In today’s Murdoch empire news, Les Hinton, the guy who was CEO of News International at the time of the phone hacking resigned today, as did Rebekah Brooks, current CEO of the newspaper operations in the UK.

Hinton was until today chairman of Dow Jones, one of the American colonies in that empire and publisher of the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.

To recap a little:

With bewildering speed, the pace of the unfolding disclosures has stripped away the Murdoch family’s image as ironclad arbiters of British public life — the people politicians had to go to if they wanted to win elections, as Mr. Cameron did before the 2010 election. Before him, Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, was also seen as eager to keep Mr. Murdoch’s support. Questions about the news-gathering techniques employed by News International had been under largely ineffective scrutiny by the police and Parliament for years, and many outsiders believed that the phone hacking was restricted to the phones of prominent people.

Then, at the beginning of last week, reports emerged that The News of the World had ordered the hacking of voice mail left for Milly Dowler, the 13-year-old girl who had been abducted and murdered. That episode shocked many Britons and triggered other disclosures of hacking into the phones of terrorism victims, possibly including some of those who died in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 in the United States. Ms. Brooks was editor of The News of the World at the time.

There’s something peculiar about that first paragraph to me: just because the phone hacking “was restricted to the phones of prominent people” made it acceptable to “many outsiders?” It certainly wouldn’t have been acceptable to me. Breaking the law is breaking the law. Trampling all over journalistic ethics is doing a disservice to one’s colleagues and to the public, too.

Anything which exposes Murdoch as an enabler of sleazy reporters and damages their reputations is fine by me.