their daughter’s phone is hacked by News Corporation’s employees in order to increase sales of his publications. Now they are being used as passive stooges for the Digger’s PR-driven ‘fightback’.

It’s pass-the-sickbag time, folks. It’s hard to imagine anyone being taken in by this cant. But then an awful lot of people used to buy The News of the World.